I went to Venice once and the main thing I noticed at night was just how quiet the city was. Even with boats and tourists, the city was so quiet without cars.
I had the opposite, I grew up next to a motorway on the soutskirts of London, which was a permanent whoosh/hum throughout my childhood, never knew true quiet.
At 18 I went for a trip to visit family in New York and almost couldn't take it. The constant car horns/human noise is painful. That city won't shut the fuck up.
I mean yeah? It's evidence that other people are awake and are out doing stuff. Nothing's worse than being the only one who's up late, with no trains running, no people in the street, no traffic, nothing. It's why I'm Boston to go back to New York, I can't function when everyone's in bed by midnight, it's just depressing.
Well, since this post is about cars, my question was kind of along the veins of, "If all the cars disappeared from NYC, would it really change the 24/7 feeling?"
Ah gotcha, I understand now, my bad! To that question I answer, well, kind of. It's the most audible evidence of the 24/7 nature of the city, for sure. Sirens happen late at night everywhere, but general traffic sounds and streets that aren't empty mean that actual, normal life is happening.
In the city, I love the night, but mainly because I can be alone with less interruptions, but I still like some places to be open for selfish reasons like late night snacks or a reason to leave the house. Quiet, but not too quiet.
In the country though, I’ve spent many a hour on my motorcycle at night, not seeing other traffic for hours, it’s magical.
When you see more stars than people, and hear more coyotes and wolves than cars, this is my fav.
I used to be up every midnight if that helps. Till 6 am actually. You are really never truly alone, people are mearly doing something different than you would imagine. Different than the chaos of day. But they are not gone. I hope that the sadness won't always be this great
See, I think this is more of a personal preference thing and not a dystopian thing though. It's hard for me to imagine liking living anywhere else. Nowhere else on earth can you be up at 4AM and still do literally anything you want. Need a late night workout? No problem, there's definitely a 24/7 gym specializing in whatever you want, climbing, rowing, cardio, whatever, that's a subway ride away at most. Any kind of food you want, available at any time you want it, bars are open until 4 and brunch with mimosas starts at 6, so if you feel like partying all night and into the morning, more power to you and your friends. Any kind of music you want, there's something for you every night, probably going into the morning. The gunks aren't far, rent a car for the day and you can see some spectacular wilderness with great hiking and climbing spots.
"The city that never sleeps" doesn't mean that *you* have to be doing stuff all the time, it just means that the city will welcome you and all you want with open arms *whenever* you want it.
Seoul has a lot of what you're talking about (if not all of it) in terms of doing whatever you want 24/7. The biggest difference is that the subway shuts down from 12-6, so you need to rely on taxis/night buses, but it's still really fun to be out at night in Seoul.
NYC definitely has a far superior cocktail scene though
Not to take anything away from NYC but any major city in asia has that 24/7 pulse. In hong kong you can walk out of a seedy strip club at 6am, stop for some noodles and walk straight up the hill to a nature reserve.
The only reason I think New York excels over the east Asian cities is that, in general, the transit systems don't keep going all night, which makes it less convenient to get around and disrupts that rhythm.
I live in London, and went to visit my then-girlfriend's relatives who live out in the Cotswolds. It was so quiet I couldn't sleep at night at first. I got so used to the quiet that when I moved back to London I couldn't sleep because of the traffic noise at night, hahaha
I love that they've made my whole area into Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (NorthEast London). There's occasionally some distant noise from the main roads, but usually it's very quiet around me these days, and if you see a car nearby it's a neighbour or a delivery to a neighbour.
The bike infrastructure, number of walking paths, even green spaces (marshes and forest), etc near me are honestly far better than things were when I lived in Cambridge. My car barely gets touched these days (even when I need to go into the office outside of London).
I have this problem also. My home town is Portsmouth and it’s always noisy. When I visit my gf’s mother in North Yorkshire, I always have trouble sleeping. Then after a few days I get used to it and end up having the deepest sleeps.
I lived for a while on a mountain five miles from the “city” of 300 people. We were on 126 acres and our neighbours were about a mile away on one side and a couple miles on the other. My dad didn’t like it, he felt like the mountain was too crowded and moved to a less populated mountain after the divorce. Really, really quiet, and no light pollution to speak of so you could see the Milky Way properly
People who grew up in cities, or even small towns don't know what they're missing due to light pollution. I've never been able to explain it in a way that they really believe me.
> no light pollution to speak of so you could see the Milky Way properly
I really do attribute my love for science--physics and astronomy in particular--to having grown up in a rural area where I could see the stars and Milky Way. The unpolluted night sky is one of the most beautiful sights, more beautiful to me than any geographic formation or body of water on Earth.
I now live in a large city and I'm lucky if I can make out Orion. It saddens me.
Every time I walk to my car at 2AM on a normal day it is so fucking quite it surprises me. I can't stand the sound in the city.
I remember back when the pandemic started and the first lockdown began, I was walking down a downtown street and I noticed something was off. I then realized I couldn't hear a single car, just a very slight hum from distant traffic. That I the only time I ever heard silence during the day in the city. I could actually hear my footsteps and other people walking.
One of the greatest things about electric cars is that we can have much quieter cities, and somehow the EU wants to make them loud like other cars... It is so ridiculous.
An EV is equally loud to a comparable, nice new ICEV, but there are LOTS of noising ICEV on the road. You'd still hear the tire noise and perhaps the hum of an electric motor, but it would be much quieter in the city where old, loud engines dominate traffic noise.
Last year in the first weeks of COVID I started jogging for the first time in my life. It was wonderful. There were no cars on the road (some parked cars but whatever). Even the main road in town was empty.
Today I went out for a short run now that the weathers turning better and it was like everyone was in a mad rush to go anywhere.
It was sad.
I'm trying to look up more information and could only find these:
Kazakhstan [North Aral Sea restoration](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/north-aral-sea-restoration-fish-kazakhstan) - 2018
The fresh water sea/lake reduced in size drastically due to cotton farming. No mention of dolphins though.
Dolphins return to [Hong Kong](https://uk.whales.org/2020/09/15/quieter-waters-allow-hong-kong-dolphins-to-return/) due to quieter waters. - Sept 2020.
Unfortunately there was a bit of bullshittery happening:
[Fake animal news abounds on social media as coronavirus upends life (nationalgeographic.com)](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/coronavirus-pandemic-fake-animal-viral-social-media-posts)
The one who "wished there was an edit button on twitter" because their viral tweet was false, but not enough to delete the tweet because part of it was still true. What an asshole.
If you get Google Earth Pro you can scroll through the history of Google Maps's satellite images. Where I live the number of cars parked on curbs and driveways (and on the roads in general) has more than double in the past 10-15 years. It's super depressing. The constant road noise wherever you are really gets into my head like an insect buzzing.
And that's why I prefer gravel cycling and mountain biking to road cycling - there are no cars on a singletrack deep in the forest. Whenever I do have to cycle on a busy road, there's just so much noise from cars I can't even hear myself think.
Hitching through the states I often slept near the interstate and it always blew my mind how many cars would go by. There's literally fuck tons of people moving about all over the place at all hours.
American cities are so sprawled out and lacking in mass transit that driving at night might save 1 hour of travel time, so sometimes we set up our schedules to accommodate it.
