Fuck Cars
This community exists as a sister community/copycat community to the r/fuckcars subreddit.
This community exists for the following reasons:
- to raise awareness around the dangers, inefficiencies and injustice that can come from car dependence.
- to allow a place to discuss and promote more healthy transport methods and ways of living.
You can find the Matrix chat room for this community here.
Rules
-
Be nice to each other. Being aggressive or inflammatory towards other users will get you banned. Name calling or obvious trolling falls under that. Hate cars, hate the system, but not people. While some drivers definitely deserve some hate, most of them didn't choose car-centric life out of free will.
-
No bigotry or hate. Racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, chauvinism, fat-shaming, body-shaming, stigmatization of people experiencing homeless or substance users, etc. are not tolerated. Don't use slurs. You can laugh at someone's fragile masculinity without associating it with their body. The correlation between car-culture and body weight is not an excuse for fat-shaming.
-
Stay on-topic. Submissions should be on-topic to the externalities of car culture in urban development and communities globally. Posting about alternatives to cars and car culture is fine. Don't post literal car fucking.
-
No traffic violence. Do not post depictions of traffic violence. NSFW or NSFL posts are not allowed. Gawking at crashes is not allowed. Be respectful to people who are a victim of traffic violence or otherwise traumatized by it. News articles about crashes and statistics about traffic violence are allowed. Glorifying traffic violence will get you banned.
-
No reposts. Before sharing, check if your post isn't a repost. Reposts that add something new are fine. Reposts that are sharing content from somewhere else are fine too.
-
No misinformation. Masks and vaccines save lives during a pandemic, climate change is real and anthropogenic - and denial of these and other established facts will get you banned. False or highly speculative titles will get your post deleted.
-
No harassment. Posts that (may) cause harassment, dogpiling or brigading, intentionally or not, will be removed. Please do not post screenshots containing uncensored usernames. Actual harassment, dogpiling or brigading is a bannable offence.
Please report posts and comments that violate our rules.
view the rest of the comments
@HiddenLayer555 This is a messed up era. When I was a kid from kindergarten and up I walked to school alone. It wasn't a super long distance, about six blocks each way but it was unsupervised, and that was the norm back then. What has happened that it has become so dangerous that kids need to be bussed to school even if they're three blocks from the school?
A vicious cycle happened. 24 hour news reports every child abduction basically in the country, making parents feel that they're more common than they are. Kids freedom starts getting restricted. There's less kids outside, so parents are less comfortable letting their own kids out, and kids have less incentive to go out. At the same time, the number of indoor entertainment options explodes. As they stop being seen outside, the world adjusts to life without them.... Less crosswalks, less bikeable areas, less parks. With so few kids being outside the house, the parents who still encourage their kids to play outside or go do things become the minority and law enforcement fucks with them accordingly, as in this story, making parents even more reluctant to let their kids out of their sight.
There's some resistance to this. Free Range Kids comes to mind. People see the problem and want to do something. But as you can see even in this thread, people have so accepted "kids should stay inside supervised at all times" as the norm that it's an uphill battle.
@psivchaz I suspect this has something to do with the obesity epidemic.
Car-centric society has made it damn near impossible to walk.
Those six blocks you used to walk have all had their lanes widened into stroads, one converted into a thoroughfare, and no attention was given to pedestrian infrastructure so crosswalks, sidewalks or bike paths are almost non-existent unless you're within 2 blocks of the school.
We have literally built most of our cities, or redesigned older cities that used to be pedestrian friendly and walkable, into a wasteland of asphalt and concrete designed exclusively for personal vehicles.
@Crankenstein Obviously you don't live in Shoreline where we spend millions on unused bike lanes where the roads narrow and potted.
If people aren't using the bike lanes it's usually because they're shit bike lanes.
@ebolapie They are at least six feet wide made from concrete that is porous so water doesn't accumulate on top.
That sounds expensive. How many roads have such bike lanes? Hypothetically, if you wanted to replace a trip to the grocery store, how useful would they be?
@ebolapie They aren't. It's hard carrying six bags of groceries on a bicycle and not going to waste time and energy going daily. Hypothetically it would get me within half a mile of a grocery store I don't like, the one I do like is seven miles away.
Given the right bicycle it's pretty easy, but that's beside the point. The question is why don't people use bike lanes that seem pretty nice on the surface of it, right? There has to be a reason other than "bikes suck and nobody wants to ride them," because in some places people go everywhere on bicycles and they love it.
So what, really, is the main difference between those places and your town, if it's not the quality of the bike lanes?
@ebolapie I suspect the weather has a lot to do with it. Kind of sucks biking in a down pour.
I dunno. It rains in Portland too but every time I'm there I see loads of people on bikes.
@ebolapie People in Portland are special.
Cool story bud