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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Train or car. Car free mostly refers to inner city trips, for special occasions it's totally fine to use a car (e.g. moving, buying something big, a weekend trip, etc)
Bus, ebikes, other types of electric assist stuff, walking. Crazy steep slopes do put a limit on exclusively human powered mobility (i.e. walking and cycling), but those places are incredibly rare.
A walkable city features amenities close by, plenty of benches to rest, and a solid bus system. There are absolutely no issues for people with restricted mobility. This applies to people with disabilities as well btw.
In fact I would turn that question around: how do elders deal with the requirement to drive a car to get groceries, etc? Isn't that like super duper dangerous?
Thank you for your detailed reply. I was under the impression that cars and buses were out of the question. This clarifies a lot. Ebikes and electric devices, however, sound to me like something futuristic, probably because I live in latinamerica.
Steep-slope places are not the norm almost anywhere, but they are not really that scarce here. We probably would need to make some technological catch up.
About elders driving, well, it's common that they have cars although they can't/shouldn't drive them. Some younger ones can step in and volunteer, usually family members, but not only. An arrangement can always be made when young people hardly owns a car.
There are kits enabling you to convert a muscle bike (push bike) into an e-bike. If you get one with a torque sensor, then it will detect how hard you push on the pedals and drive the motor proportional to that force. So you still must pedal but it amplifies your effort which preserves the natural feel and control of pedaling. It essentially makes the hills go away; a hilly place becomes a flat place.
That sounds cool. I'd still prefer to take a bus to feel safer in my car-centric town, but one can imagine living somewhere you just fire up your EPV and be gone. I reckon it requires very engaged local authorities.
No worries Switzerland and Austria have you covered. Gondolas are only suitable for people and lighter loads, but funiculars can carry a ton of weight and can be built quite steep indeed, Chile has quite a few of them. In less extreme cases there's good old rack railways. Funiculars are actually the oldest type of public transport in the world, invented before the industrial revolution, back then operated by water power (fill a tank in the top car, it will pull the bottom car up), and rack rail isn't exactly new. The oldest were built to get stuff up and down from castles. Gondolas of the Mi Teleficero type are quite a bit newer and can reach quite impressive throughput numbers as the gondolas are unhooked from the wire in stations to make it possible to have a fast wire while not having to sprint when getting on (usually they move about at like 1/2 walking pace in the stations but you can also stop them completely for the elderly).
Judging by some folks I've seen driving around with oxygen tubes in their noses: They just drive. And, yes, it is dangerous.