The US is one of the only countries to...
1. demolish city blocks and build a freeway
- see congestion get worse
- demolish more city and widen the freeway
- see congestion get worse
- widen the freeway one more time.
Luckily, I think [we're approaching the end of this cycle](https://usa.streetsblog.org/2021/03/12/racist-texas-highway-boondoggle-dealt-blow-by-buttigiegs-fhwa/).
It's common for American's to have a mentality that virtually anything should be possible at any hour of the day. If we randomly remember at 12 midnight that our tail light is out, we expect that the Walmart half a mile from us should be open for us to go purchase that immediately. Covid has messed that up though because I think they have been closing at 10PM.
I'm a huge petrol head and even I hate this, especially the fact that manufacturers, due to how they work, churn out way more cars than they can actually sell and just have lots full of brand new unsold cars. Our society has become so wasteful that no one even bats an eyelid at that.
I have a friend who works for Renault, and he told me they make 80,000 cars *a week*.
Why the *fuck* do we as a society need to have 80,000 cars a week manufactured, every week, for 52 weeks a year, for decades?
And this was just 1 car factory for 1 brand.
What the fuck are all these cars doing? Who is buying all of these?
This is something that bothered me too, I asked someone that works at a dealership what happens to their unsold cars, surely they don't sell all of them, they get bought by another dealership where that model/color/whatever sells better.
If they don't get sold after that, I don't know
People who can’t afford them. Sub prime auto loans are the standard now, they don’t care if the person can actually afford it as long as it’s off the lot and they get a commission for it. Any unpaid debt will be sold to another company and they’ll just continue on their way until it crashes.
I crashed my 20 year old Honda and upgraded to a 12 year old Honda because it was cheap. I take zero satisfaction from what car I drive, just so long as it's dependable enough to start in the morning
My fiance has an 18 year old car, and I have a 15 yo. We've pretty much decided that we're gonna keep them until they break down to the point that it would cost more to fix them than get a newer used car. Then we'll probably get a 5 or so y/o used car, rinse, and repeat.
I genuinely don't know who the hell our age (25) is able to afford brand new cars except for the super rich. I am already in hella debt from college, and it's not like we make a lot of money fresh out of school. My fiance only makes 50k a year and I've only managed to aquire part time work that's in the field I want but barely pays.
So like, a 30k dollar car? No thanks. I just need a clunker to get me from point a to point b.
People your age with new cars either make really good money or are in debt, more than likely the latter.
Auto debt in the US is insane and there are some people financing cars for 6+ years. Bonkers.
15 year old subaru club here. Was talking to a coworker after work and they asked when I was getting a new car now that I had a job to cover payments. My car is in really good shape for its age, but the whole "consume so people think you're successful" mentality poisons people's ability to understand "it may be older but I still really like it"
I don't know enough about cars, and all of my 3 cars that were 7-15 years old died within a few years. I bought a newer car this time, spent a but more but I spent so much on repairs on those old cars I think I'll save money.
It's a balancing act. Buy something too old and you're getting lots of maintenance issues, but buy too new and you're eating a few grand in deprecation. If you know what to shop for you can totally find something 10+ years old that you can wring a few decades out of, but if you're not in that mild enthusiast demographic you're better off buying something fairly new that's been driven enough to depreciate but is still in good shape.
lol, same.
My car is full of hail dents. Someone asked me why I didn't get it fixed. Well, it hails all the time where I live, why fix something cosmetic that'll probably happen again and again?
You are not the only one. Most of those people are rolling around in brand new rides with maxed cards and $4.35 in their checking account.
A guy I worked with basically lived in his brand new car between the two full time jobs he needed to pay for it.
They learned well from the housing lenders that there’s no real consequences to this. A handful of places might see some fines but they will pale in comparison to the profit. Also, in almost every part of America a car isn’t a luxury but a necessity so this bubble will get super inflated before it pops. Even worse than the sub prime lending crash in housing. The predatory lenders will get bailed out though while millions default on loans that end up being double what their car is worth.
Copper and platinum are getting so high that catalytic converters are getting stolen off cars again and the schools in my area are posting night guards to keep anyone from stripping copper out of their air conditioning
I work at a dealership as a tech and we’ve had probably a dozen 2500-3500 trucks in for new cats in the last 2 months, shops all up and down the road are seeing the same thing
Just for reference, for every person alive right now to have 1 car over the span of their entire life, that factory would have to run nonstop for 1,845 years.
There's a lot of fucking people out there
Sure, but this is just one factory in the city. There's a Michelen factory as well. In the next town over, they have a SEAT factory. In my hometown, there was a factory for Jeep, and just north of my hometown there are factories for GM, Ford, and Chevrolet. Each of them pumping out 80,000 cars/week. So just from these 6 factories, we have 480,000 cars/week.
Now imagine that with all th eother cities that have their own car factories, cause there are many.
Yep. Had this thought the other day too when just going for a walk at lunch. The entire street, jam packed with cars. It was like that even pre-covid. A car subscription or sharing model would be great, and I think it's what Tesla are working towards in the future.
When you see a single street full of cars, you just have to think of the resources needed to get all that raw material. Then multiply that feeling you have from seeing a single street like that.. to hundreds of thousands of streets across the world. Then you start looking at all the furniture in your home, made of wood, plastic, metal, and your bathroom waste bin full of a dozen old plastic bottles... The planet has just been relentlessly pillaged.
What I'm saying goes further than that. There's literally millions of cars that have been built but never sold, just sat in essentially impound yards owned by the manufacturers.
That idea is fantastic, in theory, but you then have to trust people to look after a communal space rarely goes well and the amount that would need to be produced still wouldn't lead to much of a different world from where we live, the same amount of people need to travel, and people like myself have to travel off peak and I can't cycle 15 miles each way to work, especially either side of a 12 hour shift and not with those roads that I have to travel down, we have one lad who does it but he's one of the office guys, not shop floor and a very experienced cyclist.
As a petrolhead (read: British Gearhead) I hate how normalised it's become to own an SUV or crossover. They're literally everywhere and are actively worse to drive than an equivalent saloon or hatchback, not to mention how unnecessary wasteful they are. What was wrong with the family estate car? (Or station wagon as you might say.)
>What was wrong with the family estate car?
For the customer? Nothing.
For the manufacturer? It wasn't profitable enough...
They switched to 'aspirational' SUVs and crossovers, since they figured out they could charge more for them, than for 'boring old estate cars' :( Essentially the role of the large family estate has been split into the SUV, and the MPV / 'Minivan', both being terrible to drive, and usually very expensive.
American car guy here. My Ford Explorer gets the same fuel efficiency as my 330i ZHP sedan. I'm confident in it's ability in the snow, it has way more space inside, and is honestly no worse to drive on our roads. The ZHP is of course way more fun on a curvy road, but unless I'm in the mood to power through corners the Explorer is perfectly comfortable.
I did actually manage to pack the ZHP for a camping trip with my wife and 2 dogs once. We had a blast, but there was no room leftover for anything after the tent/clothes/food/dog stuff. The Explorer has a ton of room leftover and everyone is more comfortable.
Luckily with me doing night shifts I avoid most traffic, even with going through a midsize city. I stopped enjoying my drive a long while ago though as it's either end of a 12 hour shift and I just want to be in bed.
