I hate point 2 and 3.
I have an avarage travel of 45-55 minutes from my home city to the city I work in. By car and by train, while the train is usually on the slower end. It takes about 20-30 minutes to get from my home to the train station by taking the bus or riding the bike. When taking the bus I also have to factor in about 15 minutes between arrival at the station and departure of the train. Then there is another 20 minutes from the train station at destination to my place of work. So it takes me 40-65 minutes longer taking the train… twice a day, making it 1:20-2:10h a day (when Im lucky bc trains over here have frequent delays). One hour ish doesn’t sound like much? Well you’ll feel it if you working 11-12h a shift or a 9-10 hour a day in a normal 9 to 5 job (starting work at around 7 a.m.).
Then there is a neat little think called night or late shifts. There is no way I’m gonna take the train here. They either take an hour longer or the bus at my home city does not drive anymore on the way back.
Demand better public transportation. Demand functioning trains and frequent bus and tram connections. But do not tell people that need to take the car for whatever reason, that they should just take the worse option and make them feel like the problem.
I hate cars. I hate driving. And I love taking the train or taking the bike within my city. But sometimes I just have to take the car. That is not my fault tho, since public transportation is not the main focus of politics over here. And thats what needs to change globally.
How likely is it that your home and work are 20 minutes away from train stations because your region prioritizes cars?
Its not just likely, thats the case. But living in the inner city is expensive here. And thats the case in most of the country.
When I switched from using the bus to going by bike, i cut my commute time by more than half. If I were to take the car, it would halve again. Public transport is great, and necessary. But it will never be faster than a personal car for anything but large distances.
… where you live. Where I live (in central Europe) we have a subway every 2-3 minutes and you’re at worst 2 blocks away from a stop. It all depends on the infrastructure. A subway cant be stuck in traffic…
Just say central european city.
I too live in central europe and the bus line i could take from my town to the town i work in takes 1 hr to get there and back, at the end of my day the bus only departes one hour after i’m finished with work so i have to wait for the bus the same amount of time i need for both ways with my car.
They should really say a European city with a subway. Not all cities in Europe have a subway.
It was pretty obvious from my comment that I live in a European city with a subway…
I didnt say my comment applied to all European cities either.
Also, trams/streetcars in Zurich have right of way and the red lights change for them. Which is completely logical considering how many more people you can fit in them than a few cards at a red light. The problems with public transit in North America are a function of our car infrastructure.
Yep. Here in Berlin traveling to my old office (when I didn’t work from home all the time) with the S or U-bahn took 30-35 minutes and by car/taxi about 40-45 minutes due to the traffic.
Berlin is one of the few german cities where public transport is done right. In cologne, where I lived, there are a lot of stops, but the inferstructure is just realy bad. They managed that trains get stuck in traffic too sometimes. And for some reason they trains only arrive in a 10-30min time window. So if you want to follow one line it’s relatively fine, but if you have to change trains you have to be lucky. In the city center still faster than driving though.
If I rode my bike to work, my shift would be over by the time I got there. I’m really starting to like the idea of biking to work.
A bike is faster in my city if you are decently fast, but a bus or trolley is faster than cars during rush hours, because we have public transit lanes, so while everyone in their tin cans is stressed yelling at the dumbass who just cut them off im breezing past, listening to a podcast, meditating or catching a quick ten minute nap before work.
Nearly every city on the planet with a subway system disputes your bullshit.
It sure is nice that everyone gets to live in New York, London, and Washington.
A better solution is to reduce how much people need to travel. Instead of building trillion-dollartransit systems so people can to to the office we should be taxing the everloving shit out of office spaces for jobs that can be worked remotely.
Why not both? I live in Stockholm and work from home. I have amazing trains that I could take to work, and I’ve never had a commute longer than 40 minutes. But a 0 minute commute is still shorter than 5minute commute.
Because not everyone can live in fucking Stockholm.
An apartment within 40 miles of my office in the city costs 5x as much per month as where I live. I can’t get a fucking pizza delivered to my house, much less a bus. And unless I want to smell like a gym at work the 5+ months a year it’s over 100° outside, I need to drive to the nearest bus station if I want to take transit. So I’m already having to drive and park somewhere. Then I have to pay to park at the bus station and pay again to ride the bus that drops me off 9 blocks from my office, where I’d have to walk the rest of the way.
