this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
249 points (85.3% liked)
Fuck Cars
9809 readers
1 users here now
This community exists as a sister community/copycat community to the r/fuckcars subreddit.
This community exists for the following reasons:
- to raise awareness around the dangers, inefficiencies and injustice that can come from car dependence.
- to allow a place to discuss and promote more healthy transport methods and ways of living.
You can find the Matrix chat room for this community here.
Rules
-
Be nice to each other. Being aggressive or inflammatory towards other users will get you banned. Name calling or obvious trolling falls under that. Hate cars, hate the system, but not people. While some drivers definitely deserve some hate, most of them didn't choose car-centric life out of free will.
-
No bigotry or hate. Racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, chauvinism, fat-shaming, body-shaming, stigmatization of people experiencing homeless or substance users, etc. are not tolerated. Don't use slurs. You can laugh at someone's fragile masculinity without associating it with their body. The correlation between car-culture and body weight is not an excuse for fat-shaming.
-
Stay on-topic. Submissions should be on-topic to the externalities of car culture in urban development and communities globally. Posting about alternatives to cars and car culture is fine. Don't post literal car fucking.
-
No traffic violence. Do not post depictions of traffic violence. NSFW or NSFL posts are not allowed. Gawking at crashes is not allowed. Be respectful to people who are a victim of traffic violence or otherwise traumatized by it. News articles about crashes and statistics about traffic violence are allowed. Glorifying traffic violence will get you banned.
-
No reposts. Before sharing, check if your post isn't a repost. Reposts that add something new are fine. Reposts that are sharing content from somewhere else are fine too.
-
No misinformation. Masks and vaccines save lives during a pandemic, climate change is real and anthropogenic - and denial of these and other established facts will get you banned. False or highly speculative titles will get your post deleted.
-
No harassment. Posts that (may) cause harassment, dogpiling or brigading, intentionally or not, will be removed. Please do not post screenshots containing uncensored usernames. Actual harassment, dogpiling or brigading is a bannable offence.
Please report posts and comments that violate our rules.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The problem isn't that bikes and buses aren't manufactured. The problem is that infrastructure is based around cars. Cities aren't "walking cities" or accessible. Roads and the building plan for everything screams "fuck people without cars". So people have no choice but to get cars.
Yup,when I went to this suburb in Tennessee, I was baffled by how car dependant it was.
We spotted a Wal-Mart as we drove into a hotel to spend the night, it wasn't far at all. We asked the desk clerk how to get to it. My mom wanted to go for a walk and since it wasn't far, we decided to walk there. He pointed in a direction and said it was a mile away but the clerk wasn't specific with the details.
So we walked that direction, and we walked a mile, but didn't spot the Wal-Mart at all. Confused, we see some women drive to this building next to us and get out of their car and we ask them for directions to it. They said we had to go back the way we came, go down the road further, and take a turn. It's straight from there. They said the Wal-Mart wasn't accessible because of a bypass.
We thank them, turn, and start the walk. However, because the road was so windy, 1 mile was not one mile. We could see the Wal-Mart now but it felt like we weren't getting any closer to it because we are going in basically a zigzag motion. Right, left, right, left... it's a mile as the crow flies, but because of the way the road was set up, it took over 2 hours to walk. To make it worse, there is just acres of empty fields between us. But we can't cut through the empty lots of absolutely nothing because of 10ft+ fencing with barb wire on top. If we could cut through we could have been there and back so quickly. There was nothing on this property, it wasn't farm land. There was no buildings being constructed, nothing, just fields of empty, but mowed grass. The road we walked was so busy and there wasn't even a sidewalk. I never seen anything so unfriendly to pedestrians before.
This place was 100% reliant on cars. Even the main town itself didn't really have any sidewalks to speak of While walking in the main part of the town I only saw 2 businesses and they were blocks apart. Even just going to the store and getting a few small groceries looks to be a hassle without a car.
I had a similar issue with an airport. I had a flight delay and got stuck in Miami for a day, so I had to find an Uber at 2 AM. Ubers were about $60 from the airport, but I noticed if I walked about ten minutes over to a nearby hotel and got an Uber from there it would be about $20. I plugged the hotel into Google Maps, Google goes "Yeah sure, here's the walking directions!", and I start walking only to realize that it's telling me to walk down the shoulder of an eight lane highway.
There was no safe, pedestrian way to leave the airport. Not even to a hotel less than a mile away.
Airports tend to be like that in the west, it was similar when I visited Mexico too. A taxi right outside the airport was a lot more expensive than the taxis across the street. The airport used to have a overhead walk way (which did suck to travel with luggage since it was quite a few steps), but I'm pretty sure they removed it since and the airport is on a major highway.
The airports in Montreal has a bunch of shuttles. Pretty much every nearby hotel runs a shuttle. But it's not walkable there either.
Montréal has the 747 bus for now, soon(TM) to he replaced with the REM
This also means that cities are built for cars, not humans. It's not human sized.
I'm absolutely terrified of crossing any road bigger than two lanes because of that. Whenever I would take a walk I would refuse to go to the neighborhood across the main street and would just stick to my own neighborhood. Even with a bike I don't trust other drivers to give me the time to cross, I have no idea how people do it
This right here. Though my city has buses it's inconvenient to all other traffic how they are structured. Literally having to go across 3 lanes to turn left within 100 feet of a 6 lane intersection from a stop on the side of the road in the right hand lane. I love my city. /S
Where are the sidewalks? Every other but maybe third but also forth occasionally house maybe? Fuck you walk in the street.
Btw why is every man hole in the way of a tire. City planning.... Not here.