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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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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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People here are saying a lot that cars are convenient because there's more roads... like... let public transport run on those roads? People seem to literally be unable to realize that things are the way they are now solely because you refuse to believe they can be in any other way and don't solve problems because "it's not practical". Short termed thinking runs too much
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Public transport do run on the roads, too. It's not "private car only".
never said it's private car only, but i did use wrong wording, sorry. what i meant was, those are the same roads public transport runs on, so the "cars can go anywhere" point kinda falls unless we're talking offroading. mildly inconveniencing, but that's just a tradeoff, it's the entire point of fuckcars
The problem with public transport is that it only goes on pre-planned routes. If you want to go elsewhere, you can't without a car. And replacing all nature with rails and asphalt is a very bad idea.
you don't need to replace anything, the roads are already there. and if you wanna go somewhere super specific, just walk, keep in mind that if transport is more invested into, it will barely be different from car travel. the mild convenience created by cars isn't worth the clutter that 10 times the volume of automobiles will create. also parking is already a problem now.
The problem isn't the roads, but needing to create a route that touches every single road. Public transportation can't really do customization, it's a one size fits all deal.
My city has a door-2-door system of minibuses that are a bit like the missing link between taxis and buses. They pick you up from wherever you are and take you to wherever you're going, they just pick up other people on the way too. It's generally marketed towards the disabled/elderly, but I don't see why it couldn't be scaled up and be marketed as either a bus+ or a taxi lite.
This is actually the first I've heard of this, and it's actually the perfect solution. If 1/3 of the fleet is dedicated to first come, first serve transportation, it helps a ton with what's otherwise the use case for cars.
Taxis exist.
A quick search suggests that here in the UK the average driver is spending up to £200 per month on their car (excluding any financing to pay for it in the first place). That much money would easily cover a monthly travel pass in most cities I've lived in, with plenty left over to pay for taxi rides when you need the convenience of door-to-door travel at a time that suits you.
I live in London zone 5, travelling to Zone 1 will cost me £267.30 monthly. One of my colleagues lives in Petersfield. His monthly ticket would be £613.70. You don't know much about train fares in the UK, do you? If you live in Scotland and need to travel to London, it is always cheaper to bloody fly! Sometimes it's cheaper to buy a car for one trip and then just dump it, or, even better, sell it and recoup your costs!
Which, by the way, would not be there like without a government making it so. And if those governments went "nah" to the idea of a stroad and any highway expansion beyond 6 lanes, and threw it all into railways in the '70s, the USA may have had a bullet train network today that'd make Germany jealous.
It's the path of least resistance. If public transport was more effiencent and faster, people would opt for that.
But then you're also dealing with the weather, or some people like the privacy or they enjoy driving their own car. Or not having to worry about time tables and waiting.
All these factor in, and that's why many prefer cars.
and that's what I'm talking about, selfishness and short termed thinking