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 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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?

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 40 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Cars basically have more effective rights than people.

[–] cmbabul@lemmy.world 19 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 1 month ago

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

[–] ThatGuy46475@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 month 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 4 points 1 month 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 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 -2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Cypher@aussie.zone 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Oh yeah, the American healthcare industry

Miss me with your US defaultism thanks.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com -2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Miss me with your nationalistic bigotry, thanks.

I very clearly specified what I was talking about.

If you don't wanna talk about it, don't.

[–] Cypher@aussie.zone 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You think its bigotry to point put that the aussie.zone user talking about motorcyclists they know is not US centric and not what you should focus on?

[–] ageedizzle@piefed.ca 1 points 1 month ago

I get this too. I’m registered with Piefed.ca and Americans tend to assume they are talking to another American. It’s like, bro, just read the username.

[–] Fishnoodle@lemmy.world -5 points 1 month 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 -5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

[–] daychilde@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month 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 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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 18 points 1 month 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 1 month 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.

[–] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 18 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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".

[–] cmbabul@lemmy.world 14 points 1 month 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 6 points 1 month 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 4 points 1 month 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 1 month ago

Technically I was ageless back then

[–] daychilde@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago (3 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.

[–] PedestrianError@towns.gay 7 points 1 month 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.

[–] Fedizen@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Take a look at aerial photos of cities in the US in the early 1900s vs the same cities today. In every single case, 50% or more of the land had buildings torn down to put in flat level parking lots.

[–] Fedizen@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

That's exactly the point. Cities in the US have expanded despite insane and arbitrary parking requirements. The affordability crisis and the 'strip-mall-ification' of the US are something that are inexorably linked. We don't build affordable housing anymore, we build parking lots and suburbs.

This fixation on suburbs and parking lots is a major factor in the affordability crisis we face

[–] WalrusDragonOnABike@reddthat.com 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I wonder what are between the buildings in these low-density cities? 🤔

[–] dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The buildings are the low density and all the space between. That's the problem.

  • sprawling low density detached housing developments on at least 1/4 acre lots, each
  • single-story shopping strips/plazas with massive parking lots
  • werehouses and other 1 or 2-story commercial and industrial zones
  • sprawling office parks with 2-story buildings and big parking lots
  • the occasional undeveloped 100 acre lot or remnant of a working farm here and there
  • lots of wide roads, median strips, with massive setbacks (stroads) to connect all of the above
[–] NomNom@feddit.uk 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

That headline sounds like a false binary...

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

[–] Philharmonic3@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

Meanwhile we have enough housing for all our homeless, but the owners refuse to help people for free.

[–] DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

$50,000 to $100,000 per unit

That seems really high, but it is California. Everything costs way more than it needs to in California. My solution was to leave California.

Building an apartment building without parking is dumb. Maybe not have 1 space per unit, maybe have 1 space for every two units. Why does everything have to be one extreme or the other. Have an apartment building with only 50% of the units having a parking spot, is a really big win for a car centric city. It's a good way of pushing the ball.
Also working class people that need affordable housing, probably also need a car as they can't work from home.

[–] skymtf@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 month ago

My honest issue is the us makes everything so impossible, like I get fussed at for being more than 5 minutes late, and can get written up, I could only imagine what I would get if a bus got delayed. There are places I could reasonable bike to but none of them pay enough to cover rent. So I drive my ass to target, and unfortunately I have a car that takes up space it sucks but the us needs massive retooling everything here is systemically fucked

[–] selokichtli@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Is it weird that I'm totally not shocked by this ~~headline~~ title?

Edit: even after reading the beef against it.

[–] jerkface@lemmy.ca -2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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

[–] three@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] jerkface@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 month ago

THANK you, a little bit of rationality.