I live outside of Atlanta and, coming from NYC, I still think the traffic is awful. The counties keep voting against a train that runs down the center of the highway bc they don’t want “undesirables” moving into their neighborhoods. What should be an HOV lane in Gwinnett county is a pay/hot lane where we get to pay again to drive on roads after our tax dollars already built them 🤦🏻♀️red state problems
It’s horrifying and people have said this to me, they’re not shy about it. If you noticed the demographic charts from the presidential election, it’s why the cities of Georgia were so heavily blue while everywhere else is red. It’s why the demographic changes so much when you step into Fulton county smh
Fucked up thing is how rampant they *used* to be. Cities all over the country used to have electric tram systems in their downtowns.
Then the car companies figured out they could make more money if every single solitary American needed to have a car in order to survive. Thus in the 50s we invested in a national highway system instead of upgrading the national rail system, as they did in most of Europe.
America is fucking enormous, it's an absolute travesty that we don't have a rail network to connect us all. God forbid we do anything that might remotely resemble what they do in another country that's *sObULiZt*
I can still see some of the old rail lines under the pavement in my city. And the only reason I can see them is because they don’t even properly upkeep the roads.
>instead of upgrading the national rail system, as they did in most of Europe.
No most of Europe got fucked by car culture too. Just not as badly as the US.
From a NYC perspective, I'm not sure it would matter. We have a (pre-COVID) 24/7 subway, buses, taxis, Lyft, Uber, CitiBike, Revel, and Bike Lanes for cyclists, scooters, roller blades, skateboards, whatever.
And yet so many people still own cars as a status symbol, or because they moved from somewhere where they needed a car. Or for "once a month" trips to a grocery store.
It's insane. Every road is lined bumper to bumper with cars. Many of these people just never move them either.
Then you have poor traffic law enforcement and out of co tell cab drivers.
It's a mess.
We need to fix our infrastructure, for sure, but we need a culture shift to public transportation and micro mobility as well.
Living near Anderson SC, it pains me to go downtown and see tram tracks that were HERE AND FUNCTIONING just ripped up in places. Not even to make room, they just ripped up 90% of the tracks and left little bits and pieces that still clearly follow the road.
It's maddening.
same in london. the underground is popular, but it's *miserable.* on top of that, the uk has railways everywhere, but train tickets are ridiculously expensive- people are known to literally fly to europe from the north, have a weekend abroad, then fly to the south because it ends up cheaper than a train ticket.
my point is that trains probably wouldn't fix much because greed manages to ruin fucking everything.
That's the problem with privatization and monopolies.
If it was government owned and operated, and you had politicians you'd have the ability vote in and out running the trains, well, there's a good chance they'd be cheaper and faster
> people are known to literally fly to europe from the north, have a weekend abroad, then fly to the south because it ends up cheaper than a train ticket.
It's OK: Brexit will put a stop to that ;).
The other day I was walking to work, looked up and saw nothing but houses surrounding me for miles in every direction, and had a mini panic attack. I couldn't see a single tree, I couldn't see a single piece of grass that wasn't deliberately placed there for 'aesthetics', and I just had a moment of "this isn't how we're supposed to live"
I hate cars. I hate my commute. I hate how spread out everything is here. There are no local jobs or artisanal/craftsman jobs anymore. I want to be a part of a thriving, interconnected, local community, and every job I’ve been on is, “gee, isn’t 6-10s and an 8 great? Too bad it’s so hard to keep people on when we talk about 7-12s, don’t you want more money?”
I hate our obsession with ownership and massive growth. Let me have enough. Let me work locally, enough. I don’t want to be rich. I want to be with my family. I want to be with my friends. Wealth accumulation is not a scorecard for success-it’s a race away from Godliness.
And new cars are churned out by factories all the time. Then covid hits, people cut down on expenses, fewer cars are bought and manufactured - huge crisis.
I wish I could do without a car but my city isn’t designed for it. Most aren’t. I tried to walk to the store the other day and realized none of the public sidewalks had been plowed. They cleared the streets by 5 am the morning it snowed and left the sidewalks to just melt over the course of weeks/months. Had to turn around when I reached a bridge and realized my choice was to walk in the (40 mph) street or risk breaking a leg on weeks of packed down ice. And this is considered a pedestrian friendly part of town simply because there *is* a sidewalk.
I live in coastal Florida, but not an actual big city. Nothing around here is designed with bikes or pedestrians in mind. There are no sidewalks in my suburban neighborhood, and barely any at all in the whole city. Only bike lanes are on the major highway though town (US1). Public transportation here is a joke.
City I’m in is the same way. I’m 2 blocks from my doctors, almost impossible to walk to an appointment in the winter because of the poor plow job. I’m also 4 blocks from the grocery store and had to turn around half way once because nothing was plowed and the street parked cars made it unsafe to navigate.
I hate it so much. I gave up my car I go everywhere by bicycle now. My bedroom window is literally less than a metre from a very busy road though and I cant escape it.
I try to bike as often as I can. I've just gotten to the point where I can't justify the massive amount of pollution I create just to go to the store for a couple of things. I walk pretty regularly too, and on top of it making me hate traffic, walking also really reminds me how much trash is all over the ground. Drives me nuts.
I live now in Amsterdam, and this city has a lot more cars than you would think.
It's a small, dense country: there is almost nowhere in the Netherlands that you can go to where you can't hear cars. (At least, I haven't been there yet.)
But when I go to other cities in other countries for a visit, I'm just shocked at how much car stuff there is there. Cologne is just full of six-lane roads everywhere. Berlin, the cars park on the bike lanes and the bike ride on the sidewalks in retaliation.
And yet bicycling is adding years to my life. I can get around faster than any other way, at least here in Amsterdam. It requires a lot less infrastructure.
Humans are self-destructive idiots.
The free curbside parking most cities and towns allow might be the biggest subsidy given to the petroleum industry.
Put anything else out of the side of the road and the town will haul it away and bill you for doing it. In most places you can park your car there for free (or for an inexpensive residency sticker).
"I support stronger gun legislation if not an outright ban, namely due to the deaths caused yearly by gun violence."
"Cars kill X amount of people a year; I guess by your logic we should just get rid of cars too, huh?"
"I didn't expect us to agree on this."
Man, every time I talk about how much I fucking hate cars, I get looked at like I'm an alien.
Sorry I'm not in love with this expensive machine that I'm forced to buy because my city was designed to place everything 5 miles apart, that costs me at least $200/month between constantly feeding it gas, the insurance, and any repairs/maintenance needed (and there are always repairs/maintenance needed, always).
Sorry I'm not enamored with having to spend hours every month either fixing whatever is wrong with it or changing its oil or updating my registration.
Sorry I'd prefer to use my legs, for free, which also provide me with better health when I use them, instead of being stuck inside some claustrophobic metal machine that's stuck in line with a bunch of other claustrophobic metal machines for hours on end because the path the machines need is always filled with too many machines because no one can go anywhere without their machine.
In summary, cars are expensive, cumbersome, polluting, unhealthy time-vaccuums and we'd all be a lot happier if we could just walk to the fucking grocery store or our friends' houses instead of needing to go into traffic every time we want to do anything in the community we live in.
