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People Hate the Idea of Car-Free Cities—Until They Live in One
(www.wired.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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Fuck Cars
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"What seems to work best is a carrot-and-stick approach—creating positive reasons to take a bus or to cycle rather than just making driving harder."
I guess this is why we shouldn't only play the "fuck cars" tune but also include melodies like "we love to bike" and "public transport is fun" 😉
Public transport IS fun! Much easier to masturbate on the train than while driving a car
Unfortunately here public transport is seen as something best left to 'the market', instead of treating it as a public commodity which gets its economic value from enabling people to contribute to economy by enabling them to get to work, go shopping etc. So now ticket prices are ridiculous, to the point where taking the car is 2-3 times cheaper. And of course you'll need to get to said transport first. Need a bus? If you do not live in a city or larger town you're just shit out of luck after 18:00 or so. Need to be somewhere, somewhat early in the morning? Wel tough luck for you, make sure to have somebody with a car standby to drop you off at the nearest train station. I want to like public transport and consider it fun, but my experience every time I try it is pain, suffering and awkward schedules instead. ☹️
Okay, now factor in car insurance and maintenance costs. I don't buy your statement "taking the car is 2-3 times cheaper".
Depends on how badly gouged your "local" prices are...
Where I live some train lines have gotten way better in recent times, others still cost an arm and a leg with unreliable trains and if you allow amortized car costs the car might still be competitive... (although I absolutely grant you that utility factoring in the amount of stuff you can do on a train ride both long and short is way way higher than while driving)
It's definitely not generally cheaper in Germany if you only need to move regional. But I'm interested in a comparison with any other country. I guess an urban area would be a requirement for a fair comparison.
If you care to look further into this, look for cost per kilometer estimates, factoring all the costs of owning your own vehicle vs. the cost per kilometer of taking public transit.
Can you specify where "here" is?
Unfortunately it's easier (say: cheaper) to make driving so expensive and hard that it makes public transport look like the carrot, than actually making public transport more attractive so it actually becomes the carrot.
That's why the method is called carrot and stick!
But then they call you insane because transit very obviously shitty. Like i shill for the alternatives but its barely functional most of the time, much less pleasant
Feel free to spit on the current state of transit; it's shit in so many places and there's no pretending otherwise. It's important to stress that the transit will be unrecognizable from current state if properly funded. If people think I'm talking about them ditching their cars, getting on the existing transit and watching their trip times go up 292%, they'd be right to dismiss me.
If you're interested in theory on this subject I'd recommend looking into "theory of practice". It's all about this and, like with every single other good urban planning thing, it's not at all new. We just pretend like it is so that politicians might finally do something other than build a fucking road.