this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Fuck Cars

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A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (26 children)

Because as much as trains and buses are great for everyday commuter movement (and having amenities within walking distance is key as well), there's two issues:

  • Changing the infrastructure and zoning of an existing city is much easier said than done. Ripping up concrete, tearing down existing business and homes to increase densification, that's a huge undertaking.
  • Trains never replaced the horse drawn carriage. You can never fully eliminate the need for cars because sometimes you need to move something big like a couch. Even if there's less cars on the road, it'll never be 0, as this also includes things like ambulances, and fire trucks that can't rely on schedules.
[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Actually most cities had rail laid out and working commuter trains. The car manufacturers bought them up and purposely ran them into the ground to increase car sales. (Think Twitter) they were run like that.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Some cities, yes. LA is an example, right? And how they wrecked the street cars.

But not my city. Calgary was built as a stop on the Trans Canadian Railway, and that still exists, and there's an (okayish) light rail train system here that's slowly been built over the years and not torn down. Fully wind powered, too! Edit: our public transit kinda sucks though, I'm not saying we're great. My commute to the office would be over an hour by transit and twenty minutes by car, I'm lucky I work remote.

A majority of North American cities that have grown within the last hundred years (coinciding with cars) were built from the ground up with cars in mind as the primary form of commute.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But not my city. Calgary was built as a stop on the Trans Canadian Railway

Calgary had a pretty extensive Streetcar network around downtown once upon a time.

https://saadiqm.com/2019/04/13/calgary-historic-streetcar-map.html

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Hey neat!

Just goes to show how history gets erased. Hopefully the green line gets built and we'll have even some of this coverage back.

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