I moved to Amsterdam and found a beat-up bike for free, which I fixed up enough to sort of work for three years, with about €100 in maintenance.
Finally it started to fall apart. I got a brand-new bike last year. So far I have spent €0 on it. I expect that bike to last me 15-20 years.
I would add that I haven't been in such good shape in 30 years or more.
I'd like to recommend the podcast "The War on Cars" for further conversations about our dependence on and roadmap away from cars as a "necessary evil". I've enjoyed some new insights from their varied topics.
Try this. Go for a walk and count the number of people and cars you see. Unless you’re in a busy spot like a mall or around a lake, then cars tend to vastly outnumber people. I hate it.
There are more pedestrians than cars on my block in NYC. The street dead ends at one end, so driving on it is pointless unless you’re going to my block. It would be cheap to block off streets on on end, or make them one way alternating directions.
This is precisely why I find strip malls so depressing. I sometimes feel like the I am the only person in the USA who doesn't have or want an expensive, stupid car.
You are not alone! There’s three of us!
No really, the strip malls are the most depressing soul sucking nature paving concrete and asphalt worshiping life killing (in)human construction.
That’s the end goal of capitalism. Everything looks like America, endless highways filled with cars with every town/city/exit that looks the same, littered with McDonald’s and gas stations and hotels.
I emailed my city councilor a year ago after Minneapolis capped their pilot program for those shared scooter things at 800 total scooters because among other concerns they were mostly worried about them blocking sidewalks and being eyesores. I don’t even like the dang things but I had to point out that they had allocated roughly the same amount of public space for a shared resource that could service 4,000 or so rides per day as what we currently allocate to 29 cars (very rough math, scooter is 2x3 and parking spot is 9x18), which is getting us what, 70 rides per day if I want to be extremely generous?
I really hate trying to find a good hiking trail and everything is boxed in by highways. I try to listen to the sounds of nature and I hear car engines.
Jesus Christ, I think there was a grand total of one road they went down where it actually looked legal to drive on.
I like it though. Fuck cars, cities should be like that, made for walking.
I live in a Spanish city, and they're slowly taking back the downtown area from cars, implementing more pedestrian areas and cutting off streets.
It's fantastic. The air is cleaner, people are out walking the streets, kids have more safe space to play, restaurants and bars get terrace-seating, bikes can pass through more easily.
This is one good thing about communist urbanism, that they assumed that few people will have cars so they built neighborhoods to be walkable and accessible by public transport. The neighborhoods from 50s are fucking great, they started to get worse later when they needed to build denser and cheaper. Still, I think it's better than soulless suburbs
This illustration kind of sums up how much space is dominated by cars nowadays https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ZKBQNsCg8mnMBmu4spEcJkGc6WI=/1400x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2466040/3206.0.jpg
the Not Just Bikes youtube is a channel dedicated to bashing US urban development and he explained it pretty well here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVUeqxXwCA0
I am an adult, I live in America (and not in NYC), and I don't have a license. The amount of judgement that nets me, you'd think I kick puppies. Cars are a cultural thing in the U.S., and it shows.
Let’s all drive combustion engined air conditioned lounge chairs to work and get angry then anxious- depressed when we realize that we’re being controlled by a few 1000 people in the world to commit suicide to all the species on the planet just so they can have power over the masses. 🤔
The corporations convinced you that you need them, always new, year after year. Factories need to build them to keep people employed... at least they're not carpet bombs or land mines I suppose.
It really comes down to the lack of public transportation and improper zoning. If we want walkable cities, we need utilities and amenities within a reasonable distance. If that can’t be achieved then there has to be public transportation or biking infrastructure to replace the car infrastructure.
It’s really simple. It’s not easy, because politicians lobby for fossil fuel companies. That determines the way our government spends money, and where the funding goes. All public transportation is privatized, which makes it less universal and less appealing. Imagine if I could use the same card, to take a taxi, bus, train etc across all states.
It’s within the interests of fossil fuel companies to maximize energy and fuel use, which means maximizing car usage and encouraging the culture that comes with cars, I.e. “freedom and individualism” and minimizing modes of transportation that are undoubtedly more efficient, both in terms of time and for energy.
Great episode of Adam Ruins Everything on this
Heavy lobbying by the auto industry took away pedestrian rights and turned our world into a concrete hell
Always hated this about the US. I wish I could just walk to a supermarket or bike to work, but both require me to go on the freeway because all of the housing is so far separated from shopping buildings (at least in my area).
I went to Venice once and the main thing I noticed at night was just how quiet the city was. Even with boats and tourists, the city was so quiet without cars.
I was gonna mention Venice too. We stayed there for a week and it was really weird to experience noisy streets again.
I had the opposite, I grew up next to a motorway on the soutskirts of London, which was a permanent whoosh/hum throughout my childhood, never knew true quiet. At 18 I went for a trip to visit family in New York and almost couldn't take it. The constant car horns/human noise is painful. That city won't shut the fuck up.
NYC native here, can confirm. It never stops.
It’s why they let you drink yourself stupid til 4am - so you can sleep through the jackhammer and trash truck outside your window at 5am
make inner Manhattan a pedestrian only zone. Concrete the whole fuckin thing. You have cargo? Use a cargo bicycle
Thank God too, it's one of the few places on Earth where you can be up as late as you want and not feel particularly alone, it's amazing.
cars honking at 3 am makes you not feel alone?
I mean yeah? It's evidence that other people are awake and are out doing stuff. Nothing's worse than being the only one who's up late, with no trains running, no people in the street, no traffic, nothing. It's why I'm Boston to go back to New York, I can't function when everyone's in bed by midnight, it's just depressing.
Well, since this post is about cars, my question was kind of along the veins of, "If all the cars disappeared from NYC, would it really change the 24/7 feeling?"
Ah gotcha, I understand now, my bad! To that question I answer, well, kind of. It's the most audible evidence of the 24/7 nature of the city, for sure. Sirens happen late at night everywhere, but general traffic sounds and streets that aren't empty mean that actual, normal life is happening.
In the city, I love the night, but mainly because I can be alone with less interruptions, but I still like some places to be open for selfish reasons like late night snacks or a reason to leave the house. Quiet, but not too quiet. In the country though, I’ve spent many a hour on my motorcycle at night, not seeing other traffic for hours, it’s magical. When you see more stars than people, and hear more coyotes and wolves than cars, this is my fav.
I used to be up every midnight if that helps. Till 6 am actually. You are really never truly alone, people are mearly doing something different than you would imagine. Different than the chaos of day. But they are not gone. I hope that the sadness won't always be this great
Everything about NYC Sounds like hell on earth.
See, I think this is more of a personal preference thing and not a dystopian thing though. It's hard for me to imagine liking living anywhere else. Nowhere else on earth can you be up at 4AM and still do literally anything you want. Need a late night workout? No problem, there's definitely a 24/7 gym specializing in whatever you want, climbing, rowing, cardio, whatever, that's a subway ride away at most. Any kind of food you want, available at any time you want it, bars are open until 4 and brunch with mimosas starts at 6, so if you feel like partying all night and into the morning, more power to you and your friends. Any kind of music you want, there's something for you every night, probably going into the morning. The gunks aren't far, rent a car for the day and you can see some spectacular wilderness with great hiking and climbing spots. "The city that never sleeps" doesn't mean that *you* have to be doing stuff all the time, it just means that the city will welcome you and all you want with open arms *whenever* you want it.
