this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
533 points (89.0% liked)
Fuck Cars
9804 readers
209 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The "race to the bottom" by getting bigger and bigger cars (which should also be much more heavily taxed, but aren't).
Let's make the cars much bigger then, so big that you can stand upright and walk through it! When they're so big that it makes no sense for Joe Schmoe to drive it, let's hire drivers for them. Since it makes no sense for every household to hire their own drivers, let's pool all the houses in the neighbourhood to use the same Big Unit Suv. Since nobody needs to be in the same places at the same times, let's run this Big Unit Suv on a schedule, where it'll be at specific places in specific time frames. To speed it up a little, let's redesign the doors to optimise for being able to get in and out quickly.
I just invented a bus, didn't I?
Attach a few of those "buses" (lol such a silly name) together in line. And this - train? I dunno - long thing of "buses", is so big, we should keep people who aren't using this "train" (I'll workshop that, so weird) from getting too close, maybe it runs in a specific kind of lane of its own!
I think this could work!
Let's give your Big Unit SUV its own special roads too. Then we could attach multiples of them together to be able to fit even more people in them. We could then run electrical wires over the special roads so they wouldn't have to carry their own power source around.
Nah, it could never be done.
Nah, doesn't sound too ridiculous. Now, if we could expect the Big Unit SUVs to never leave the special roads, we could, for instance, use a special design of road and special design of road-vehicle interface that makes the entire thing as efficient as possible. I heard that using a hard material like steel in both the road and the wheels is a good starting point, plus it has a ton of carrying capacity, so you can make a lot of weight rest on two narrow strips of the material. Also, if these Big Unit SUVs are gonna be chained up together forever, can we make it possible that people could walk from one Big Unit SUV to the next without leaving the chain of Big Unit SUVs?
Nono, bigger cars are used to transport more important things, they should be subsidised.
The hit to society would be too great if we allowed all those fragile egos to shatter without their precious protective shells, consisting of multiple tons of gas-guzzling steel.