this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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Fuck Cars
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To some people the question of "where do you put the cars?" is more important than the question "where do we house the people?"
It's bizarre.
I'm convinced that to many Americans, there's no difference, and that their mental image of a person includes four wheels. (And that a human without a car is not a person, as in, not deserving of moral comsideration.)
I'm convinced that many people who've never lived in the southern USA have absolutely no concept of how viable public transportation doesn't fucking exist, yet housing is typically 30-40 minutes from where business center locations are.
Yeah that's a stupid way to build towns and cities, and should change. But the south tends to vote Republican, so that's just going to make everything worse. (Not that Democrats are amazing, but it's like squares and rectangles.)
The image is of a dense urban area though, not some southern bumfuck town
Do people typically live that close to where they work though? All my coworkers live out of town, 30 min to 2 hours away by car.
That sounds like it has an easy solution.
If you’re suggesting mass transit, it’s double the time if available.
Double is generous.
When I lived in Orlando in either 2012 or 2013, there was a guy that lived in Apopka and it took him 2.5 hours each way to get to work in East Orlando using public transportation. He legit spent 5 hours of his day commuting for about a year while he was having some financial troubles and his car wasn't working.
Otherwise, that's typically around 30 minutes in a car.
I'm suggesting not buying 2 hours from place of work.
That would be most ideal but that’s not how things usually work.
Weakest excuse ever.
What's that?
Never been to Atlanta, Charlotte, Jacksonville, Tampa, or any city in the south huh?
You're pretty much who my comment was about. My comment wasn't in response to a picture, it was in response to uninformed people.
There's a TON of people in the south that cannot escape for financial reasons. They'd much rather not have to drive everywhere. I'm 100% against victim shaming, which is what I took SwingingTheLamp's comment to be.
You say that like the reason for those things isn’t because of the design of the cities. It is exactly advocating for the car centric design that keeps it car centric down here. Sincerely somebody who’s lived in the south their whole life but doesn’t think cars should define your life
Yeah, I have to spend two hours on the bus when it takes half an hour to drive downtown. They have great bus service if you're within walking distance of the downtown area, but until earlier this year the last bus home left the station at 4p. Now the last bus home leaves at 6p.
I haven't owned a car in a while, and I cannot even find a job because employers don't want to work around the useless bus schedule.
Would a scooter, ebike, or commuter motorcycle like a used NC750X work?
Sort of? I used to have a regular bicycle, but the route with the least grade is also the truck route with no shoulders on parts of it. I quit biking after I got run off the road by a semi, so I think the main problem is just a lack of infrastructure.
Correct, but until you can fix the larger systemic issue, a 2-wheeler helps shield you from the monthly cost, stress of finding parking, traffic, etc when living in a carcentric hell.
And that forces you to treat people without cars as sub-human? No sympathy, or even empathy, for people who have to navigate such a landscape without one?
What does your comment have to do with what I said? I genuinely do not understand what you are trying to correlate here...
to be fair there is enough vacant homes already in a lot of the metropolises around the world. just poorly distributed.
There is a lot of vacant houses. When you narrow that down to "long term vacancies in metropolises" the number goes down , and by no small amount
so its more of a fucklandlords and fuckthehousingbubble than fuckcars really, if we look at it close enough
No, absolutely fuck cars, cars are worse than landlords... Might be a hot take but the cars and urban spread that cars allow do more damage than landlords
while i certainly think there are far more cars distributed amongst people than needed, i don't think they should go alltogether, as they still have their usecases (certainly not a personal everyday mode of transport tho). Housing problem, on the other hand, is more immediate:
if i go to a new city, i won't give a single smallest flying fuck about cars, if i won't be able to find myself a place to live.
So yeah, absolutely fuck the landlords and the real estate agencies.
More immediate issue isn't necessarily a less important or less worse issue. Cars have much greater long term impacts on the ability of a population to be restrained by debt, damage to the environment, and hurt smaller economic ecosystems that are important for robust cities and towns.
I'm not saying don't fuck the landlords I'm saying they're a less important issue.
let's head back to my example:
how tf am i supposed to care about cars if i don't have anywhere to live? A roof above your head is at the literal bottom of the Maslow pyramid, as it's a basic need. People won't care about anything unless those are satisfied.
So yes, homes are more important issue even if cars is your priority
This isn't about a hypothetical where you don't have x or y, or about you personally in a hypothetical. it's about what are larger issues at the present.
Having a home is more important. The housing crisis is considerably less of an issue as of yet compared to car centric sprawl, even though they are very related issues.
Housing is also much easier to fix. It doesn't require decades of infrastructure, it requires changing a few zoning restrictions here and there, and some small encouragement for larger multi family apartments
if it's such an easy fix, why won't we fix it first, so that more people would be able to join the anti-car movement? I never said whe should have x or y tho. Just that we should have x before having y.
Because a large portion of the population has a vested interest in not having more housing. Not just the rich. But the upper middle/middle class nimbys as well.
There's related issues, fixing both together is the most efficient path. Turn parking lots into housing. Take garages out of plots and you have another spot for a house. But people don't want increased density. People need to have room to not have a car if you want to increase density to better levels.
Am i supposed to WALK? What is wrong with people?