this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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Fuck Cars
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And what of people that live out in the country, far from a city? Not walkable or bikeable. Building public transport there is not viable. Cars with sustainable fuel sources are the far better solution.
Nearly every single small town was built on a backbone of rail. They could at the very least put back what was stolen.
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but people travelled in the country before cars were invented
Really? You mean when people in rural areas had to stay overnight if they went to town for supplies because the trip there took so long? And that’s before a century of planning around the convenience of cars.
Yeah, I mean then. Some people got used to driving their SUV 200km into town to get a haircut and buy out of season fruit every saturday. And that lifestyle relies on unsustainable and dangerous technologies that we can't afford to keep running. It was never going to be permanent. If you want metropolitan conveniences, you're going to have to live in a metropolitan area. This isn't difficult logic.
Let’s say you need a plumber to come fix a leak. How does he get his tools and supplies there? On his mule and cart?
For this example I’ll use the US average commute of 27.6 miles (44.4 km) one way. Based on what I looked up, a donkey pulling a cart is ~4.5 mp/h (7.2 km/h). That’s 12 hours of travel time there and back. Help me understand how this is reasonable.
Most traffic is neither freight nor service teams with their turnout kit.
No, most traffic isn’t. A large portion of the population would be just as well off if they used public transport. However, there’s also a portion that the complete banning of road vehicles would be extremely detrimental to their livelihoods.
Easy. Get rid of indoor plumbing
Again, sufficiency and resilience. If you live in a rural space, you learn to fix shit yourself. Famously: tractors.
If you believe that rural just means "own a house in a village or next to a town", that's not it, that's tourism. That's like owning a cabin in the woods or like the car-dependent suburbia. What makes you a rural dweller is participation in the rural economy or subsistence living. If you live like a guest, you are a guest.
Based on your replies to my comments, I agree with you a lot. I haven’t been saying that we shouldn’t transition away from car-focused infrastructure and living. Rather, OP’s pipe-dream of banning cars and solving the infrastructure/living issue in 5 years is ridiculous.
He loads up his hand cart with his tools, he walks 500m to the train station, he travels 43.4 km on the train, and then he walks 500m to my house.
Where’s all this rail infrastructure coming from? If cars are banned it will take exponentially longer to complete. What does the population do in the meantime?
I think 5 years is a reasonable span of time to transition out of cars if it's our top priority and we put all our resources into a green new deal.
Just curious, are you a white-collar worker?
That is a very vague term and I don't think my job fits neatly into blue collar or white collar. If you're asking whether I do hands on work at jobsites, the answer is yes.
Yeah, you "went into town/city" rarely. Rural life meant a lot of local sufficiency.
Commuting was not a thing. Only trains started to make that an option.
This comm is literally called fuckcars
Personally, I’m not a fan of government policies that ban things, because a ban is a blunt instrument that often leads to perverse results. Instead, I think that government should internalize economic extenalities, and let the individual incentives work. People who live out in the countryside get massive tax subsidies in the form of all those roads on which only they drive, for the most part.
So, fine, if cars are the only practical transportation, then the people who want to live out there need to pay for their roads with their own money.
(That is the long way to say that I don’t think personal cars out in the countryside are all that practical.)
I don't think you realize how much of rural America is a random exit off the interstate. Which is mostly not local traffic and paid for those who travel it.
We have more than 4,100,000 ~~million~~ miles of highway in the United States, but only 48,756 miles of Interstate highway. That doesn't sound like most places are just off of a random exit, and with one glance of the map, one can see vast swathes of land nowhere near an Interstate highway. However, the system does carry about 1/4 of all highway miles in the country, so that's a lot of lightly-traveled non-Interstate pavement. Furthermore, revenues from highway users does not cover the cost of the Interstate system. The Highway Trust Fund has been shrinking, because the $0.184 per gallon tax hasn't changed since 1993, and the fund is projected to be depleted by 2028. The Federal government has shored it up multiple times with transfers from the general fund. Wisconsin has done the same, I know, and likely quite a few other states that I'm not familiar with, as well. In short, the massive subsidy to automobile travel, especially in rural areas, is not practical, because it is not sustainable.
Yes. One of the problems is the USA is government banning mixed zoning and every tyoe of home except single family home. It can only turn in suburban sprawl and car use.
It turns out that you can do rural spaces bad too. Rural sprawl!
https://www.britannica.com/place/United-States/Settlement-patterns
In reality, the industrial revolution and especially the Green Revolution have ended the rural economy and, with that, the rural society. These places will remain unsustainable, nonviable, slowly dying as people try to move away for better lives or as they remain stuck, dependent on some corrupt local politicians and leaders.
It's a simple matter: once a couple of people with lots of cool machines and work vast tracts of land, the rest of the people in the area become useless.
Rural spaces are, currently, in a transient situation.
If the industrial economy collapses, then, yes, rural spaces will be great again.
I'm not trying to promote some false dichotomy, this is the economy and the people stuck in rural places are usually worse off - and that's for a reason. They will never be better off in this context, it is not happening.
So, instead of trying to prop up a dying place, help the people migrate. End the subsidized fantasy and end the sunk cost loop.
Damn that industrial revolution