Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
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.
Posting Guidelines
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:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
view the rest of the comments
Though to be fair to Australia, there is no way to make an efficient public transit system for the whole country.
Yes there is?
Basically half of us live in 2 cities as it is and we’re more urbanised than the US, UK, France, or South Korea.
Very few people live in the vast expanses of land, and rural towns are shrinking. We all live in very few cities overall. It’s easy to cater to that if we bothered to.
If you can build a road you can build a railway
Nonetheless, even if we conceded that one needs a car to get by in Australia, the cars don’t need to be as large, and with such lethally poor visibility as in the US. While the US is (outside of small pockets) a dog-eat-dog society where you either project dominance or are dominated, Australia still has some semblance of a social fabric, an existent if somewhat threadbare welfare safety net and the fabled ideal of “mateship”, meaning that we don’t need our cars to look preemptively threatening.
Yes, these trucks don't do any job particularly well. They don't have big bed capacity, they have terrible visibility, they're extremely dangerous, and they're not even particularly good offroad because they're not built for that. They're built to exceed certain weight limits in the US's EPA regulations to reduce their cost. There's no point doing that then adding a bunch of expensive suspension components. You're much better off with a 20 year old Hilux in that regard. They only look like utes because you can't sell a 4 tonne family sedan, because people would notice it was useless. The tiny bed in back is a fig leaf.
Not Just Bikes covers this same misconception about the US thoroughly in a great video.
Its not about "size" its about population density. Cities can have public trasit and clustered rural areas can be contected by rail but when cities and towns are so spread out with nothing in between a rail system connecting them become more and more costly.
The vast majority of Australians live in a densely populated strip on the east coast. It should have high speed rail from Melbourne to Brisbane decades ago.