this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2025
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Fuck Cars

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A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!

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New York City

Bronx councilwoman Kristy Marmorato was running for reelection

Kristy Marmorato fought to create more parking. In fact, she wanted developers to build parking even if it increases housing costs:

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2024/08/07/bronx-metro-north-rezoning-parking-mandates

She was defeated last night by Shirley Aldebol.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge's entire City Council was up for reelection.

John Hanratty was running for office

https://www.hanrattyforcambridge.com/

John was a leading member of a group that called itself “Cambridge Streets For All” which unsuccessfully sued Cambridge to stop bike lane projects.

John Hanratty was defeated last night.

In fact, 7 out of the 9 Cambridge City Council members received endorsements from Cambridge Bike Safety, the volunteer organization that's working to improve bike infrastructure 🎉

https://mass.streetsblog.org/2025/11/05/bike-safety-slate-wins-strong-majority-in-cambridge-city-council-election

Boston, Massachusetts

Mayor Michelle Wu, who has been taking bold positions to expand the city's bike network and public transit was reelected 🥳

Catherine Vitale and Shawn Nelson were both running for Boston city council. They pledged to defend cars and "eliminate bike lanes" during their campaigns

*"They're trying to make it undesirable to drive cars!!" warned Vitale at a meeting.

Both Catherine Vitale and Shawn Nelson were defeated 👏

Virginia

Winsome Earle-Sears was running for governor.

She wanted to get rid of the car tax:

This was the dumbest tax plan EVER.

  • Virginia residents who own a car get millions in cuts 💰

  • Virginia residents who are car-free get nothing

She was defeated last night 👏

North Carolina

The referendum to raise Charlotte sales tax by 1% to pay for public transit improvements won 52.13% of the vote 🎉

The tax increase is expected to raise more than $19.4 billion over 30 years.

It will help significant increase the number of buses.

It will also pay for the completion of the Red Line

Thank you to those who voted 🙏🙏🙏

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[–] ButteryMonkey@piefed.social 6 points 1 month ago

I’m not a huge fan of sales tax being used to pay for transit because that still disproportionately impacts poorer people, but it’s a good start, and maybe when they have solid public transit and people like and use it more, they can transition to a better funding source like taxing the rich more, or increasing property taxes on second+ homes or something.

Overall great progress. I would love to someday have public transit near me that’s good enough to get rid of my car. I don’t live in a big urban area tho so it’s gunna be a hot minute (even tho trains pass 4 blocks from me every hour of every day.. we can’t ride those because reasons..)

[–] TaTTe@lemmy.world -2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Surely you meant $19.4 million, not billion?

[–] halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Probably not. The amounts were talking, and the time frames are pretty big.

A quick search shows statewide retail sales in Q4 2023 was $60.9B. So extrapolating that out, that's $243.6B for the state in a year. If we assume Charlotte is about 1/5 of the State's retail footprint, which seems reasonable for the largest city, with over double the population of the 2nd largest... we get $48.7B. Then 1% of those sales comes to $487M. Multiply that by 40 years and you get... $19.4 Billion. And that's just using numbers I found with a quick Google search and basic math.

[–] TaTTe@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

Right, OP edited the post to now include "over 30 years" which makes more sense. I originally thought it was per year, in which case the amount seemed off.