this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2026
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Fuck Cars

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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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[–] grue@lemmy.world 11 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

I agree with the objections about the title, but we don't currently have a rule to address it. I'm not going to remove the post, but @NomNom@feddit.uk, would you please consider editing it to a less editorialized title?

[–] jerkface@lemmy.ca 1 points 46 minutes ago* (last edited 45 minutes ago)

The fuck is all the pearl clutching in this thread?? It's clearly a sardonic title. No one is being deceived, get a grip.

[–] daychilde@lemmy.world 9 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

Editorialized title aside… the thing about parking is that in the US, we're sparse and spread out and need cars in most places.

You want to eliminate cars? Build densely. Replace great swaths of our suburbs with medium to high density housing + commercial spaces where people don't need cars to go shopping or eat at restaurants or grocery shop. Then you're also dense enough to be able to support great public transportation. And then you can greatly reduce the number of cars.

It'd be great. I'd love to be able to walk^[well, roll, as a wheelchair user] to shopping and restaurants. I'd love to take good public transportation to my doctor visits and elsewhere.

But that requites a radical re-thinking about how we live, and then a radical re-building.

I'd be all for it - the cost savings of not owning a vehicle would be fantastic, and while electric cars wll help, congestion and pollution are even less of a problem with a great public transportation network.

[–] Fedizen@lemmy.world 3 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

Cities today are orders of magnitude larger (population-wise) than cities in the early 1900s and this is largely due to plumbing and fire codesn Parking is like an afterthought in terms of city planning of any size, usually.

Parking in most US cities is insane because of lobbying and corruption by the car industry. The design challenges aren't unique.

The problem in the US is not size or distance or density, none of those are in any way unique.

The #1 biggest difference between US and other countries is lobbying by car companies. In the US car companies have created not only a plethora of pseudoscientific parking laws but also import/export, safety, transit, and emission laws. None of which make any sense.

[–] PedestrianError@towns.gay 1 points 8 hours ago

@daychilde @NomNom What about all the places that have density and public transit but hamstring themselves with parking mandates based on suburban trip generation assumptions? The more you mandate parking, the harder you make it to get around or do business. We have walkable urban neighborhoods that are food deserts and people want to open corner stores in old vacant buildings but are blocked because they don't have space for off-street parking.

[–] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 13 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

So you just warped the title into whatever sensationalized garbage you wanted. The Streets Blog headline actually reads:

New UCLA Report Looks into the High Cost to Build Parking

And the UCLA Center for Parking Policy Report is titled:

No Such Thing as Free Parking: Construction Costs in 17 U.S. Cities

It's grossly disrespectful to overeditorialize a report like this that probably had hundreds of hours of work put into it; you're actively misrepresenting that work and putting words in the author's mouth. If you're going to say "study finds", then you should say what the study finds according to the author(s) who actually painstakingly analyzed the data. If not, then it's "I read this study [doubt] and drew these conclusions about it".

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 29 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

Cars basically have more effective rights than people.

[–] cmbabul@lemmy.world 18 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Drivers and driving certainly do. Gods forbid a protest slow a commute to the Costco

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 14 hours ago

'All Americans shall have not have their unalianable right to pursue gridlock wholly unimpinged.'

[–] ThatGuy46475@lemmy.world 4 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Would the salvage value of a hospital patient be from their organs?

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

Pretty much.

There are people whose job is to be dispatched to traffic fatalities, check if they're an organ donor, begin harvesting.

[–] deranger@sh.itjust.works 3 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

I mean they go to the hospital, not the crash site, but that’s about right. The alternative is the organs get wasted because too much time passed, and that seems wasteful to me.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (2 children)

... Not for motorcyclists.

Who wore full helmets.

And have good eyes.

Gotta get those on ice pretty fast, is what I've been told.

[–] deranger@sh.itjust.works 3 points 12 hours ago

Yes, for all of those. A procurement specialist isn’t going on site. EMS is recovering the body, getting it to the hospital, and that’s where procurement happens.

[–] Cypher@aussie.zone 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Almost every motorcyclist I know is against organ donation.

It’s almost like the medical industry acting like ghouls is driving people away from donation for some reason.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 47 minutes ago

Oh yeah, the American healthcare industry is so insanely corrupt and broken that uh, guess what?

There's no ethical healthcare under capitalism.

If you're a medical professional, and you're willingly any part of this system?

Nobody cares that its some other part of tue bureacracy that's actually the bad guy and you're just doing your job.

Nope, fuck you, you're just another, willing part of the machine that shackles people into debt slavery and destitution.

