Fuck Cars
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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As far as I know, there doesn’t exist a single shred of actual, empirical evidence that we can make self driving cars actually better than humans, outside of our faith in technological improvement. Companies used to publish their data on simulated injury rates for their internal testing, and they were way way way worse than professional human drivers, like taxi drivers, which is what Cruise is trying to replace.
I don't want to be right. I want self-driving cars that work. It'd be personally very convenient for me, so much so that I would buy a brand new car for the first time in my life (I'm in my mid thirties) if I had actual, robust, empirical reason to believe that they work as advertised.
That article was written over a year ago and since then a lot has changed. Both waymo and cruise have now been approved for av taxis in San Francisco. This decision seems to not have been motivated by hype but a good track record with less incidents then a human driver. Cruise claims it's greater than 50% better then a comparable human driver and while that may be just their own flawed study this article also agrees that they're about even if not better then human drivers.
You'll probably have to wait a while to buy one though as these are decked out with a larger assortment of sensors compared to a Tesla and probably cost a couple hundred thousand all said and done. They are also specifically trained on the surface streets of San Francisco, so they probably won't be able to take you on your commute any time soon. Hell id give it another 5 years before their even able to take you to the airport 10 miles south of the city since it would have to get on the freeway. But in this relatively limited problem space they do quite well.
Both of those links rely on the same self-reported data by Cruise... We'll see, I suppose! Happy to be proven wrong. I live on a frozen hilly dirt road, so realistically, for me, it's not going to happen.
The second one relies on it for the number of incidents, which cruise is required to report to the police and in my opinion can be taken as fact. You can try to hide who was at fault for the incident, like they're doing in the original story, but it's very unlikely you'll get away with hiding that an incident happened. If cruise doesn't report it then the driver or pedestrian that got hit sure as shit will, and they've got their branding all over it so they know who to report to. If they report it and cruise gets caught trying to cover it up, they'll be in deep shit, enough to not make it worth trying to do so. They just lost their license for omitting some footage after a report, imagine what would've happened if they didn't report at all.
Sorta.... the second does some pretty thin analysis, and the refers right back to the same report, of which i am skeptical considering they were just caught bending the truth in their favor.
We need a robust and publicly accountable third party investigation. I fear we don't have the political and institutional infrastructure to do that, and it's going to be like how even just 50 years ago the FDA regularly was letting dangerous shit fly that they absolutely should've caught and that companies were straight up lying about.