this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2026
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Fuck Cars

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Car commuting is borked (lemmy.world)
submitted 16 hours ago by fireweed@lemmy.world to c/fuckcars@lemmy.world
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[–] DisasterTransport@startrek.website 1 points 27 minutes ago

One of the interchange ramps on my commute home that regularly slows to stop and go due to lane changes. There is an on ramp followed by an off ramp a mile later. They share a lane. Cars entering the freeway, cars exiting the freeway, and cars on the freeway all fight for space. And I live in a relatively affluent area (ornrsther a very stratified area) so lots of people have newer model cars with automatic cruise control that quickly fills gaps and and then hard brakes when people enter the freeway. It's a shitshow.

Anyway, I've learned that by exiting the freeway a mile early, entering downtown, doing a full circle on a round about, and reentering the freeway allows me to skip that mile or so of hostile traffic. I log my mileage and I have found the longer route actually burns less fuel, even.

[–] kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world 3 points 1 hour ago

The clover interchange is the most cursed interchange, and also the most common because it's relatively cheap.

[–] fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 0 points 18 minutes ago

Its because of the change in elevation. Map != Territory

[–] saimen@feddit.org 11 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

Isn't there this paradoxical thing that additional roads can lead to longer travel times for everyone? I think it has something to do with things like these. I guess there was a veritasium episode about it.

[–] SkyezOpen@lemmy.world 5 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Induced demand.

[–] manuallybreathing@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

Its similar to this

1865

The Jevons paradox (pronounced /ˈdʒɛ.vənz/, JEV-ənz) or Jevons effect is an economic phenomenon said to occur when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource's use lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in total consumption of that resource.[1][2][3][4] Greater efficiency reduces the amount of the resource needed per application, lowering its effective cost; if demand is sufficiently price elastic, this induces demand, frequently resulting in a net increase of total resource consumption

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[–] wdx@feddit.org 1 points 35 minutes ago

is this any different to the rebound effect, or are they both describing the same phenomenon in different ways?

[–] saimen@feddit.org 5 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

I found it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox

It's more about everyone trying to use their best route which might might be inefficient for the whole system, as OPs example nicely shows.

[–] Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 hours ago

I dont think so, people just tailgate too much so they cant handle a little traffic, just go the long way and skip everyone else in the conga line not realizing a conga line moves very slowly.

[–] jaykrown@lemmy.world 31 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (6 children)

Everyone commuting at the same time is borked. Drive around a 3 AM, there's no traffic. It'd be better if we pushed for shifts that don't NEED to be 9 AM to 5 PM out towards a different time like 6 AM to 2 PM.

What's "borked" is that we all conform to a weird strict standard of all leaving/returning at the same hour.

[–] IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

Years ago I worked with a guy who had a roughly 20 mile commute that was about 19 miles on a major highway that choked during rush hour. He worked from home in the early morning then drove in starting after 10:00. He’d then head home around 6:00 PM or later. He said traffic was almost always light.

He also never listened to traffic reports on TV or the radio. One day he got on the highway and was surprised to find traffic was virtually non-existent. He got about half way to the office to find the highway had been completely shut down due to a fuel tanker that was on fire…

[–] huey_m@piefed.social 10 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

How would you ever coordinate with friends and family though if one is you is always working? This is something I distinctly remember from the bad old days of shift work. It's so much easier when you and your friends can all pretty reliably be expected to be available in the evenings or on the weekend...

I think this is less and less of an issue anyway as telecommuting becomes more and more viable. Now companies fighting that is an arbitrary cultural norm holding us back.

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 13 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Ah, that's the beauty of getting older: eventually you have no friends or family.

[–] huey_m@piefed.social 3 points 3 hours ago

Tabletop gaming has solved that problem for me and might also explain my sensitivity to working around scheduling issues lol.

[–] Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

I mean yeah but we still find a time like once a month we both have a saturday off or something. I think the much bigger inconvenience is always having to miss work no matter what for a doctors appointment or something like that because they're all like 9-5 too.

[–] huey_m@piefed.social 3 points 3 hours ago

That's mostly an issue with poor labor laws not allowing for time off when you should really have it, though.

[–] lazynooblet@lazysoci.al 8 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

to be 9 AM to 5 AM

I know this is a typo but I found it hilarious to think you were recommending 20 hour shifts as an improvement.