All told it’d add 2-3 hours to my commute and be more expensive than driving.
But if 100% of the work I do is on the computer at the office. The real solution is to not have the fucking office at all.
There are obviously other systemic problems. Cities being designed around cars isn’t the only one.
But your rage shouldn’t be directed at the people who want to make public transit options suck less.
His solution isn’t to make it suck less. His just says how great it is to live somewhere that was designed around walking because when the city was established that was pretty much the only option.
The Southern US is designed around cars because until fairly recently it was very sparsely populated, so everything had to be designed around cars and air conditioning in order to develop. It was the correct decision at the time, and changing it now is much more difficult than simply saying “be like this city that was established before the steam engine.”
Yeah that’s definitely a challenge, and I believe it is a failure of city planning.
My condo is worth $300k and is within 15min of central Stockholm. The housing crisis is definitely a problem around the world, but European cities that don’t have the missing middle problem are in a much better place.
Back on topic, even if you could work from home, it would still take you over an hour to go grocery shopping or buy a pizza, which is a huge problem. Both of those things are within a 15 min walk for me.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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So what? Subways requires a minimum amount of people to be viable. Outside of major urban centres they are useless.
I think the point here is that suburbs and cities have such dogshit public transit and bike infrastructure that people do everything by car. Nobody is telling those who live in rural areas to bike 30km to get groceries.
I’m in Vancouver, while the system needs some improvement, the skytrain gets me right to the airport, with trains every few minutes. No parking nonsense. Driving, with traffic, is much longer. Bussing has some express routes so the trips aren’t so many stops also. until the system wxpands develooment the consideration is looking for a place nearer a stop or station.
I tried taking my family out on a weekend on transit. 40 minutes wait for a bus that had any room, an hour to travel 10km, and it cost us $10 each way for the family. I live in a major city but our transit is trash. It’s not fit for a city of this size.
It’s not fit for a city of this size.
Tokyo would like to have a word with you. It’s not public transit in and of itself that is the issue, it’s the implementation.
I think you read that wrong. They aren’t saying public transit doesn’t work in a city that size, but the public transit in their city isn’t up to the standard it should be for a city that size.
You’re right, I see it now. My bad!
That sounds horrible. Public transportation is such a vital thing for citys to function properly as a place to live and not just work in. And dont get me started on small towns or the countryside where not owning a car basically means you’re fucked. I cannot wrap my head around how politicians just fail to see this. Climate change might be the most urgent, but by far not the only argument for better public transportation.
Am from Reutlingen Germany and went to Nuremburg to visit a convention.
The public transit is night and day between those two places.
Only had to wait about <10min for the next bus.
I believe the accomodation is not very outside or inside of the transit serving area but it is surprising what a subway and a good schedule can do for one.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannonball_Run_challenge
Are you sure about that second one?
“Successful record attempts have employed a variety of tactics for evading traffic law enforcement.”
😎
Speed limits are more like suggestions in the states anyway, this is just taking it to it’s logical extreme.
Vehicular manslaughter 😎
And here i thought it was just a funny movie all hese years!
From my understanding, the movie is pretty close to what actually happened.
We were not supposed to go to the moon! Years of building rocket infrastructure and yet nobody other than a select few people have gone to the moon!
Stop building rockets!
To be fair going to the moon wasnt about going the moon. It was about proving you could deliver mutual destruction wherever you wanted through general rocket superioririty
And yet very few people actually get to launch nukes these days. One rule for them and another for us.
Yeah I want to go to the shops and back faster than a trip to the moon thanks.
Stop doing physics! Motion was not meant to be analysed.
convert that speed from nautical miles to miles please
let me calculate the snap, crackle and pop of that missile
Statements dreamed up by the utterly insane.
Excellent discourse right there
I love cars and I love driving but commuting by car just sucks in every possible way.
I dispute every way. There is nothing like listening to music in your car. It sounds better.
Depends on your cars sound system
It does but there is something about the combination of driving and music that is magical.
I feel you. But I’d rather reserve this for when I want to drive and don’t have to.
invest in good headphones then
Can’t sing along at the top of my lungs though, which is the only place I can because the walls of my apartment are too thin.
