this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
2318 points (96.2% liked)
Fuck Cars
9590 readers
41 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's not that simple. In the US at least it's more of a case of standards that created an accidental loophole, which could have been closed quickly, but because car manufacturers found it so profitable they have fought ever since to keep the rules from being revised. When the original cafe standards were passed trucks were actual utilitarian vehicles and CAFE did a lot to raise average mileage. It's time to stop exempting trucks and SUVs.
It’s always some particular thing, but the pattern is clear. Government lacks the agility to correct its own mistakes, and they get carved in stone and last for years or decades before the mistakes are corrected.
Government is like a child who places his hand on the stove, and then must get consensus among every neuron in his brain before removing the hand. Someone then says “government tends to burn its hands on the stove” and someone else says “yes but only because of how stupidly the reflex was handled”.
In reality, a child who puts his hand on the stove benefits from the decentralized nervous system. The decision to whip the hand back off the stove is made at the spine, before the brain is aware.
Excessive government regulation mandates not only constraints and goals, but methods of implementation. And again, and again, and again, our society ends up with third degree burns as a result of government ordering the hand onto the stove, then lacking the efficiency to bring it back off again.