this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
138 points (82.5% liked)
Asklemmy
43939 readers
436 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You summarized perfectly the problem I see with the "fuck cars" crowd. They never acknowledge the need for cars in some cases. America's population centers are definitely large cities where public transportation SHOULD be championed, but there has to be an acknowledgement of the rural population (around 15% in America I believe) where cars are a necessity.
The rural population isn't the issue, it's suburbia which is where the majority of the US population lives.
It's not dense enough for public transportation to be viable and it's zoned in a way that makes pedestrian traffic a non starter.
Suburbia causes a lot of problems. I understand why it exists - owning a house with a yard is nice. I personally wouldn't want to give that up to live in an urban environment if I didn't have to
but why should that 15% derail conversations about the vast majority of the rest of the country?
Because the 'founders' made the Senate and house to be anti urban
It shouldn't. There should be acknowledgement of the exceptions.
So no one should ever be able to have a conversation without patting you on the head for being a special boy at the end of every sentence?
More like no one should be demonizing those who do need cars.
Well it's a good thing no one is doing that then, isn't it? Why does everyone feel the need to make up problems to whine about?
For crying out loud I live in a small town and need a car. Do you think I don't deserve access to decent public transportation?
People do do this. Just because you don't, doesn't mean no one else does. I've had discussions with multiple people trying to convince me that anyone who drives a car is evil.
Not what I said, but go ahead and make your absurd conclusions. Just for the record, I'm 100% for public transportation, EVs, renewable energy, and getting off the fossil fuel tit.
If we're ever going to pull people along the path to that future, we have to accept and acknowledge the exceptions. Not all the time, but don't ignore it like most articles I've read on the topic. I believe division occurs when people feel they are being ignored.
Honestly, I'm part of that 15%, and I feel more excluded by people pretending we can't have mass transit just because my neighbors like big trucks than I am by people in cities not bringing me and my concerns up every time cars are mention.
Rural communities got along just fine before the invention of the automobile. In fact, most of the people who have ever lived have been rural people without cars. The idea that we can't have small walkable towns connected to decent mass transit is just incredibly stupid, and it pisses me off when everybody just assumes it's unsolvable, moreso when it's people who actually live here and should know better.
I agree with the idea of small communities being interconnected with a massive distribution of public transit. I would love to walk everywhere from my daily necessities, but still making it easy to get to larger social centers for other needs. I think that should be the goal we strive for as a society.
That's just not true. The movement is about boosting alternative transport. It's not about eradicating cars.