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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I get the hate on trucks because they’ve become a luxury item/status symbol instead of a vehicle used for its utility. Arbitrary weight limits are probably not the best way to handle it though. Cars are heavier than I think you realize. Safety requirements and other government mandates have driven the average vehicle weight up over time too.
Every mini van on the market is over 4000 some pushing 5000. Most mid-sized sedans are over 3500 and probably all full sized. Mazda 3 is a compact sedan and tops out at ~3400. My mother’s 2019 Lincoln Continental is admittedly on the larger side and weighs in at ~4500 and the entire car is under 5 feet tall. Doing a quick search on a 2024 Tesla model 3 is 3862-4054 pounds. Ram Promaster 1500(think plumber van) start at about 4500 and go up. That doesn’t account for all the stuff those ultimately end up holding too. The sight lines in front of you on those vans are impeccable though.
I’m of the opinion that vehicle registration should be by mass. I think that adding extra for use case and for expected hauling is also reasonable. We can allow the gas tax to slowly fade into a carbon tax while making registration be both the way we fund roads and a progressive tax on those who do more damage to them. We can even have different vehicle categories with different weight costs for incentives.
Cars didn't used to weigh that much and the safety regulations can still exist, it just requires car manufactures to fix their safety issues without adding more weight ultimately making everyone less safe.
A 1990 Ford Ranger weighed <3000 lbs.
A 90’s Ranger didn’t even have airbags let alone side curtain airbags. One of my 2012 cars had seven airbags just for the driver. Also ridiculous stuff like backup cameras being mandatory since May 1, 2018 which is why every car has a screen in it now. All that stuff has just been slowly adding weight a bit at a time.
NHTSA keeps changing/adding crash tests. So if manufacturers want to keep those 5 star ratings then they need to reinforce or redesign the chassis to obtain it which can add a non trivial amount of weight as well.
One of my vehicles they welded in ‘crash bars’ in front of and behind the front tires to improve its crash testing.
Not to mention being a rear wheel drive and a manual cut down a lot of weight.