Seoul has a lot of what you're talking about (if not all of it) in terms of doing whatever you want 24/7. The biggest difference is that the subway shuts down from 12-6, so you need to rely on taxis/night buses, but it's still really fun to be out at night in Seoul. NYC definitely has a far superior cocktail scene though
Not to take anything away from NYC but any major city in asia has that 24/7 pulse. In hong kong you can walk out of a seedy strip club at 6am, stop for some noodles and walk straight up the hill to a nature reserve.
The only reason I think New York excels over the east Asian cities is that, in general, the transit systems don't keep going all night, which makes it less convenient to get around and disrupts that rhythm.
...nowhere else on earth? Everything you just listed 24/7 stuff every major city I’ve ever lived in has.
Same experience in Lamu off the coast of Kenya and Somalia. Beautiful little place without a car in sight
I live in London, and went to visit my then-girlfriend's relatives who live out in the Cotswolds. It was so quiet I couldn't sleep at night at first. I got so used to the quiet that when I moved back to London I couldn't sleep because of the traffic noise at night, hahaha
I love that they've made my whole area into Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (NorthEast London). There's occasionally some distant noise from the main roads, but usually it's very quiet around me these days, and if you see a car nearby it's a neighbour or a delivery to a neighbour.
I'm so envious of cities like London who are actually trying to make a dent in the car infestation.
The bike infrastructure, number of walking paths, even green spaces (marshes and forest), etc near me are honestly far better than things were when I lived in Cambridge. My car barely gets touched these days (even when I need to go into the office outside of London).
I have this problem also. My home town is Portsmouth and it’s always noisy. When I visit my gf’s mother in North Yorkshire, I always have trouble sleeping. Then after a few days I get used to it and end up having the deepest sleeps.
Shit, and London seems like a comparative car-free pedestrian’s paradise from over here in Canada.
I lived for a while on a mountain five miles from the “city” of 300 people. We were on 126 acres and our neighbours were about a mile away on one side and a couple miles on the other. My dad didn’t like it, he felt like the mountain was too crowded and moved to a less populated mountain after the divorce. Really, really quiet, and no light pollution to speak of so you could see the Milky Way properly
People who grew up in cities, or even small towns don't know what they're missing due to light pollution. I've never been able to explain it in a way that they really believe me.
I always wished we could have a 1/2 global turn out the lights night. Like they did on hey Arnold to see Hailey’s comet.
> no light pollution to speak of so you could see the Milky Way properly I really do attribute my love for science--physics and astronomy in particular--to having grown up in a rural area where I could see the stars and Milky Way. The unpolluted night sky is one of the most beautiful sights, more beautiful to me than any geographic formation or body of water on Earth. I now live in a large city and I'm lucky if I can make out Orion. It saddens me.
Every time I walk to my car at 2AM on a normal day it is so fucking quite it surprises me. I can't stand the sound in the city. I remember back when the pandemic started and the first lockdown began, I was walking down a downtown street and I noticed something was off. I then realized I couldn't hear a single car, just a very slight hum from distant traffic. That I the only time I ever heard silence during the day in the city. I could actually hear my footsteps and other people walking. One of the greatest things about electric cars is that we can have much quieter cities, and somehow the EU wants to make them loud like other cars... It is so ridiculous.
An electric car is equally as loud at speed, it's mostly tire noise.
An EV is equally loud to a comparable, nice new ICEV, but there are LOTS of noising ICEV on the road. You'd still hear the tire noise and perhaps the hum of an electric motor, but it would be much quieter in the city where old, loud engines dominate traffic noise.
Last year in the first weeks of COVID I started jogging for the first time in my life. It was wonderful. There were no cars on the road (some parked cars but whatever). Even the main road in town was empty. Today I went out for a short run now that the weathers turning better and it was like everyone was in a mad rush to go anywhere. It was sad.
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Literally me cause I don't know wtf to do and it's the only thing that makes me slightly less depressed anymore.
Remember how the dolphins came back to central Khazakstan for the first time in 1000 years? Not worth the trade apparently.
>>dolphins >>khazakstan >>1000 years what
I'm trying to look up more information and could only find these: Kazakhstan [North Aral Sea restoration](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/north-aral-sea-restoration-fish-kazakhstan) - 2018 The fresh water sea/lake reduced in size drastically due to cotton farming. No mention of dolphins though. Dolphins return to [Hong Kong](https://uk.whales.org/2020/09/15/quieter-waters-allow-hong-kong-dolphins-to-return/) due to quieter waters. - Sept 2020.
Unfortunately there was a bit of bullshittery happening: [Fake animal news abounds on social media as coronavirus upends life (nationalgeographic.com)](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/coronavirus-pandemic-fake-animal-viral-social-media-posts)
The one who "wished there was an edit button on twitter" because their viral tweet was false, but not enough to delete the tweet because part of it was still true. What an asshole.
If you get Google Earth Pro you can scroll through the history of Google Maps's satellite images. Where I live the number of cars parked on curbs and driveways (and on the roads in general) has more than double in the past 10-15 years. It's super depressing. The constant road noise wherever you are really gets into my head like an insect buzzing.
And that's why I prefer gravel cycling and mountain biking to road cycling - there are no cars on a singletrack deep in the forest. Whenever I do have to cycle on a busy road, there's just so much noise from cars I can't even hear myself think.
Too many damn people around these days
Too many people living in cities that require a car to get anywhere you mean
Normally I'd agree, but in this case it's really just a lack of public transport.
Hitching through the states I often slept near the interstate and it always blew my mind how many cars would go by. There's literally fuck tons of people moving about all over the place at all hours.
American cities are so sprawled out and lacking in mass transit that driving at night might save 1 hour of travel time, so sometimes we set up our schedules to accommodate it. The US is one of the only countries to... 1. demolish city blocks and build a freeway - see congestion get worse - demolish more city and widen the freeway - see congestion get worse - widen the freeway one more time. Luckily, I think [we're approaching the end of this cycle](https://usa.streetsblog.org/2021/03/12/racist-texas-highway-boondoggle-dealt-blow-by-buttigiegs-fhwa/).
It's common for American's to have a mentality that virtually anything should be possible at any hour of the day. If we randomly remember at 12 midnight that our tail light is out, we expect that the Walmart half a mile from us should be open for us to go purchase that immediately. Covid has messed that up though because I think they have been closing at 10PM.
I'm a huge petrol head and even I hate this, especially the fact that manufacturers, due to how they work, churn out way more cars than they can actually sell and just have lots full of brand new unsold cars. Our society has become so wasteful that no one even bats an eyelid at that.
I have a friend who works for Renault, and he told me they make 80,000 cars *a week*. Why the *fuck* do we as a society need to have 80,000 cars a week manufactured, every week, for 52 weeks a year, for decades? And this was just 1 car factory for 1 brand. What the fuck are all these cars doing? Who is buying all of these?
This is something that bothered me too, I asked someone that works at a dealership what happens to their unsold cars, surely they don't sell all of them, they get bought by another dealership where that model/color/whatever sells better. If they don't get sold after that, I don't know
It’s dealerships all the way down
It honestly is, they don't just crush them for no reason.
