1465
Diesel-smelling
(lemmy.world)
Jeremy Clarkson: Just been for a walk round the farm and I'm a bit alarmed by how few butterflies there are.
Something is afoot.
Danny Wallace: Diesel-smelling Top Gear host who threatened climate protestors misses butterflies.
Someone missed the episode(s?) where he raced the public transit system and lost. Or raced other drivers in noticeably slower cars in highly congested traffic and lost, or raced a bicycle and lost.
A semi-common through-line of the show was that cars are, and should be, for fun. (Full disclosure this was often pushed most heavily by James May, but I feel like Jeremy could have said no at any point.) They often lambasted average and everyday use cars.
I loved my old sports car! It was 2 seats and too much power! I had to get rid of it because it was unreliable and unsafe for traveling with my first kid. Neither would have been an issue with good public transit infrastructure in place.
Cars are not the problem, but car dependency absolutely is.
(I don't totally feel this way and do think cars a major contributing factor in some problems, like pollution of microplastic particulates from aggressive driving, but that isn't as quippy.)
But where would you get the gas to power your sports car without the massive fossil fuel infrastructure?
From a refinery? Losing car dependency doesn't mean that the global oil industry goes away over night. Shoot, if we invented completely safe and cheap scifi teleporters, making all current forms of transportation obsolete, I don't believe every factory in the world would stop producing gasoline.
My thinking for this primarily comes from vacuum tubes. The technology has been completely replaced by better performing, cheaper, smaller, and more reliable components for about 50 years now. However, there are still 2 or 3 factories churning out tubes for guitar amplifiers supplying the world for the handful of enthusiasts who enjoy that sort of thing.
Go ahead and throw mechanical typewriters into that same category of "Wow! I can't believe that they still make these?" as well.
I never watched the show, but I did visit its wiki page.
It looks like they did 6 races against public transportation, and the car won 5 of them. They also did 2 four way races between car, water, bike and public transport, and car and bike were the two first place winners.