[–] jaykrown@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago

Yea it's 4 AM where I am and I haven't slept well for two days in a row due to financial stress.

[–] kamee@lemmy.zip 9 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

I don’t, my day us shifted, so I commute later, instead of like an hour and a half my commute is 50 minutes (which is still a lot for a European) but in exchange I live in my hometown

[–] jaykrown@lemmy.world 5 points 6 hours ago

Yea that's exactly what I'm talking about, you're saving like an hour a day simply by commuting at a slightly different time, AND you're not contributing to peak traffic hours.

[–] mirshafie@europe.pub 4 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

One word answer: families.

[–] BlaestEgnen@feddit.dk 1 points 21 minutes ago

Families is actually usually the reason for people to push for this, as having one parent for sending the child off and one for picking them up is often necessary if both parents wants to work full time

So one goes like 6 to 14 and the other does their 8 to 16 shenanigans

[–] jaykrown@lemmy.world 4 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Yea, schedule is still mostly to blame, just think about how empty the streets are for many hours a night, or very little traffic at 11 AM or 2 PM. This is why I'm doing everything I can to try to avoid getting stuck commuting at normal times. I'd rather have a job that starts at 6 AM and ends at 2 PM.

[–] mirshafie@europe.pub 6 points 6 hours ago (3 children)

Oh, you can drop your toddler off at daycare at 5 AM? Are your tweens fine readying themselves for school without any adults at home?

A car-centric society is the problem. The need to commute by car, both for the kids and the adults, is the problem.

[–] Madzielle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

I worked 6a-6p (3.5 days a week) with a toddler as a single mom, and daycare options were super limited. There was a whole two places available, could only use licenced in-home daycare folks.

I loved the schedule though. I did feel like someone elsecwas raising my kid on work days though.

commuting was easy peasy too

[–] jaykrown@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

So then ask, why does a car-centric society exist in the first place. It stems from the decision of many to live in giant houses, where everyone needs their own back yard. From zoning laws and the need to live somewhere far from work. It's deeply ingrained in the US, which is why remote work is the fastest solution, but many corporations refuse for control.

[–] SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zip 2 points 52 minutes ago

It's what we got, so it must reflect what people wanted, right? Wrong. The reason that the U.S. is full of car-centric suburbia is that local leaders wanted to keep Black people out.

Not even kidding or exaggerating. My house is a little newer, but houses either direction down my street had racially-restricted covenants in the deeds. Many of them still say that you can't sell to Black people, though those clauses were struck down by the courts, and are unenforceable.

But once de jure housing segregation became impossible, they adopted poverty as a proxy: Drive up the cost of houses by making the minimum lot size big, with big lawns. Set the maximum occupancy low, usually single-family, so poor people couldn't double up. Make cars the only way to get around, because that costs more, and the automakers were all on-board. Then, subsidize white families through the original GI Bill, and FHA-backed, low-interest mortgages (a.k.a. red-lining).

This may sound like conspiracy thinking, but it's not. This was explicitly the plan. The leaders said so, in public, even wrote it down. The simple reason that we have big lawns and big cars engrained in American culture: racism.

One might think, yes, but cars were still what Americans wanted, but shockingly, no, we didn't. There were anti-car protests as late as the 1950's! It was a concerted propaganda campaign by the automakers to break down the opposition. They worked hard to re-frame streets as space for cars, and people as the interlopers. (They invented the conceit of jaywalking, for instance, and put out safety films about looking both ways before crossing the street.) Again, we have the memos that they wrote to each other as proof that this was an explicit, deliberate goal. To sell more cars

So, the idea that we have cars because Americans love cars proves that old joke about the KGB agent chatting with the CIA agent about propaganda: Ours is so effective, we no longer even recognize it as propaganda. (That, and we're so alienated from our emotions that many people think that they enjoy driving, despite all of the obvious signs that it makes them miserable.)

[–] Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 hours ago

It stems from auto companies systematically destroying public transit across the country.

[–] nautevenkidding@feddit.org 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

Edit: nvm, apparently I misunderstood the meaning of "tween"

Are your tweens (as in 20-something year olds) living with you and attending middle school? 😄 I would hope they can ready themselves just fine.

