A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
This is not out in some rural town. This is in Portland, OR about 2 miles from downtown. Personal vehicles this large are simply incompatible with urban living and pressure their owners to continually break traffic law. Technically that Miata is parked as close to the stop sign as it can legally be, but as the Denali doesn't fit in many places around here it's owner is compelled to park across both the stop sign and the crosswalk.
I find that a lot of Europeans entertain the delusion that they arrived at safe, livable transit and streets by calling the cops a lot. I guess that's an easy misconception to pick up if you grew up with those safe streets, where all that was left to maintain them was to pay taxes and occasionally call the cops, and when there's a decent chance that those cops aren't murderous racist fascists who don't respond to the call.
But Europe, western and northern in particular, got their infrastructure by pitching a long and eventually successful political fight against automotive culture as a whole throughout the 60s - 80s. They redesigned their cities to accommodate walking and cycling, they staged mass protests, they passed automotive regulations to mostly ban the sorts of personal vehicles that are fundamentally incompatible with that sort of city. They didn't oust motor culture from their city centers by calling the cops a lot. No, that's just maintenance upkeep long after the win. The boomer-aged Europeans of today had to take up a long hard fight in an organized fashion to create that world for themselves and their kids.
It's the exact same reason why Europe has better Labour Laws: decades ago the many fought to change the system so that they were not being constantly fucked up by the few.
The cops are just a mechanism for applying said good laws that people fought for in the past.
This is also why as many such laws have regressed in the last couple of decades, the utility of the cops for the general public regressed with them, and more and more what's visible as the utility of the cops is the only kind of use of the powers of the state that has never wavered: the protection of the property and physical integrity of the wealthy and powerful.
None of this is transport specific, though it definitely gets reflected in transport (partly in terms of traffic laws, their application and the size of the penalties when they are broken, but even more so in general transportation policies such as public transportation and even the very design of streets putting more importance on non-car transportation and less on car transportation, which is why, for example, sidewalks are more common in Europe) because of its outsized impact in quality of life.
In fact I would say that the much broader availability of public transportation in Europe too is the product of the very same fights in the past to put the interest of the many above the interests of the few.
calling the cops about small things in the US can very easily destroy lives. Only do it when something is life or death.