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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If people are driving too fast on a road then the road is badly designed. Speed cameras are a bandage covering up the problem of shit infrastructure.
Better infrastructure would be great, but there will always be places where you will need to drive slower than the designed speed, and drivers should be able to follow that if they're going to be allowed to pilot a large and dangerous vehicle.
I mean so what's to be done then. I agree on "redesign pretty much every street or road" but like, until then, it's just a great big free for all?
If the road is dangerously designed, close the road.
Ah yes, let's just close all the roads in the country until we get that sorted out, great idea.
I'm not sure if you're being serious here
Why not? It's obviously a huge hazard and people can't be trusted to use it safely. So for the public health and safety this road should be closed. This also means the poor council doesn't need to maintain this road anymore saving money in the long run. Maybe a train could even replace where the road was increases throughput and safety for everyone.
Because that's hardly what can be considered a realistic solution. Again, not against it, but what, are you gonna close down like 90% of roads? Only some of them, if so, which ones, and how is stuff handled on the ones that remain open?
Not all roads, just roads that "require" speed cameras.
So when's that the case or not
I'm sure your plan will be popular with the motoring public that anti speed camera rhetoric is trying to appeal to.
Traffic calming and speed cameras are carrot and stick in lowering the speed of roads. Lowering the design speed of roads alone is never going to stop drivers in a hurry from driving dangerously fast. People aren't deterred from commiting crimes by heavy penalties, they are deterred by the chance of getting caught. Automatic traffic enforcement raises that chance to 100%.
Why wouldn't it? If drivers feel unsafe speeding down a road then they simply won't speed, rendering speed cameras unnecessary. If you see a speed bump ahead of you aren't you going slow down?
Speed cameras are applicable to all roads, from the 30 km/h residential street to the 140 km/h highway. Speed cameras are also self-funding and thus have a negative cost. Fines collected by speed cameras can be used to finance road redesign and traffic calming measures.
It's not like that in every country. For example, speed cameras in Italy can't be placed in 30 km/h zones
They can also be used to kickback to the politician and the lobbyist who work for the company that profits from them.
Please explain to me where the money to redesign and rebuild like half the city's roads is going to come from if not from a transitional period of speed cameras.
Say, why are you such a virulent opponent of speed cameras? Do you find yourself to be a chronic speeder?
I don't drive. But when when did you stop beating your wife?
Lol the absolute state of speed camera opposers
If you don't drive, you have literally no reason to oppose speed cameras. Speed cameras reduce the negative externalities of cars at literally no cost to you. If you don't drive, you cannot get a speed ticket.
Also, for the China fans out there, consider how the widespread implementation of automatic traffic enforcement cameras in China that do things from watching if you're speeding, to watching if you're driving in multiple lanes at once, to watching if you're wearing a seatbelt have massively improved driving conditions and reduced road chaos in China. Automatic traffic enforcement makes driving better.
Well yeah, because China is a functional country that wants to actually decrease traffic violations.
The point of American cameras is to raise funds. That's why there's no immediate feedback for when you get a ticket. They don't want people to connect their driving to consequences, they want the consequences to be distant with no immediate impact.
All it would take is for traffic cameras to flash drivers when they get a ticket. It'd be that easy. Yet it will never happen.
The widespread implementation of automatic traffic enforcement cameras in China objectively has decreased traffic violations. Compare driving in China in 2008 to 2024. It is a night and day difference.
I agree with your assessment about American traffic enforcement being more about collecting an informal tax than actually being about improving road safety (see: speed traps). In the UK (which this article is about), the speed cameras do flash (and thus provide immediate feedback).
Absolutely.
America does this thing where only some areas have cameras, creating huge dead zones with no camera enforcement. This is done to catch drivers off-guard so that more traffic tickets are given out. As I understand it, China just has cameras on every street because their goal is to decrease traffic violations and not just generate ticket revenue.
I still think my idea of traffic cameras flashing drivers when they get ticketed would be effective, but China has it figured out.
This is correct. Traffic cameras are present on basically every street, and they are highly visible, preceded by a road sign, and your GPS audibly tells you about them. They also flash at you.
China also has a better implementation of red light cameras. Green lights start flashing a few seconds before they turn yellow, allowing you to either make it across the intersection or slow down in time.
Oh wow, warning flashes for green lights would be so helpful! There's an intersection on the way to work where I live that has a four way stop, but at highway speeds. You have to hit the brakes hard when the light turns yellow or you'll blow through when it turns red 😅
We could expropriate the expropriators. 😉
The same can be said for anything that the government contracts out. Road building is another good example, and there's a lot more money to go around there than with speed cameras.
I was once passed by someone who was speeding along a narrow, windy road while I was following the speed limit. That entire length of road is a no passing zone. If they had passed slightly later, they would have had a head-on collision with another automobile that was coming the opposite direction. Some people will just do dumb things, no matter the road design.