Guess you meant children or young teens

[–] architect@thelemmy.club 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

Tween means pre-teen…

[–] DudeWhoYapsTooMuch@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

That's called night shifts, and they actually weigh more heavier on the human psyche because humans are not typically nocturnal. The most thing I can actually state is that peopel should have more HOV Lanes like they do for Houstonians who live outside of Downtown Houston. But the problem is that HOV lanes have people who don't actually know how to drive the exact speed limit and those who do cause accidents.

[–] Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 hours ago

Hov lanes help because all the dumbasses take it and the local lanes become a lot easier to navigate lol

[–] jaykrown@lemmy.world 4 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Not really, night shifts are like 8 PM to 4 AM. I'm talking about a shifted schedule where people leave just 1 hour earlier to avoid the worst of traffic, and thus efficiency improves considerably. Most jobs could be worked from 6 AM to 2 PM instead of 9 AM to 5 PM.

[–] SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zip 1 points 41 minutes ago

Wouldn't work. We're familiar with the idea of induced demand spatially, as in building more lanes generates worse traffic congestion, but it would work temporally, too. Make more road capacity available by using the lanes we have at different times, and they'd just generate traffic congestion at different times.

By the way, I read recently that Houston no longer has a rush hour. It's just congested through the whole day, now.

[–] bryndos@fedia.io 14 points 9 hours ago

Why'd they build those useless blobby green barriers everywhere in the top right? They should clearly have added another lane or two to the red route.

Some woke Joni Mitchell communist plot.

[–] wheezy@lemmy.ml 62 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (5 children)

Ugh, clovers. Giving me trauma to living in San Jose and the clover that merges 101 and 880.

The two most congested and largest freeways. Let's have all the traffic entering have to fight with all the traffic exiting in about 100 ft of road.

You'd literally have people blocking the far left lanes and essentially making "right turns" across the all lanes. I hated them at first. But, honestly, you learn quickly that it's just all lanes of traffic fighting and that's just one method of getting through. It's not even faster because all lanes are just blocked at that point.

Fuck cars. But clover interchanges are a special kind of stupid.

Worst part. I took the Cal train to SF to avoid traffic. But this was a road block between my house and the train station. It was anywhere from 30-60 minutes of driving in rush hour. It was a 5 minute drive when there was no traffic at night.

Just absolute insanity.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, why are clovers so wide-spread over there? We have almost none here.

[–] Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Because we built the highways in one shot in the 50s and have just now started questioning if there are better designs

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 3 points 7 hours ago

Clovers work well if there's like 3 cars using it at any given point in time.

[–] a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world 5 points 10 hours ago

City I used to fly into for work eventually rebuilt an intire intersection (pretty major one for the area) to remove it. Had to be a real bitch to do. It was a huge upgrade.

Wasn't a giant concrete monstrosity, which I'd imagine would be worse.

[–] cerement@slrpnk.net 6 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Texas had to go one better – inverted cloverleafs (stack interchanges) complete with service (frontage) roads

[–] wheezy@lemmy.ml 4 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

Dude, I have driven through Texas. I forgot about those. It's like someone created a merge and thought "who should yield? Eh, we'll never have enough cars for that to matter."

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[–] Canconda@lemmy.ca 29 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

Ah yes the classic, "pro gamer move."

To turn left onto my local stroadway it's often faster to go straight, make a u-turn and a right turn because the left turns are advance green only. The main green is 5x longer so inevitably a bunch of people are just stopped with no cars going through the intersection.

[–] Agent641@lemmy.world 4 points 7 hours ago

I used to go to work along a road that had a two-lane roundabout. One lane turns left and one lane turns right (in this country, we drive on the left for context)

The left lane was always banked up many many cars, but the right lane wasn't.

So I'd go bomb down in the right lane and do a 270 degree turn to end up going left, where the banked-up left-turning cars had to yield to me.

That's a pro gamer move.

[–] fizzle@quokk.au 14 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

It annoys me that there is no fourth ring in the north east corner.

I understand why. You do not need to explain it to me. It's still annoying.

[–] Gloomy@mander.xyz 17 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

Does this help? You better now?

[–] teslekova@sh.itjust.works 8 points 10 hours ago

...yes mum thx mum

[–] HonoraryMancunian@lemmy.world 2 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

I understand why

I don't :(

Edit: I mean I see the other long sweepy road for northbound to turn left, but why is that like that but clovers for the other three directions to turn left?

[–] fizzle@quokk.au 4 points 7 hours ago

I think because it was intended to handle more traffic west and south, so they get long sweepy bends. Those have added lanes so they don't even merge.

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