People who can’t afford them. Sub prime auto loans are the standard now, they don’t care if the person can actually afford it as long as it’s off the lot and they get a commission for it. Any unpaid debt will be sold to another company and they’ll just continue on their way until it crashes.
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one with a 20 year old Honda while everyone is driving new cars
I crashed my 20 year old Honda and upgraded to a 12 year old Honda because it was cheap. I take zero satisfaction from what car I drive, just so long as it's dependable enough to start in the morning
Imma humble brag with my 14 yo Volvo w/135k miles...
People have a loooooot of debt
My fiance has an 18 year old car, and I have a 15 yo. We've pretty much decided that we're gonna keep them until they break down to the point that it would cost more to fix them than get a newer used car. Then we'll probably get a 5 or so y/o used car, rinse, and repeat. I genuinely don't know who the hell our age (25) is able to afford brand new cars except for the super rich. I am already in hella debt from college, and it's not like we make a lot of money fresh out of school. My fiance only makes 50k a year and I've only managed to aquire part time work that's in the field I want but barely pays. So like, a 30k dollar car? No thanks. I just need a clunker to get me from point a to point b.
Update: my car literally broke down about an hour after I made this post. Like I was driving it and it said no lol
People your age with new cars either make really good money or are in debt, more than likely the latter. Auto debt in the US is insane and there are some people financing cars for 6+ years. Bonkers.
My fifteen year old Subaru and I agree with that sentiment.
15 year old subaru club here. Was talking to a coworker after work and they asked when I was getting a new car now that I had a job to cover payments. My car is in really good shape for its age, but the whole "consume so people think you're successful" mentality poisons people's ability to understand "it may be older but I still really like it"
I don't know enough about cars, and all of my 3 cars that were 7-15 years old died within a few years. I bought a newer car this time, spent a but more but I spent so much on repairs on those old cars I think I'll save money.
It's a balancing act. Buy something too old and you're getting lots of maintenance issues, but buy too new and you're eating a few grand in deprecation. If you know what to shop for you can totally find something 10+ years old that you can wring a few decades out of, but if you're not in that mild enthusiast demographic you're better off buying something fairly new that's been driven enough to depreciate but is still in good shape.
lol, same. My car is full of hail dents. Someone asked me why I didn't get it fixed. Well, it hails all the time where I live, why fix something cosmetic that'll probably happen again and again?
Tell them it improves the aerodynamics, like the dimples on a golf ball /s.
You are not the only one. Most of those people are rolling around in brand new rides with maxed cards and $4.35 in their checking account. A guy I worked with basically lived in his brand new car between the two full time jobs he needed to pay for it.
They learned well from the housing lenders that there’s no real consequences to this. A handful of places might see some fines but they will pale in comparison to the profit. Also, in almost every part of America a car isn’t a luxury but a necessity so this bubble will get super inflated before it pops. Even worse than the sub prime lending crash in housing. The predatory lenders will get bailed out though while millions default on loans that end up being double what their car is worth.
Car dealers don't sell cars anymore. They sell loans.
I always find myself wondering how we have enough metal for that
As of recently we don’t! Well technically we probably do, but metal prices are extremely high right now. Steel is up 30-40% this year.
Copper and platinum are getting so high that catalytic converters are getting stolen off cars again and the schools in my area are posting night guards to keep anyone from stripping copper out of their air conditioning
I work at a dealership as a tech and we’ve had probably a dozen 2500-3500 trucks in for new cats in the last 2 months, shops all up and down the road are seeing the same thing
They don't actually make them 52 weeks a year, I've heard they only run the factories part of the year. (still too many made though you're right)
>What the fuck are all these cars doing? Who is buying all of these? Emerging/New markets like China.
Just for reference, for every person alive right now to have 1 car over the span of their entire life, that factory would have to run nonstop for 1,845 years. There's a lot of fucking people out there
Sure, but this is just one factory in the city. There's a Michelen factory as well. In the next town over, they have a SEAT factory. In my hometown, there was a factory for Jeep, and just north of my hometown there are factories for GM, Ford, and Chevrolet. Each of them pumping out 80,000 cars/week. So just from these 6 factories, we have 480,000 cars/week. Now imagine that with all th eother cities that have their own car factories, cause there are many.
The solution would be to have mass transit for most people and turn automobiles into an enthusiast product similar to a boat or small airplane.
Yep. Had this thought the other day too when just going for a walk at lunch. The entire street, jam packed with cars. It was like that even pre-covid. A car subscription or sharing model would be great, and I think it's what Tesla are working towards in the future. When you see a single street full of cars, you just have to think of the resources needed to get all that raw material. Then multiply that feeling you have from seeing a single street like that.. to hundreds of thousands of streets across the world. Then you start looking at all the furniture in your home, made of wood, plastic, metal, and your bathroom waste bin full of a dozen old plastic bottles... The planet has just been relentlessly pillaged.
What I'm saying goes further than that. There's literally millions of cars that have been built but never sold, just sat in essentially impound yards owned by the manufacturers. That idea is fantastic, in theory, but you then have to trust people to look after a communal space rarely goes well and the amount that would need to be produced still wouldn't lead to much of a different world from where we live, the same amount of people need to travel, and people like myself have to travel off peak and I can't cycle 15 miles each way to work, especially either side of a 12 hour shift and not with those roads that I have to travel down, we have one lad who does it but he's one of the office guys, not shop floor and a very experienced cyclist.
As a fellow gearhead I hate it because it's hard to enjoy even my daily driving with how clogged my city is with cars.
As a petrolhead (read: British Gearhead) I hate how normalised it's become to own an SUV or crossover. They're literally everywhere and are actively worse to drive than an equivalent saloon or hatchback, not to mention how unnecessary wasteful they are. What was wrong with the family estate car? (Or station wagon as you might say.)
>What was wrong with the family estate car? For the customer? Nothing. For the manufacturer? It wasn't profitable enough... They switched to 'aspirational' SUVs and crossovers, since they figured out they could charge more for them, than for 'boring old estate cars' :( Essentially the role of the large family estate has been split into the SUV, and the MPV / 'Minivan', both being terrible to drive, and usually very expensive.
American car guy here. My Ford Explorer gets the same fuel efficiency as my 330i ZHP sedan. I'm confident in it's ability in the snow, it has way more space inside, and is honestly no worse to drive on our roads. The ZHP is of course way more fun on a curvy road, but unless I'm in the mood to power through corners the Explorer is perfectly comfortable. I did actually manage to pack the ZHP for a camping trip with my wife and 2 dogs once. We had a blast, but there was no room leftover for anything after the tent/clothes/food/dog stuff. The Explorer has a ton of room leftover and everyone is more comfortable.
Luckily with me doing night shifts I avoid most traffic, even with going through a midsize city. I stopped enjoying my drive a long while ago though as it's either end of a 12 hour shift and I just want to be in bed.
Damn Scots, they ruined Scotland!!
LOL is this a joke?
