A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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.
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:
An 82-year-old female said she had been driving a 2013 Ford Edge SUV going west on Country Club Road. She stated that she thought she hit something, turned around to check the area, but didn’t see anything, so she continued her journey home.
For some reason its normal this lady can drive. Yep, sure thing, we'd help you open a door for worry of your frailty but you can totally chuck an 8 ton hunk of metal down the road.
And if you suggest we should add public transit so that 82 year olds have a reasonable option other than driving, everyone acts like you’re ableist as if people whose disabilities make driving more dangerous don’t exist at all.
The problem with public transportation in the US is that black people will use it. That means the old white lady is going to fight paying for it and then take her own car anyway.
This is the answer.
I live in a conservative area and I've literally gotten political fliers in the mail from two different republican local campaigns bickering over who's the most against public transportation.
One of them said "So-and-so would fund a new bus station that would allow those people from the city to come to our town!"
The other one's response was basically "Whats-his-face is a liar! So-and-so only suggested funding and renovation of an existing bus station which doesn't have a route to the city. It wouldn't bring those people from the city here at all!"
To me, reading that just felt like the entire county's racism on full display...
You're not wrong.
Yup, and in many states it's legal for blind people to own guns.
When I hear of people like this driver, it reminds me of the quote from Coming to America: "Imagine a country so free one can throw glass in its streets." It's meant as a joke in the movie, but for me, it's actually a really great way to describe our concept of freedom.
My own grandfather is a danger on the road. He's slowly losing his faculties, which is always tragic but doubly so because this was a deep intellectual. But trying to convince him that it's really time to stop driving has been... a challenge, shall we say. There's really only so much you can do in a legal sense.
Getting killed by a granny that didn't even notice the fact that she killed you and drove away home all jolly is some horror movie material.
In America, you get at least on free kill with your vehicle. Age is rather irrelevant except she waited longer than others to claim her's.
Fuck this sucks.
Here's an article about him skating 5,500km across Australia:
I am too terrified to ride a bike 20km to the next town. I could probably do a quarter of it on paths. Perhaps a bit more bush bashing. But the highway sections seems like certain death. I envy places that are connected with paths. Huge respect for this guy.
“An 82-year-old female said she had been driving a 2013 Ford Edge SUV going west on Country Club Road. She stated that she thought she hit something, turned around to check the area, but didn’t see anything, so she continued her journey home.”
Well at least she was nice and safe in her rolling fortress.
And thank god we don't ever test people again after giving them access to killing machines
82-year-old
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK
I've read horror stories told by acquaintances from Japan about old people there driving and usually finding themselves crashing into things, crashing into cars, cyclists, pedestrians, or worse. There's been talk among Japanese about setting limits to drivers older than 60 or 70.
FUCK CARS...especially fuck that this asshole won't suffer anything worse than a slap on the wrist for KILLING someone.
...i don't give a fuck if she's 82, that just means she shouldn't have been driving in the first place.
Guess they picked the wrong country to rollerblade in /s
As someone who travels on two wheels in the US all the time, they kinda did.
“An 82-year-old female said she had been driving a 2013 Ford Edge SUV going west on Country Club Road. She stated that she thought she hit something, turned around to check the area, but didn’t see anything, so she continued her journey home.”
As someone that once accidentally hit a cat whilst driving an SUV, I cannot fathom how anyone could hit anything as large a human and be unsure if something was struck.
Remember, people who don't live here:
Our rails are almost all shut down, public transit is a joke in all but a few small areas, roads are dangerous to bike or walk on with many not even having a shoulder let alone a reasoable place for traffic that isn't motorized.
You slmost have to have a car here, by incredibly shitty design.
And then the cars, now...
Between the fact that nobody makes a decent car anymore, they all fall apart just about the time your lease is up so you can't even own one only sign eternal contracts for landfill bait, all of them spy on you, and have beacons that are tracked by countless parts of our surveillence capitalism infrastructure on top of sending their own reports on you to the automaker who then sells it to anyone ad everyone, insurance is insanely expensive, and now gas is nuts, as well... And if you have a diesel?
I don't own a car anymore, and am not in an area with passable public transit. I have one chance a week, insanely early in the morning, to catch a buss for an eight hour trip that would take one by car to get to a hub... Which doesn't even have decent local transit for the town, but does have a meeting of interstates so you can catch other busses to other cities. At leaast those city connections run at least once a day instead of a week.
Ofc its a fucking hit and run too like what the fuck. We remember people out here being like “ban cars? You don’t mean outright right? Haha” no we mean it, we hate cars, ban them we hate them so fucking much dude. Yeah there’s a time or place for them but there needs to be proper safe routes for pedestrians and bikers and cars need to be straight up banned in certain areas.
Ps: all our thoughts and care to the family, really sorry for your son. He was doing what he loved.
What a pure-hearted dream, crushed by the worst country in the world. Of course it would happen in Kansas.
Forest Gump was a lie :/
We let 82 year olds drive
We force them to drive. So long as we have a car-dependent infrastructure and few if any affordable alternatives, you're advocating for elderly people to require family or money to be able to navigate the world around them, which is not really a great stance to take.
That does not require this situation to be the case of required driving, but a rule which prohibits elderly people from driving means that we have to anticipate how it will effect people that could not get around otherwise; disabled people deal with this all the time, and they're pretty much abandoned.
Of course an suv. People and their big vehicles thinking they're untouchable and in their private house with no one looking in.
I watched as Chad Caruso skateboarded the US and I was scared for him the entire way. It's such a huge gamble.
It really is.
I've had cars going the other way on a road slow down to yell at and intimidate me, even though I'm on the other side of the road and observing traffic laws. I wear a motorcycle helmet, in part, for fear that one day one of these nutjobs will throw something at me. The entitlement is absolutely bonkers.
I was on my bicycle one time, on a road that was plenty wide enough for a car to pass me with the required minimum space of four feet while staying in their lane. A car passed me going way farther to the left of me than they needed to, forcing a van that was coming in the opposite direction to pull over to the curb and stop. As he passed me, the van driver stuck himself halfway out his window and started yelling at me "you're gonna get somebody killed!" Asshole, go yell at the driver of the other car, I didn't do shit. And all that happened is it took you an extra five seconds to get to the red light.
Where I live, 99.9% of drivers are cool and give cyclists plenty of room. But that 0.1% means I'm probably risking my life every time I go for a ride.
I saw a video of a skateboarder who skates across the states the other day and all I could think is how surprised I was that he didn't get hit/killed. Though in his montage he did get clipped
I've been to Saline County, Kansas. That's an especially shitty place to die.
This is horrible... but also somehow even more sad that I would have totally expected this. Trying to go cross country on rollerblades in the US is akin to entering a warzone with a target on your back. This country is not friendly to non-car commuters. I live in a dense suburb with some bikelanes and its bad enough, so I cannot imagine what its like in places with huge stroads and highways running through town. You can barely cross a street let alone travel on rollerblades or bikes...
Did this guy really get from NYC to Kansas in 22 days? Dude was haulin' ass. That's about 64mi/103km per day.
When I was a teenager, I once rollerbladed 25 miles in a day and my feet were very unhappy about it. The constant, violent vibrations of the asphalt make it hard not to get blisters and stuff.
Murica
Maybe if we had decent public transport, we could take away elderly licenses without restricting their freedom.