Fuck Cars
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:
view the rest of the comments
Bus lanes and trams are a symbol of “communism” and car is a sign of “freedom” until you realize that the ultimate freedom is choosing to walk, bike, take transit, or drive to your destination.
Well, that’s a fucking problem. Don’t take a job in which you are expected to use a personal vehicle for work purposes. Work provided vehicle and submit receipts for gasoline. Insurance company won’t like it. You won’t like how fast your car goes through tires and then dies. Etc.
I still don't get truck culture.
I grew up kinda out in the sticks, fair number of religious nuts and racists.
You know what they'd say about trucks, in the late 90s?
If you need a truck, like, really actually need a truck, you get it and use it only for actually hauling shit, or towing something.
Then you have a sedan or similar for everything else.
Like, ... the yokels of 20/30 years ago would all be laughing at the yokels of today.
I don't get how these people can be this aggresively stupid, its literally an insult to their 'heritage', fucked up as that heritage may or may not be.
It's masculine insecurity. Our culture doesn't produce men who are secure in their gender identity so they have to constantly proofs it to themselves and others all the time. Once you see it, you realize it's the root cause from everything from truck nuts to looksmaxxing
They would! I remember my gear head uncles scoffing and laughing at the extended cab in the 90s.
They would absolutley laugh at these yuppies. Now some of them are the yuppies.
its wild.
Yep I remember that too, specifically
Extended cab? Ridiculous. Like 'hwaaaak ptooie' ridiculous.
Whatchu gonna do with that?
Take your wife down to the feed and seed, ask her for help liftin bags into the bed?
Ahhahahahah!
Swear to god I heard nearly exactly that at some point.
I feel like the legality of not reimbursing him for using his personal vehicle for work purposes is fairly dubious though I'd be lying if I said I knew the specifics of the laws there.
Employer: taps head They're a contractor and I don't pay then enough to live.
I think in his case he's salary as a regional manager. Contractor is a whole other thing.
I can only see so much of the article so I don't know where he's based, but I know in some places the reimbursement is mandatory. Per IRS mileage reimbursement is currently $0.725/mile. Working in hospice I drive to patients homes with my supplies full time, which cuts me a check for about $300-450 mo, which more than covers gas.
I actually just switched to a hybrid so since reimbursement stays the same, it'll start paying for the car a well.
EXACTLY. GIVE A CHOICE!!
I myself am a car person but still. Give us a choice. I would be ALL FOR banning cars in our downtown area and just having to bike walk or bus to get there from farther away. Cars ruin cities.
We need them in rural. But thats far fewer people.
Given the cost of fuel, a bus pass for me (if I still had to commute, I work from home now) for a month is now just over $800/mo.
6 years ago, that was $375/mo.
I don't think the issue is limited to car drivers, I suspect more than a few folks who took public transit with me are looking at a pretty impactful monthly cost.
Yeah. I feel very lucky to have moved to a place where I have an electric train and an electric bus system powered by hydroelectric.
Oh wait, climate change means our glacial flow is 12% of the typical rate and the province is announcing a datacenter construction plan?
Well fuck me too I guess.
Trains. Overhead wire. Green energy. Build it now or suffer later.
We had electric buses with overhead wires in São Paulo in the 80s.
The US had electric interurban railroads in the Rockies a hundred years ago.
It can happen very fast.
No I'm sorry I'm informed that trains do jot ql4eady exist and so cannot exist
I agree.
That does nothing to address the current (rapidly rising) commuting costs happening now, though.
We need Americans to feel the pain hard enough they screen for trains
Would be wonderful.
Unfortunately the time to do it was years ago. Obviously the next best time is to start now, but it will be years before results and that doesnt help those impacted now.
We need to Americans to come to psychologically distrust driving.
Way too much land, way too little education, and way too much selfishness to allow for that.
What.... the fuck....? Where do you live that this costs 800 FREAKING DOLLARS???
Northeast US.
The bus stop by me also was shut down, so if I were to do it now, I'd have to drive 25min east. The parking is limited though, so either its pay someone for a monthly parking spot, get there early enough (5:50am, after that its unlikely you'll find a spot), or get dropped off. Or take the risk of a parking ticket I suppose.
Or I could drive 15 min west, away from where I'd be going, and pay an hourly rate for parking. About $25/day, or a monthly cost of ~$250 (last I checked with someone who goes this route). It'll add another $30/mo to the commuter pass for the bus as well.
(EDIT: Just checked out of curiosity - and no more monthly parking there, its now only flat rate of $2.50/hr. There are other lots a block or two away in a few directions that may still offer monthly, but I couldn't say.)
If I drive for about 30 minutes, I can get to a train station where its $400/mo, though the parking cost there is higher at $300/mo, my cousin does that ride but his wife drops him off.
These are not uncommon costs for commuting into major cities.
It been a lonnngg time, but in 2008 a 30 day bus pass was $45 in connecticut. brb, gonna go look it up.
https://www.cttransit.com/fares $63 bucks
edit edit, I see you are accounting for.. your parking too. well, thats.. different.
In 2008, I think the train pass for where I was then would have been $65/mo
Now that pass is... (Checking).... Oof, $100 for the weekly, $295 for the monthly.
on a bus? what state?
idk why a train is so much more, I think I am comparing apples to oranges here, apologies, ill hush now.
I was just commenting on the train pass I had at that time with the last comment.
And NJ. NJT doesnt run everywhere (honestly it runs very little outside of a few counties IMO), there are companies that service a large portion of the state as NJT registered operators.
I took mass transit the moment I went more than a few miles (of course it also jumped to a 30mi each way commute at that point), but ive been pure WFH for a long while now.
That said, the increases in bus costs of late directly caused by the increases in fuel costs are astounding. A lot of people are going to be hurt by this.
My main point in this thread has been simple - its not just car drivers impacted by fuel costs. Commuters taking mass transit are already being hit by it, and its going to get worse.
That is horrifying. I can get a monthly transit pass in my city for $88, which is actually down from 10 years ago, when it was $100.
This is basically it.
I saw a post the other day that argued to the conservative mind there must be an underclass. There must be poor people whose lives suck. If you try to make things good for everyone, you're going against nature and will just make things bad for everyone.
Thus good public transit is bad. If different classes of people all mingle then it's like mixing your food up on the plate and that's just wrong!
They really are like children