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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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:
Walking is great. There's so much stuff to see and interact with. It's better for businesses, too. Jacobs had this figured out in like the 1960s.
Good article.
I miss walking to supermarket with my shopping cart and walking to the restaurants downtown. I really need to move out of this car-centric hellhole
Most drivers are more car than person:
Truth is, though, all I would have to do is get back in the shared car that still sits in my drive, and I’d be on the other side of the divide again. I do it every month or two – to reach some awkward location – and I’ve noticed that at first, I feel terribly anxious about the fragile bodies of pedestrians and cyclists, and almost ashamed to be blocking up their streets. And then, if I’m honest, my consideration begins to evaporate, and I slip back into seeing the world through a driver’s eyes again.
But the greater the intervals between driving, the more strongly I feel I don’t want to see the world through driver’s eyes any more. And not just because it’s dangerous, bound up with the fossil fuel industry, and about the worst thing we can do for the climate, but also because, for me at least, driving is a time-consuming and meaningless experience. In fact, the word “experience” is a stretch – I’ve started to wonder if it is more like the absence of an experience.
It is crazy how angry car drivers can get. Saw someone screaming out their window at another driver today over some pointlessly small inconvenience.
I pointed and laughed.
When cyclists and pedestrians accidentally inconvenience each other we just laugh and give a little wave. I think once you remove the cars from the equation, which removes the "I could kill you at any moment by depressing my foot" vibe from the encounter, it's a lot easier to be pleasant to each other.
You're right. Often, the primary emotion is fear when something goes wrong when driving. But it gets pushed out as anger.
The other factor is that driving is a lot more frustrating than walking or cycling, at least in the city. Stop-and-go causes stress to build up because you feel like you don't have control over your actions most of the time. That doesn't happen with walking.
There's a scene from the original Gundam that I think about a lot in this context.
The MC, having just gotten inside his giant death mech for the first time, is ordered to shoot some enemies (who had been trying to kill him just a moment prior) fleeing the battle. He couldn't do it.
The next fight that breaks out, those same enemies are back, in their own giant death machines, and the MC stops to think to himself "this is much easier, they don't look like humans now". Then he starts firing his laser.