I’d like to say it doesn’t matter, but this is how we ended up with so much fake news in the US.

We ended up with a lot of fake news in the US for a lot of reasons, but I don't think Fuck Cars is likely to turn into a launchpad for the country's first left-wing authoritarian.

In other words, I think people are getting all jazzercized up about something that's essentially meaningless. But that's life too I guess. 🤷

EDIT: This country is very strange. People do nothing about right-wingers going on shooting sprees, but someone posting a slightly annoying image about how big trucks have gotten and everyone forms a line to decry it for "balance" reasons.

The problem comes when it's an echo chamber. I can get on board with reducing car dependence, that America is oversaturated with SUVs and trucks that are unnecessarily large, and that bike infrastructure should be improved. FuckCars, however, then devolves into purity cycles where perfectly reasonable things are hated. This is especially true for people who have no experience at all with how people use their trucks for work. That then spills over into all other communities in the vicinity, and then you get dumb flamewars as people call out their bullshit rather than swallowing it whole.

Expressing frustration is fine. The thing I really have a problem with is how misplaced it is in this case. Even if every big pickup truck (and big SUV; why not?) somehow magically transformed into a compact sedan tomorrow, we'd still have the same shitty car-dependency problem we have now. We'd still have the same number of cars demanding the same wide roads and huge parking lots, destroying walkability, making our cities insolvent, fucking up our health*, etc. Nothing would've actually improved in any meaningful way what-so-fucking-ever!

The arrogance of space of all cars is the thing we need to be frustrated about, and the inherent pretense of these anti-truck posts -- that of redirecting criticism of all cars to one particular type of car -- is at best a useless unintentional distraction, or at worst, deliberate disinformation designed to sap attention from efforts towards things like road diets and parking reform.

TL;DR: If you're bitching about specifically big trucks, you're not bitching about cars in general -- and we should be bitching about cars in general!

(* That one's a trifecta, BTW: lung disease from pollution, obesity from being sedentary, and poor mental health from road rage and loss of "third places" due to Euclidean zoning!)

These are work vehicles, bought by people who do work.

The amount of pavement princesses out there says otherwise.

“These monstrosities” will exist in anything short of a significantly de-growthed society. OP’s picture is not typical of an F650. They are usually converted to flat bed towing, refrigerated box trucks, utility cranes, ambulances, and dump trailers. If you don’t believe me, well, here’s a listing of used ones. Notice how many have anything like the original bed.

I wrote "F650 pickup truck." I also, pointedly, did not write "F650 chassis-cab commercial vehicle" or anything similar. I generally choose my words pretty carefully when writing these comments.

Maybe you should make sure you read what a person actually wrote before falling over yourself to post a dishonest strawman argument.

That's the issue. It is like saying we could get rid of fire departments if we installed fire suppression systems in every home, then we get rid of fire departments.

We need to make mass transit better, once that happens people will stop driving as much by choice.

Go check out what happened when Buffalo NY built its rail. That is a perfect example and the entire downtown died.

I think you're scapegoating the rail and the real problem was that declining rust belt cities just suck.

See also: https://www.buffalorising.com/2007/10/what-really-killed-downtown-retail/

Glad you agree. They aren’t safe and rarely a good option. Forcing cars to make sharp turns and pedestrians to walk longer distances in the road to cross.

No, everything you wrote is wrong: roundabouts are relatively safe because they minimize path conflicts, forcing cars to make sharp turns (and thereby slow down) is a good thing, and although pedestrians walk longer distances around the edge of the roundabout, the crosswalks themselves are generally shorter and thus safer.

The reasons I think roundabouts are overrated have nothing to do with safety and everything to do with lack of space-efficiency and how the good performance for cars comes at the expense of other street users' convenience (e.g. making pedestrians walk farther).

Congestion taxes. They don’t impact somewhat wealth-off people like me since we can adjust our schedule. They punish poor people who can’t. It isn’t even regressive, it is reverse-progressive.

Oh, that's what you were talking about? Never mind then; I agree with you on that point.

Discouraging people from driving in downtowns needs to be accomplished by physically choking the traffic off with road diets and traffic calming etc. "Lexus lanes" not only create unjust privilege, they also fail at reducing capacity since they're just shifting the usage from one cohort of drivers to another.

Gentrification and white flight. I suspect you knew damn well what I was referring to but enjoy backwards arguments

No, I really didn't. What confused me was your use of the word "force." Nobody's forcing upper middle class people to do a damn thing. If they're moving to impoverished areas and gentrifying them, it's because they saw an opportunity they liked and took it. Conversely, if they're engaging in white flight, they're being "forced" by nothing but their own bigotry (which obviously doesn't count).

The upper middle class people have all the power in the situations you're talking about. Painting them as somehow the victims of their own choices is laughable.