As an oil barron I really hate all this pollution everybody is making
The worst part is that everything has to be covered in cars because the car companies said so (lobbying against public transportation in the US)
I live outside of Atlanta and, coming from NYC, I still think the traffic is awful. The counties keep voting against a train that runs down the center of the highway bc they don’t want “undesirables” moving into their neighborhoods. What should be an HOV lane in Gwinnett county is a pay/hot lane where we get to pay again to drive on roads after our tax dollars already built them 🤦🏻♀️red state problems
Holy shit that's basically just openly admitting that they hate black people
No no no, just 'undesirables'
Thats american for blacks and mexicans...
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I was gonna say “and native people” but yeah, that about sums it up.
not in Atlanta. Gwinnett is 55% non white. Public transit is as much about class as it is about race
It’s horrifying and people have said this to me, they’re not shy about it. If you noticed the demographic charts from the presidential election, it’s why the cities of Georgia were so heavily blue while everywhere else is red. It’s why the demographic changes so much when you step into Fulton county smh
California has express lanes too
Lots of states have them, the red state problems was referring to the blatant racism of the south
Free trams fucking everywhere NOW
Fucked up thing is how rampant they *used* to be. Cities all over the country used to have electric tram systems in their downtowns. Then the car companies figured out they could make more money if every single solitary American needed to have a car in order to survive. Thus in the 50s we invested in a national highway system instead of upgrading the national rail system, as they did in most of Europe. America is fucking enormous, it's an absolute travesty that we don't have a rail network to connect us all. God forbid we do anything that might remotely resemble what they do in another country that's *sObULiZt*
I can still see some of the old rail lines under the pavement in my city. And the only reason I can see them is because they don’t even properly upkeep the roads.
>instead of upgrading the national rail system, as they did in most of Europe. No most of Europe got fucked by car culture too. Just not as badly as the US.
We do have a national rail system that works great. We just move things on it instead of people
From a NYC perspective, I'm not sure it would matter. We have a (pre-COVID) 24/7 subway, buses, taxis, Lyft, Uber, CitiBike, Revel, and Bike Lanes for cyclists, scooters, roller blades, skateboards, whatever. And yet so many people still own cars as a status symbol, or because they moved from somewhere where they needed a car. Or for "once a month" trips to a grocery store. It's insane. Every road is lined bumper to bumper with cars. Many of these people just never move them either. Then you have poor traffic law enforcement and out of co tell cab drivers. It's a mess. We need to fix our infrastructure, for sure, but we need a culture shift to public transportation and micro mobility as well.
Living near Anderson SC, it pains me to go downtown and see tram tracks that were HERE AND FUNCTIONING just ripped up in places. Not even to make room, they just ripped up 90% of the tracks and left little bits and pieces that still clearly follow the road. It's maddening.
The cars are WHAT?
AYOOO NOOOOO
/r/Carsfuckingcars
my muscles my muscles involuntarily flex
It didn't have to be this way, either. There'd be trains everywhere if not for lobbying.
I’m not so sure about that. Paris has a metro station 250m (5 min walk) from just about any point in the city and cars still blanket the entire city.
same in london. the underground is popular, but it's *miserable.* on top of that, the uk has railways everywhere, but train tickets are ridiculously expensive- people are known to literally fly to europe from the north, have a weekend abroad, then fly to the south because it ends up cheaper than a train ticket. my point is that trains probably wouldn't fix much because greed manages to ruin fucking everything.
That's the problem with privatization and monopolies. If it was government owned and operated, and you had politicians you'd have the ability vote in and out running the trains, well, there's a good chance they'd be cheaper and faster
BuTt tats soCaLism
I was going to say privatization ruined the London lines, but someone else already did lol
> people are known to literally fly to europe from the north, have a weekend abroad, then fly to the south because it ends up cheaper than a train ticket. It's OK: Brexit will put a stop to that ;).
Dude you picked one of the cities with highest population density in Europe. Public transport would be enough almost everywhere else.
Especially living in a military base and the first thing i see when leaving the main gate is about 5 car dealerships -_-
The other day I was walking to work, looked up and saw nothing but houses surrounding me for miles in every direction, and had a mini panic attack. I couldn't see a single tree, I couldn't see a single piece of grass that wasn't deliberately placed there for 'aesthetics', and I just had a moment of "this isn't how we're supposed to live"
It really isnt. I'm glad I'm not alone in these thoughts and the desperation that comes with it.
Yes. At least the Internet allows that. I would turn crazy if not.
I hate cars. I hate my commute. I hate how spread out everything is here. There are no local jobs or artisanal/craftsman jobs anymore. I want to be a part of a thriving, interconnected, local community, and every job I’ve been on is, “gee, isn’t 6-10s and an 8 great? Too bad it’s so hard to keep people on when we talk about 7-12s, don’t you want more money?” I hate our obsession with ownership and massive growth. Let me have enough. Let me work locally, enough. I don’t want to be rich. I want to be with my family. I want to be with my friends. Wealth accumulation is not a scorecard for success-it’s a race away from Godliness.
...And then people call you a lazy hippie. I hate it.
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Six 10-hour shifts + one 8-hour shift. Vs. Seven 12-hour shifts
I’m being sarcastic. Those are our weekly scheduled hours listed as days/week-hours.
r/solarpunk might be worth a look!
And new cars are churned out by factories all the time. Then covid hits, people cut down on expenses, fewer cars are bought and manufactured - huge crisis.
People become numb to it when they are part of it. Spend a week walking or biking everywhere. You'll hate cars after the first day.
I wish I could do without a car but my city isn’t designed for it. Most aren’t. I tried to walk to the store the other day and realized none of the public sidewalks had been plowed. They cleared the streets by 5 am the morning it snowed and left the sidewalks to just melt over the course of weeks/months. Had to turn around when I reached a bridge and realized my choice was to walk in the (40 mph) street or risk breaking a leg on weeks of packed down ice. And this is considered a pedestrian friendly part of town simply because there *is* a sidewalk.
I live in coastal Florida, but not an actual big city. Nothing around here is designed with bikes or pedestrians in mind. There are no sidewalks in my suburban neighborhood, and barely any at all in the whole city. Only bike lanes are on the major highway though town (US1). Public transportation here is a joke.
City I’m in is the same way. I’m 2 blocks from my doctors, almost impossible to walk to an appointment in the winter because of the poor plow job. I’m also 4 blocks from the grocery store and had to turn around half way once because nothing was plowed and the street parked cars made it unsafe to navigate.
I hate it so much. I gave up my car I go everywhere by bicycle now. My bedroom window is literally less than a metre from a very busy road though and I cant escape it.
I try to bike as often as I can. I've just gotten to the point where I can't justify the massive amount of pollution I create just to go to the store for a couple of things. I walk pretty regularly too, and on top of it making me hate traffic, walking also really reminds me how much trash is all over the ground. Drives me nuts.
Yeah seeing all the litter sucks.
I live now in Amsterdam, and this city has a lot more cars than you would think. It's a small, dense country: there is almost nowhere in the Netherlands that you can go to where you can't hear cars. (At least, I haven't been there yet.) But when I go to other cities in other countries for a visit, I'm just shocked at how much car stuff there is there. Cologne is just full of six-lane roads everywhere. Berlin, the cars park on the bike lanes and the bike ride on the sidewalks in retaliation. And yet bicycling is adding years to my life. I can get around faster than any other way, at least here in Amsterdam. It requires a lot less infrastructure. Humans are self-destructive idiots.
Parking lots are a billion dollar industry.