Driving to and from places is way more relaxing than being on transit imo. Transit has always been significantly more stressful for me and never lines up with when I need to use it.
For me it’s the other way around. Public transit is more relaxing since I can just sit down and relax and don’t have to deal with all these idiots that drive like they have to arrive at their destination half an hour ago.
Okay I’ll walk 19 miles to work.
Sure, those are the only two options.
Ok I’ll catch two buses and a train. Or three buses. I’ll only have to wake up at 5am everyday and go to bed at 9pm after returning home at 8:30. Totally viable.
If only there was something with two wheels
Ride a bike for a 38 mile round trip every single day to another city and back when there is no bike lane connecting said cities?
Bikes just aren’t viable for anybody who sweats like a bitch.
Y’all need some better headphones
deleted by creator
My favourite meme format combined with my favourite topic
Great meme and even better because its true.
Imagine getting driven everywhere and still choosing doing it on your own. These people need Steam Decks, I tell you.
This is one of my favourite meme format for some reason.
The left can’t meme material. Bonus use for deranged use of deranged.
It’s a perfectly acceptable use of the meme template, though I suspect in your triggered rage you didn’t manage to notice that.
/r/theLeftCantMeme
wrong website
Engineers designed these roads, not urbanist.
Traffic engineers are hilariously bad at their jobs in the U.S.
Traffic engineering isn’t a university program and we’re still using studies from the 50’s to dictate our traffic engineering. It’s civil engineers in NA who are forced to follow outdated policy which maximizes for car traffic flow, regardless of body count or overall flow of poeple across all transit options. Generally, city planners are all for public transit and walkable and bike able cities but have to battle with politicians appealing to suburbanites with cars.
I don’t understand why this is such a hard thing for people and government to understand. Your car isn’t going to a place, you and the stuff you need to carry are. The car is just the means and there are many other means to do so, they just get a lot less attention and funding. Cars and traffic infrastructure have been subsidised for over a century now. Of course cars more developed, and of course we build our cities for cars, we’re socializing cars.
Yes, there are many areas that have been developed so car focused that it’s a necessity to own a car. People living in rural areas will always need personal cars. People in urban and suburban areas probably don’t and should give up their personal vehicles so Farmer can keep theirs.
Places were not supposed to be driven to?
Places were not meant to be filmed, or cycled to, or taken a blimp or train to. Places just are places. There is no meaning. Who is upvoting these low quality memes?
I wonder how many fuck cars people will buy a car when they finally graduate and get a job and realise they want 1 hr 30 commuting every day instead of 3 hours?
I didn’t. Even when I lived an hour away from my job, it was about as fast by train as driving, and I could spend that time productively or relaxing instead of concentrating on.
If it takes twice as long without a car, that’s a problem that should be solved!
These people are ridiculous. They want to gaslight people who have to drive into thinking we’re bad people and when we call them out on the fact that there is no public transit infrastructure built they’re just like “well all people have to do is build the infrastructure!” Bitch where? And who? And how do we make them? And with what money? I’m so sick of hearing “you should drive a smart car because it makes sense for my DINK ass and I know what’s best”. My home is in an ocean of suburbia. They gonna just bulldoze a whole swath of homes to install a rail? They’ve been talking about installing a rail from DFW to Austin/Houston for the past 40 years and there was even room for it once upon a time. You can’t just say the magical solution is to just “build trains”. We don’t love our cars, these fuckcars people are just lunatics. As you point out the vast majority of them are almost certainly children. The rest are fortunate enough to have never experienced a place with poor public transit.
Absolutely, unfortunately those fuckers have dogpiled the shit out of me like I haven’t heard their shitty argument 100 times and as though they have something original and interesting to say. Puts you off saying anything that doesn’t exactly follow the hive mind.
I’m 46, the parts of my life where I haven’t needed to use a car every day have been great for my physical and mental health … now I live too far from work I use a little 125 motorbike to commute, and it’s still much nicer than having to take a car. When I am forced to take a car, the one I have is small and economical.
I didn’t start figuring this out until I was 30, maybe you need a few more years to mature enough to throw off the consumerist mindset?
You are allowed hate something you own and depend on. What I find fuck cars people are about is how much cars are catered for and it’s still horrible to use in a lot of places.
absolutely.
