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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@mondoman712 I can't read the article at the moment as it's paywalled. I assumed it was yet another repeat of the Emissions Analytics BS since there seem to be a few about. If there is new, credible, peer reviewed work on this, then that's a good thing and I'm sorry for dismissing it.
I believe there is a risk of perfect vs good. A small number of people will need cars long term for various reasons (equipment and some disabilities). Cars, vans, buses, and residual road freight, will need to be electric.
But most of what we need to do to get to that point i.e. making cities more accessible, safer, etc, will take significant time, construction work, political challenges and social attitude changes. We will need to change attitudes to cars, attitudes to women, BAME and disabled people. We will need to build a lot more housing (bikes don't work if you can't afford to live nearby). We will need to build segregated cycle lanes, move retail businesses around, and very possibly increase density. Carrots and sticks work, and the transformation of e.g. Paris is inspiring, but as with all such changes it's hard-fought; shopkeepers will oppose even simple easy wins like converting on-street parking to bike lanes. And many people have good reason to fear public transport (of course, many people don't have a choice; the assumption that the important people / the majority drive is a problem in itself). Making cities accessible to disabled people with mobility issues will also take time and a lot of work. For long haul, new train lines take decades.
My point is while we may be able to reduce miles driven by 30% or so with improved bus services, getting to 80% will probably take decades.
We can't ban cars overnight, but there's a lot we *can* do relatively quickly (especially on buses), and a lot that we need to make a start on.
I would not be surprised if tyres were responsible for a significant fraction of the microplastics problem. Which is just another reason why a society with fewer cars would be a better one, although it should be possible to improve tyres relatively quickly as there hasn't been much work on them until recently and they have to be replaced regularly anyway.
Given the difficulties getting to a non-car-obsessed society, and the needs of the developing world, the peak number of EVs might well be similar to the number of cars now. Degrowth is vital but not a magic bullet any more than EVs are. Degrowth is part of an overarching socialist framework, but while some demand reduction measures can be implemented quickly, many will take longer.
Audiences change. People *will* weaponise such claims to discourage *any* action.
Anyway, thanks, and good luck.