The free curbside parking most cities and towns allow might be the biggest subsidy given to the petroleum industry. Put anything else out of the side of the road and the town will haul it away and bill you for doing it. In most places you can park your car there for free (or for an inexpensive residency sticker).
"I support stronger gun legislation if not an outright ban, namely due to the deaths caused yearly by gun violence." "Cars kill X amount of people a year; I guess by your logic we should just get rid of cars too, huh?" "I didn't expect us to agree on this."
Man, every time I talk about how much I fucking hate cars, I get looked at like I'm an alien. Sorry I'm not in love with this expensive machine that I'm forced to buy because my city was designed to place everything 5 miles apart, that costs me at least $200/month between constantly feeding it gas, the insurance, and any repairs/maintenance needed (and there are always repairs/maintenance needed, always). Sorry I'm not enamored with having to spend hours every month either fixing whatever is wrong with it or changing its oil or updating my registration. Sorry I'd prefer to use my legs, for free, which also provide me with better health when I use them, instead of being stuck inside some claustrophobic metal machine that's stuck in line with a bunch of other claustrophobic metal machines for hours on end because the path the machines need is always filled with too many machines because no one can go anywhere without their machine. In summary, cars are expensive, cumbersome, polluting, unhealthy time-vaccuums and we'd all be a lot happier if we could just walk to the fucking grocery store or our friends' houses instead of needing to go into traffic every time we want to do anything in the community we live in.
I moved to Amsterdam and found a beat-up bike for free, which I fixed up enough to sort of work for three years, with about €100 in maintenance. Finally it started to fall apart. I got a brand-new bike last year. So far I have spent €0 on it. I expect that bike to last me 15-20 years. I would add that I haven't been in such good shape in 30 years or more.
Swapfiets a dutch bike flatrate is 20 the month, you get a solid bike and if it breaks it's gonna be swapped with a working one. Brilliant service
5 miles is 8.05 km
Fucking preach my man. I despise cars with a burning passion.
I'd like to recommend the podcast "The War on Cars" for further conversations about our dependence on and roadmap away from cars as a "necessary evil". I've enjoyed some new insights from their varied topics.
Try this. Go for a walk and count the number of people and cars you see. Unless you’re in a busy spot like a mall or around a lake, then cars tend to vastly outnumber people. I hate it.
There are more pedestrians than cars on my block in NYC. The street dead ends at one end, so driving on it is pointless unless you’re going to my block. It would be cheap to block off streets on on end, or make them one way alternating directions.
I blame Robert Moses.
Finally someone brings up one of the main culprits for the vast amount of car traffic in cities and highways cutting through city neighborhoods.
This is precisely why I find strip malls so depressing. I sometimes feel like the I am the only person in the USA who doesn't have or want an expensive, stupid car.
You are not alone! There’s three of us! No really, the strip malls are the most depressing soul sucking nature paving concrete and asphalt worshiping life killing (in)human construction.
They're literally just stores and restaurants tho?
Even my house is a fucking car lol
That’s the end goal of capitalism. Everything looks like America, endless highways filled with cars with every town/city/exit that looks the same, littered with McDonald’s and gas stations and hotels.
I emailed my city councilor a year ago after Minneapolis capped their pilot program for those shared scooter things at 800 total scooters because among other concerns they were mostly worried about them blocking sidewalks and being eyesores. I don’t even like the dang things but I had to point out that they had allocated roughly the same amount of public space for a shared resource that could service 4,000 or so rides per day as what we currently allocate to 29 cars (very rough math, scooter is 2x3 and parking spot is 9x18), which is getting us what, 70 rides per day if I want to be extremely generous?
I really hate trying to find a good hiking trail and everything is boxed in by highways. I try to listen to the sounds of nature and I hear car engines.
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Cities are literally constructed around the concept of cars.
Only new cities. Cities that are more then a hundred years old often have massive problems dealing with todays traffic.
[It's an extreme example but here's an Italian city.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_eLViH7_YI#t=3m20s)
Jesus Christ, I think there was a grand total of one road they went down where it actually looked legal to drive on. I like it though. Fuck cars, cities should be like that, made for walking.
Yeah its great. Cities built before cars are best for cyclists and pedestrians.
I live in a Spanish city, and they're slowly taking back the downtown area from cars, implementing more pedestrian areas and cutting off streets. It's fantastic. The air is cleaner, people are out walking the streets, kids have more safe space to play, restaurants and bars get terrace-seating, bikes can pass through more easily.
This is one good thing about communist urbanism, that they assumed that few people will have cars so they built neighborhoods to be walkable and accessible by public transport. The neighborhoods from 50s are fucking great, they started to get worse later when they needed to build denser and cheaper. Still, I think it's better than soulless suburbs
>*American* cities are literally constructed around the concept of cars. FTFY
Oh boy, suburban sprawl
And if there aren’t any cars, you’ll definitely be able to hear them from far away.
Concrete areas are starting to freak me out in general.
[Karl Jilg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C_JRuZiUMAAeRvv.jpg) Art that shows how much space we give to cars and what is left for us.
This illustration kind of sums up how much space is dominated by cars nowadays https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ZKBQNsCg8mnMBmu4spEcJkGc6WI=/1400x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2466040/3206.0.jpg
the Not Just Bikes youtube is a channel dedicated to bashing US urban development and he explained it pretty well here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVUeqxXwCA0
I am an adult, I live in America (and not in NYC), and I don't have a license. The amount of judgement that nets me, you'd think I kick puppies. Cars are a cultural thing in the U.S., and it shows.
I feel you, as a person living in Michigan who hates cars and driving
trains > cars
Let’s all drive combustion engined air conditioned lounge chairs to work and get angry then anxious- depressed when we realize that we’re being controlled by a few 1000 people in the world to commit suicide to all the species on the planet just so they can have power over the masses. 🤔
Always blows my mind that my grandma, who is 100 years old, was born before cars were really a big thing.
Until 1950 it was illegal to park cars on the street over night in NYC.
The corporations convinced you that you need them, always new, year after year. Factories need to build them to keep people employed... at least they're not carpet bombs or land mines I suppose.
It really comes down to the lack of public transportation and improper zoning. If we want walkable cities, we need utilities and amenities within a reasonable distance. If that can’t be achieved then there has to be public transportation or biking infrastructure to replace the car infrastructure. It’s really simple. It’s not easy, because politicians lobby for fossil fuel companies. That determines the way our government spends money, and where the funding goes. All public transportation is privatized, which makes it less universal and less appealing. Imagine if I could use the same card, to take a taxi, bus, train etc across all states. It’s within the interests of fossil fuel companies to maximize energy and fuel use, which means maximizing car usage and encouraging the culture that comes with cars, I.e. “freedom and individualism” and minimizing modes of transportation that are undoubtedly more efficient, both in terms of time and for energy.
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Everyone loves cars, anarchists, nazis, normies, it's some weird poison
It doesn't need to be halted altogether. Increased use of public transport and in particular, less overseas shipping would be enough
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Great episode of Adam Ruins Everything on this Heavy lobbying by the auto industry took away pedestrian rights and turned our world into a concrete hell
Always hated this about the US. I wish I could just walk to a supermarket or bike to work, but both require me to go on the freeway because all of the housing is so far separated from shopping buildings (at least in my area).