Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
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:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
view the rest of the comments
Yeah, lots of correct observations, but also lots of wrong conclusions. I'd even argue the very first point about culture is very relevant, because japanese culture inherently puts a small bit of breaks on the aspects of capitalism that spiral out of control (they have tons of hypercapitalist issues too, though).
I think it's correct that having private companies compete has certain advantages in railway infrastructure, if the right framework is given. Imagine someone from here was to start a railway company - they would know about induced demand, about the importance of having frequent service even at times of lower demand to enable rail as primary transport. They wouldn't have to convince rightoids that spending public money on that is worth it, they could just do it and see the results. In general the good thing about markets is that they enable less planning overhead as everyone focuses on their own thing. Loosely some sort of swarm intelligence.
But none of that will ever work when cars are effectively subsidized and even private rail companies would still be beholden to massive political hurdles for building new lines. Though especially the latter is a real question about tradeoffs of benefit for society vs. individual preference with no single correct answer.