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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Fuck Cars
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I am all for more public transportation in this country, but it wouldn't help me personally. I live outside of city limits- the closest bus line is two miles away. My work is even further outside city limits, a 10-minute drive south of me down a four-lane highway, past farm fields and into an industrial park.
There's just no way public transportation is going to help me there. And even if I didn't have to do it down a highway, there's no way I'm riding a bike there in the middle of winter.
So do please make public transport more available and expansive. Just know that it still won't be a universal solution. Individual transport is needed by some of us.
I plan to get an electric (not a Tesla) for my next car. I currently drive a hybrid.
"More public transport wouldn't help me, because there's no transit access here" seems tautological but ok.
Countries with similar layouts but working public transit would simply build a train line into your industrial park and place bus stops a reasonable distance away from where you live.
At what point is it too rural for that to make sense? I'm surrounded by cornfields.
Lots of people in fuck cars communities are black and white about it. They're very unwilling to even discuss compromise. They'll say the city needs to build a subway system under all the farmland.
can you point me to that? because i spend a lot of time in these communities and have never actually seen that
You tell me; your community was likely first built by having a train line drawn out to it in the frontier era, and later had the tracks scuttled due to obsolescence and overt state support for the motor vehicle alternative.
Rural rail has been done and is still done in pretty much every country that's not the USA. If you're a farmer, there's a lot of rationale to having rail built out to whatever market terminal you sell your product at. It's not unheard of for farmers to build out small private rail lines across the farm to transport goods, equipment, themselves, etc.
I don't know a country as spread out as the U.S. that has practical rail in all rural areas. Certainly not Canada or China or India.
The U.S. The U.S. was that country. The country was built by train.
Oh, and 80% of the population lives in cities!
And that 80% of the population should have robust public transit.
Then there's the rest of us who don't live in cities. The train never went out to farmer's fields in the hopes of picking up people here and there who happened to live between them. That's nonsense.
Canada is carbrained like the US, but China and India actually have extremely profuse rail networks.
China and India have vast rural areas with no trains.
I think it's fair to say absolutely 0 cars is also a problem. But we could use a bit more public transport, and less cars than what we currently have. Especially where we know many people move "in mass", like cities in rush hour.
Public transport only really works in crowded areas. Pretty sure you can easily ditch your car and get around fine in NYC, but in Bumfuck, North Dakota, you are lucky to get a bus once a day.
The reasons for this include a high upfront set-up cost and mistakes in the past.
When public transport was planned out, the population was smaller and the roads were more empty. The current systems might have been sufficiently expansible at that time, but there is just so much traffic and overloaded infrastructure nowadays. In IT fields, you'd say that you have technical debt: you favored an easier solution without thinking about long-term maintainabilty and are now stuck at trying to refactor the mess you made.
And today, public transport also needs to be profitable, of course, which is nigh Impossible. The only way to solve it would be a public transport tax and theb you'll see most of the vocal supporterd fall.
Anecdotal point in case: I live in a rural area in Germany and a friend's dad always complained about how awful public transport is here. At one point, a party put up the suggestion to have a "tax" of 20 bucks per quarter, so public transport could be expanded and free to use for everyone. Friend's dad was furious about that suggestion because "I'm not using public transport, so why should I pay for everyone who does". People just like to complain, not solve the issue they're aggravated about.
You have this backwards. Areas become dense due to the presence of public transport, not the other way around. Infrastructure comes before population, not afterwards. This remains true even in car-world, because even drivers won't really travel where there's no meaningful roads to do so.
Bumfuck, North Dakota is Bumfuck, North Dakota specifically because of the lack of investment in transport, not because it "doesn't work". If Bumfuck convinced someone to pull a spur off of the old Great Northern Line that runs through northern ND, it might grow into something much larger.
Where I grew up there is zero chance anyone is willing to invest in a rail system. They would never make the money back and the local government would not be able to afford it. This is just ridiculous.
People who make this argument never seem concerned about how their local government can afford to maintain its suburban stroads and all the supporting infrastructure they require, which is all ludicrously more expensive per person than the same infrastructure in walkable/transit-oriented development. Not to mention the cost imposed on people living there who would not have to own a car, even in small rural towns and villages, if the development patterns were different.
Said development also can be, was always historically, and in many places still is, compact and transit-connected. Switzerland has an incredible train system connecting all of its tiny mountain villages with its cities, but even America used to have the same thing before the auto and oil industries hijacked the government. There's even a rail museum in Sacramento where you can learn about that history, and there's documentation of the compact, walkable downtowns we used to have before we bulldozed them to build parking lots.
You're probably right about the state of things in your hometown, as that is how things currently are in most of America, but your assumption that it has to be that way and would be more expensive if it was otherwise is ahistorical, contrary to economics, and defeatist.
You are the one who is making silly assumptions. My home town has HORRIFIC roads and sidewalks. They cannot afford to fix anything and the heat and dirt destroys everything. You do not understand what it's like in a rural town in the US.
What we should be focusing on instead of just saying FUCK CARS, is creating the best versions of each. If you put in a rail it's the best version. If you put in a bus, it must be the best version, and all cars should be electric.
I actually agree that public transportation should be the standard but I also live in a place we call reality and this black and white thinking is never going anywhere.
My guy, do you not hear yourself? Your home town has HORRIFIC roads and sidewalks, they cannot afford to fix anything and the heat destroys everything, but the solution is to dump more money into road infrastructure that costs way more and makes the heat worse due to the urban heat island effect?
And where did I engage in black-and-white thinking? Literally my entire point was that better things are possible if you look at places that do things differently than we do. If you think I was engaging in black-and-white thinking, then you're the one who didn't understand what I was arguing.
I never said anything about dumping money into more roads. You fucking guys just pull shit out of your ass to try to sound superior. LOL there is no URBAN HEAT ISLAND where I grew up. It's in the middle of a fucking desert. The roads do nothing to make it hotter. It's HOT. IT'S A DESERT.
The roads and sidewalks in my hometown are falling apart and in terrible shape and still NO ONE is going to do what you are suggesting. It's ridiculous and you are just wasting your breath trying to get people to abandon their cars. They are all farmers there and they need their vehicles.
Well, if your solution isn't to prioritize rail transport and reduce the amount of paved surface around, then I fail to see what else you could be suggesting besides further investing in roads.
That sounds like their problem, then.
Want to show me where I'm "trying to get people to abandon their cars" without qualification? Sure, I'll encourage someone who lives and works in San Francisco to get rid of their car, because the development patterns there already allow for it, and anybody who owns a big fuck-off truck but doesn't haul anything bigger than groceries can definitely get rid of that shit. But in suburbia, I have no problem with a person owning a car, nor does anybody else here: the system they inhabit has made alternatives nonviable. Once development patterns shift to accommodate alternatives, once going car-free is a viable option, then you talk about that. Nobody here argues for individual solutions to our systemic problems.
In which country? Sorry, couldn't tell from the context.
My apologies for being an asshole American. I meant the U.S.
Same reason we still have one person take a car if we're going on a scouts camp with bikes or train. There are times were even a perfect public transport system (Luxemburg is up there) can fail you.
Especially since so many US cities are designed around cars.
They were redesigned for cars. Mistakes of the past can be fixed.