[–] Fishnoodle@lemmy.world -4 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

The alternative is that injured people get adequate medical care and a chance to live. A body not being mutilated so someone can steal its organs isn't a waste.

Here let's try a little thought exercise. A blank person is just a waste of organs. We're better off just taking the organs.

What does 'blank' have to become for you to staunchly agree,or disagree with that statement? Black, white, young, old, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Chinese, Canadian, American, etc

Where do you draw the line between a person's organs serving their purpose and being a waste?

[–] Fishnoodle@lemmy.world -3 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Lol down votes with no rebuttal comments means the truth is being told

[–] daychilde@lemmy.world 3 points 9 hours ago

Lol down votes with no rebuttal comments means the truth is being told

I happened to see this comment first which is great because it means I can ignore everything else you said because this is one of those stupid things troll say. It's about the level of "I KNOW YOU ARE BUT WHAT AM I".

I'm sure it makes you feel better about yourself, but it's just as stupid as when I get angry and people not reading what I wrote^[I recognize the irony of not reading your other comments and saying this] and bitching at them, which nets even more downvotes because people DEFINITELY don't take the time to read my ranting about them not reading what I wrote in the first place.

So, I mean, do as you please, but your comment that I quoted is simply bullshit and lame and has nothing to do with anything else you said.

[–] Fishnoodle@lemmy.world 1 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

Yup. I'm not an organ donor, because A. If you are, and you're injured, you don't get a say in what happens to you, but the organ donation team sure as hell will. They'll talk to everyone, the doctor, your family, the recipients family, all to convince them your not worth the effort so they can get your organs.

The other reason, B. is that it's a scam. They declare you 'brain dead', take your organs, then sell them to hospitals who are reimbursed by insurers. A life is saved, the hospital makes money, the doctors make money, the organ harvesters make money, insurance makes money. Your family gets fucking nothing,

If you want my organs so that some rich shit bag can rape kids for another 5-10 years, your going to fucking pay. Rather your insurance is going to fucking pay. And if they don't want to buy the ticket, then you shouldn't get to take the ride.

Organ donation is just a way to slaughter the young and poor to benefit the old and rich. They'll gladly reduce your life span by 40 years to add another month to the life span of Zuckerberg, Bezos, Trump, or some other child raping traitor.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

Don't forget the literally vampiric plasma "donation" industry.

You know your town's made it (to the bottom) when one of those sets up shop.

[–] TriplePlaid@wetshav.ing 14 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

The article makes no mention of homelessness and thus I find the title disingenuous/misleading.

It's a good article though. I think the community would be better served with a title about how this study shows that we would be better off removing parking requirements from building codes.

[–] chellewalker@lemmy.ca 4 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

It's a worthwhile read about how new parking spaces now cost as much as a new car, but there's no mention of public opinion polling like the title implies.

[–] Fishnoodle@lemmy.world -5 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

Parking spaces don't 'cost' anything. The apartment building already owns the land. Anything after that is just a discussion on what the best use of it is. But they're not paying more for where they allow cars to park. And they're not paying less for where they allow people to live.

If the argument is that the space required to park a car is annually as valuable as the car itself then that just seems to promote the idea that we should be using those spaces for housing and not for cars.

[–] jerkface@lemmy.ca 1 points 43 minutes ago

I think I can see the point you're trying to make... but you're not.

[–] HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 2 points 10 hours ago

The value of the land that the developer bought the land for is in how much money they can make from that. Otherwise, the developer wouldn't buy the property.

[–] cmbabul@lemmy.world 13 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I know we have to do studies to prove it, but I could’ve told you that during the W admin

[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 3 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

Is that because you wouldn't have been old enough to tell us this during the Nixon administration?

[–] Remember_the_tooth@lemmy.world 3 points 14 hours ago

You whippersnappers seem to be forgetting about Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, who set the stage for the 1929 Great Depression and the shanty towns that would follow.

[–] cmbabul@lemmy.world 2 points 15 hours ago

Technically I was ageless back then

[–] NomNom@feddit.uk 8 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Across the United States, zoning codes require new developments to provide a minimum number of parking spaces, which carry substantial construction costs.

In this report, we use 2025 construction cost estimates from Rider Levett Bucknall to calculate the cost per space in 17 U.S. cities and combine these data with local minimum parking requirements to estimate how parking mandates increase total construction costs across building types.

We find that parking construction costs have risen substantially faster than inflation since 2012 and that required parking can account for a large share of total project costs—adding tens of thousands of dollars per housing unit and, in some cases, increasing total construction costs by more than 50%

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9f88x32n#main

[–] AfricanExpansionist@lemmy.ml 6 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

That headline sounds like a false binary...

But yes, I read the article and I understand the logic