Normally I live in a, relatively speaking, new city - and everything is so bloody far away, sure some things are more centralised but plenty of things are getting built in places with no public transport connections or an easy way to walk to.
For 3 years at uni I lived in a very old town, and everything, just everything, was in the town centre, you could walk everywhere with no issues.
The difference is one place was built for people, and the other was built for cars.
let me translate what you just asked
I wonder how many people will be forced to buy a car to be able to function in society even though they hate the idea owning a car and in any other developed nation they could go car free in an equivalent city because they have better public transport and/or bike infrastructure
Got to love how you assume I’m American.
Nothing there said you’re American.
“any other developed nation” was kind of implicit.
Because China doesn’t exist or anything. Or Russia, or Australia.
Read it back.
Is anyone seriously denying the U.S. is a repressive country or that it’s status as one is really relevant?
Is Australia a repressive country?
Isn’t most of the global south repressive despite the fact that they’re walkable by necessity?
Or are you just here to pick a fight because you want to live in Paris but can never afford to with your shitty McDonald’s wages?
I’m in Germany. That’s how long it takes with the trains to get to my Workplace. And I still rather work from Home because I don’t have to travel 3 to 4 hours a day.
Holy shit you guys have bad infrastructure. Even worse than ours.
I also generally rather use the train despite its problems. Especially when I’m not sure if I will be drinking or taking other drugs.
Why is everybody assuming I’m not European?
Because you behave like a brainless, witless worm, which is much rarer in Europe
Not really, the images and travel descriptions you’re reading here are the exception, not the rule. The US has great infrastructure, just not for public transportation as there isn’t enough centralized usage and the locations are far apart. It would take me 4 hours to go to work by bus, but it takes me 25 min by car.
That’s simply poor route planning, which could be solved by better bus funding, leading to more buses with more stops and more frequent trips.
That sounds like it’s a vicious cycle. There isn’t any public transport so there are no people using the public transport which causes public transports to be bad, so there isn’t anybody using it
Oh look, you are this guy
You are massively original. It’s great that a meme can deflect any criticism of your consumerist habits. Now you can do whatever the fuck you want as well as feeing morally superior about doing it, because you are only doing it because the bad men in suits made you. Very clever.
Yeah, buddy, widely used meme can perfectly answer your “well-thought out” “criticism”. Maybe it’s a comment on your position, eh?
Yeah, no. I have a car and I hate driving it. I hate others having cars and driving them. I hate public transport being ignored over car infrastructure leaving them completely impractical. I hate our cities being ruined in order to work around cars, when metros are underground, and trains are overground but take way less space since they can take in way more people and transfer them way faster. I hate car accidents being one of the leading causes of death in my country. Fuck cars
A lot of hate there buddy. Just need to relax.
I’m just responding to your initial stupid take, I don’t mean ‘hate’ as in going out and breaking car windows because they’re the bane of my existence
Of course I own a car, you need to own one to get anywhere where I live. That doesn't mean I have to support car infrastructure or be against public transit. I advocate for making public transit services more common and easier to use, and I would use public transit if my supported policies were implemented.
I’m not against public transit either. I was just wondering aloud how many are so vocally against cars due to not never really needing one anyway so far in their lives.
Hi, im 26 years old and i have the money to get a car and make enough money to Use the car. But i dont have one, i use every day the train to get to work. 5 min with bike to the trainstation 31 min with the train, 5 min on foot to my work place, 5 min back to the trainstation, 22 min back with train and 10-15 min with my bike home. With a car I would need 38 min (gmaps). I pay 49€ in month and can use bus or trai In whole Germany. With a car it would be 66km per day. The car of our family uses 6,5 L/ 100km 66km = 4,29L × 20 (workdays) =85,8L * 1,82 (price per liter fuel)= 155,61€ and that is only the fuel with out the tax for the car insurance and not the wear out and without the 2 year controll checkup. And with that I can say train is faster and cheaper for me so I don’t need a car.
Good for you mate. Shit if you want to go anywhere except work though, especially in the countryside.
Renting is a concept that exists, just in case you were unaware.
Tried that. If you want to rent for the weekend you waste a bunch of time picking up and dropping off the vehicle. And say you are using it for camping, you have to pack all your stuff that same day then unload everything before drop off. There are also restrictions as to where you can take rentals, like gravel roads are off limits. Just some examples
Well its only a problem if its night and im drunk. A car wouldnt help except there is a not drunken driver.
