this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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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.
Sounds like he should've just biked tbh
You should have a little empathy instead of blind car-hate.
If car drivers had empathy there wouldn't be a fourth as many bike deaths every year.
There's going to be some psychopaths no matter what (I have a buddy with permanent injuries from an intentional hit-and-run on his bike) but the bigger problems there are poorly designed roads, improper bike lanes, and lack of enforcement for distracted driving. Empathy doesn't resolve infrastructure failures.
Empathy for car drivers has nothing to do with that.
If people did better in terms of voting, we'd have better designed cities and less drivers. Stop blaming the victims you contentious prick. Bikes also cost money. Something that a lot of people in the south do not have.
Every day in Chicago I see hundreds of people needlessly driving when we have the infrastructure. It's an individuals problem too.
Bikes are dirt cheap. Lol. Would easily pay for itself in saved gas money from the stupid trucks southern people drive
Yea... not in 95 degree heat and 70+ % humidity. He didn't have a shower at the office.
Cut the ac and it solves that issue
The solution is to make everyone uncomfortably hot and sweaty?
Stupid counter points deserve stupid responses.
Bringing up how the weather makes a bicycle a poor choice is not a "stupid counter point".
Yes it is lmao just bike a little slower. Blame you fitness not the bike
How fit you are doesn't determine how much you sweat. Becoming more fit can make some people even sweat more.
Being physically fit causes tasks to be less exerting which can reduce sweat.
No. You can be completely exerted without sweating or completely soaked in sweat without feeling exerted at all. I've experienced both and when I'm in better shape I will sweat more without feeling exerted, while when out of shape I can feel exerted without being sweaty. The amount of energy required to move your body is about the same whether you are fit or not. So the heat production and therefore the sweat production would be the same. Being in better shape makes the body better at producing sweat to cool you down. So more sweat and less exertion.
Dumbest comment I've read in weeks. Congrats!
Stupid counter points deserve stupid responses.
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.
Southern US city?
PNW sadly enough. The fuckin neolibs running the area are using public transit to virtue signal how green they are without actually spending the money to make it actually effective. Gotta look good, so there's multiple 15min bus lines, but it only covers a couple square miles, so nobody wants to pay the $2 when they could just walk.
I almost moved to Seattle a few years ago. I loved Seattle, but I wanted to explore what was outside of Seattle. I could tell pretty quickly that the state of Washington wanted to consolidate it's tax dollars in Seattle as much as possible to the detriment of the rest of the state that wasn't Seattle.
More tax dollars get spent where more of the taxpayers are. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/99/Washington_population_density_2020.png
Beyond that simplification I can't really address your point because it's quite vague. Public transit has been a fight for a long time, in part due to loud anti-tax lobbyists and NIMBYs fighting infrastructure at every step.
You're not wrong. It's also not helped that they look for any excuse to cut service, like they cut service during the '08 crash, took nearly a decade to bring it back to something close to what it was, only for it to get cut back even farther during COVID. There used to be a bus between the train station and the bus station, but that got cut back in '17 for unknown reasons. Heaven forbid they actually help people with their public service.
They say they don't want to expand the lines because nobody rides it, but that's only because their timetables and routes are shit. The first bus goes by my neighborhood at 6:30a and it's always packed to standing with people who start work at 9am. But I guess people being willing to stand on a bus going 50mph is "nobody".
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...