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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Everyone
So here's the thing -- NotJustBikes makes this point frequently -- you can't trust that people are going to do the right thing. This is why painted bicycle gutters do not work. The way to combat drivers hitting people is to design the infrastructure in such a way that it's difficult to do things the wrong and dangerous way. Grade-separated bike paths, level crossings for people not in cars, and lower speeds for cars (forced with narrower roads and traffic calming) are probably the 3 biggest things to contribute to this. From what I saw, Paris has, at the very least, curbs and flexi-posts separating bike lanes which are good starts. They also, admirably, took away some lanes for bikes instead which is GREAT.
When you introduce these, the danger goes down significantly and people feel a lot more comfortable taking their bike places they might normally take a car to. The reason for this is that motorists feel endangered if they drive faster or in a dangerous way. That's what we want, because history and traffic studies have shown time and time again that the only time the majority of drivers change their behaviour is when they feel that doing differently will damage their car.
The final step to ensuring safety is making bike networks that are different from the car networks. Getting people on bikes to their destination faster than cars. Keeping them entirely separate from cars in a lot of their journey. Making cars go around the "long way", which paradoxically decreases traffic and makes driving an all around nicer experience. Decreasing the conflicts between different types of traffic is ideal.
There's lots more besides this, such as pedestrian/cyclist-leading cross signals, Dutch roundabouts which are built in a different way to make biking around them easier and safer, and varying road materials such as brick to make drivers once again feel uncomfortable going fast, there's TONS of solutions that when combined make travelling safer for ALL.
Just asking people to follow laws will never be enough. Luckily, that's not even close to the only option, although it might be hard to imagine for North Americans.
As long as everyone attempts to obey street laws and both cars and bikes respect each other. “Share the road” etc. signal, have lights at night, pass on the left.
Read it again. Asking doesn't work. Infrastructure does.
Wishful thinking.
Not at all. The Netherlands does LITERALLY all of those things.
Yes, well, that is a level of perfection I doubt many countries will ever reach.
Lol. Dutch people are just people. There's already been changes in many North American cities. The Netherlands didn't start out this way, it was just as car centric as every other major city in the 70s.