I wonder how many fuck cars people will buy a car when they finally graduate and get a job and realise they want 1 hr 30 commuting every day instead of 3 hours?
My wife and I own two cars and live outside the most urban parts of our city. I actually love cars, especially when I get to drive a standard transmission. But we both are firmly in the FuckCars camp.
We walk, bike, and use public transit when we can, and we vote to improve the pedestrian infrastructure in our area whenever we can. We love vacationing in places with good public transit, and would live in such places if circumstances allowed.
Part of the frustration in the FuckCars community is the very thing you said in your post. Cities are built around cars, which means every other form of commuting is secondary and therefore worse than it could be. This is what we want to change. Build cities around people. Get rid of massive parking lots, dangerous stroads, etc. If people need cars to get from city to city, or outside of cities, totally fine. But they shouldn’t be necessary for day-to-day in populated areas.
Cities could be so much better, and we know this because there ARE cities that are better. It just takes effort and time.
All we need now is infinite money and to convince the entire population to give up their personal transportation. Easy enough
Infinite money if we want to do it immediately. Don’t be so defeatist. Changing hearts, minds, and infrastructure is not immediate.
Nah it’s typical online leftism. Good at defining problems and not so good at working up solutions that don’t just bubble down to “everyone should think like me”.
Cars are here to stay.
There are plenty of good solutions. Just because you’re only hearing the very valid complaints doesn’t mean solutions don’t exist. They just aren’t going to be easy or immediate. Life doesn’t work that way.
Cars are indeed here to stay. But we can make cities much better over time.
Well yeah of course. But I think what you’re not factoring in is that people will always choose the convenience of cars. People don’t just drive to and from places in the same city.
I believe I did mention cars as valuable for use outside of cities. I live in the US, cars are an absolute necessity outside of major population centers.
Even so, cities are better when cars are unnecessary within them. CAPABLE, but unnecessary.
You don’t have to give up personal transportation to build public transportation. Are you high? And no, it does not take infinite money. How the fuck do you think that they’re are cities who have already implemented decent public transportation got them? They certainly did not have infinite money.
Are you always this defeatist?
Cities could be so much better, and we know this because there ARE cities that are better. It just takes effort and time.
And eminent domain, to take the land to build that infrastructure. And money. Lots and lots of money. And way more time than you think. Effectively having to level homes for miles, grade the surface and then, finally getting to build this utopian vision of public transportation, which will then need to be fed, sorry, maintained, by taxes that will shoot through the roof. Then, the displaced will need a place to stay, so enter yet more eminent domain to take more property to build vertical, because there is a finite amount of land. And this would be jn just one small to mid sized US city.
Look, I’m happy for anyone who’s happy in how they do their daily. You chose it, and it works for you. Some people don’t chose that life, and it doesn’t work for them. I respect your way of life, it should only be fair that you respect mine. I’m not driving a 3500 turbo diesel that gets 12 gallons to the mile, stomping on the gas “just because I like the sound” and throwing cheeseburger wrappers out the window.
Difference is, I’m not trying to force my way of life on others…
I have never had a commute longer than 40 min each way. I had a 5 minute commute once, too.
Good for you I guess. That’s not an option for me right now.
If your city and region got rid of cars, you could have that, too.
Doubtful.
Not if they’re living on the the village
Traditional pre-car villages were all walkable and all had their own train station. They sprawled out and lost their train stations when cars came around.
You just have to change trains twice and catch a bus at the other end.
Point being?
You’re a moron that never heard about other countries existing. It’s okay, you’ll probably learn about them when you enroll for 1st grade.
Got another one who is assuming I’m American. The sweet irony.
Ah, yes. Minimizing other people’s arguments by implying they don’t have jobs.
This is a bad comment that you should probably delete.
Nope. I’m touching on the student politics that infest sites like this. Opinions that are easy to hold when your only destination is your university campus.
Cool. I’ve been working for 8 years, commuting in the range of 10-15 km to my various places of work throughout that period, with the exception of the pandemic period during which I worked remotely.
Not once have I driven a car to any of my jobs. A mix of public transportation and cycling has covered all of my needs, and I wouldn’t have saved any time by opting to drive.
