Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
6. Defend your opinion
This is a bit of a mix of rules 4 and 5 to help foster higher quality posts. You are expected to defend your unpopular opinion in the post body. We don't expect a whole manifesto (please, no manifestos), but you should at least provide some details as to why you hold the position you do.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
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80% sounds very high. Do you have any data to support that? I see rough estimates closer to 50/50. Mass transit isn't viable outside of Metro areas and a lot of people live far from big cities.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-rural-populations.html
They've even tried to prop up the rural population counts by changing the definition, but it still only manages to be 20% anyway.
You can live in a densely populated city and still need to travel long distances regularly though.. Especially if you're poor.
But the key is that that isn't a legitimate need because driving is the only reasonable way to solve the problem; it's an illegitimate need caused by a failure of politicians to allow correct city planning and infrastructure.
I work in many different locations. Some of them remote. I often bring large equipment with me. More than that, my work days tend to be anywhere from 10 hours to 16 hours long, typically with a lot of manual labor included. Some of my commutes can be 2 hours one way. I've worked plenty of those 16 hour days with 4 hours of driving added on top. The thought of riding a bike or running the public transit gauntlet (which, will typically double or quadruple the commute times in my area) is repulsive.
I think you're massively over-simplifying this issue.
Guess what: you're that special snowflake who has a legitimate need to drive. The vast majority of people are not like you.
Just like pearl-clutching about rural people, bringing up arguments like yours to try to make excuses for why the majority "have to" drive is bad-faith whataboutism.
Providing counter-arguments you clearly haven't considered is not a bad-faith argument. Lobbing insults and strawman arguments (I never made the case that the majority of people have to drive) is arguing in bad faith.