This invalidates this terrible comment, so let’s not keep repeating.
So because you have a job then Lemmy isn’t full of reactionary student politics? Great logic.
The point is your generalization is disingenuously dismissive and insultingly reductive
A lot. Because our infrastructure and zoning basically demand you buy a car. That’s not the point. The point is to advocate change through local government.
What comes first the cars or the infrastructure? It’s a bit of a chicken/egg scenario. People aren’t going to lobby to inconvenience their lives whe it doesn’t make sense.
The infrastructure came first. It was specifically lobbied for to force people to buy cars.
Cars are a form of personal transportation. Personal transportation is great, things like bikes and escooters can get people around very quickly. The problem with cars is that they go too fast, and they take up too much space.
It’s a tragedy of the commons. Cars would be great if they were only used by professional drivers, didn’t require parking, and were limited to how many could fit on the roads without causing traffic. (These are called busses and taxis)
All cities in the 60s and 70s were excited about cars. Even cities that would be considered “anti-car” nowadays, like NYC, Paris, and Amsterdam, were excited about cars and building massive highways. However, what most people realized, is that building enough parking, and building wide enough roads to handle all the cars is really hard (and in some cases, literally impossible). Residents realized that they didn’t want any more of their city to be bulldozed for yet another highway or parking lot, and went fuckcars.
On top of that, this all happened before we understood the impacts of cars on climate change and mental health.
So yes, we built car-dependent places because it was convenient, and now we’re de-carifying those places because it was a terrible decision.
People outside of your bubble largely enjoy cars.
I have plenty of friends and family in the us and Sweden who own cars. I dont know a single person who enjoys driving to work.
My point still stands, cars are nice for the first 10k people to drive, but they fucking suck for the other 40k+ people in your city.
I do. It’s my sacred time to listen to some albums or a podcast, and to laugh at all the people catching COVID on the bus with all the single mothers, old people and unemployed.
I’m not downvoting you btw, but it sounds like the problem here isn’t that you like cars, but rather that you’re a rural conservative who doesn’t like interacting with lower classes.
Your brain must be a marble.
and to laugh at all the people catching COVID on the bus with all the single mothers, old people and unemployed
well aren’t you a peach
People outside of your bubble largely dislike cars.
If you’re trying to use Lemmy and Reddit as indicators of what people actually care about you will be repeatedly disappointed.
It is just as irrational for me to make the claim I made as you to make yours without evidence. Fortunately the arguments against car-dependent infrastructure planning go far beyond “we don’t like 'em”. The human and environmental benefits of walkable cities with robust public transit and the unsustainability of car-dependency speak for themselves. What other issue of political advocacy would “some people disagree” fly as a reasonable argument? The whole point of advocacy is to shift the tide of popular opinion enough to make material change
Yep most car owners whose cars are not unreliable pieces of shit do enjoy their cars. I’ve been careful over the years to only buy cars that I would enjoy driving and owning. Zero regrets about any of my 5 car purchases. I only sometimes regret selling a couple of them.
You can’t take the train before the tracks are laid down.
Go to Europe my friend. You can go from Madrid to Barcelona for $30 on a train that goes over 300 km/h.
I am in Europe.
Where? Have you tried going outside?
The UK. Trains are expensive as shit and terrible. Still better than the US but not viable for me right now
Look up the Beecher report (hopefully I got the name right) to find out what happened to your trains. It was politicians getting bought by car manufacturers.
Oh we’re talking about developed countries but I understand the confusion.
Ah, well thank neoliberal privatization for that. Thatcher and Reagan fucked their respective countries so damn hard to the benefit of their wealthy friends.
The car industry lobbies to tear up public infrastructure, dingus.
Wow I’ve never thought of that. Your thoughts are so insightful and original, if only I was as clever as you. Just make the government do stuff.
I’m sure you’ll get there. Just keep educating yourself.
This memes community should be named 'Wannabe Activitists"
Literally
This isn’t a meme. It’s just stupid anti-car delusion.
There are other countries in the world than the shithole you live in. Some of them figured out how to not be a car-centric hell.
Depending if the person means it seriously. If you didn’t know, it’s a meme template, usually used more absurdly though. Original
Oh wow til. Thanks.
