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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I can't believe gas prices are only $3/gallon. That needs to be at least $20/gallon to make any dent in this climate catastrophe
Where's the party that is running on a platform of gradually increasing the gas prices to $99/gallon and beyond?
Yes, punish us poor people who have no other option than to commute instead of the mega-corporstions. Good thinking.
Car dependency punishes poor people. The solution is viable alternatives, for which having fewer cars is often very beneficial.
Raising the gas prices 10x overnight won't create those alternatives overnight, nor will it put petrol companies out of business because they pass the cost on to consumers who are mostly forced to buy gas at whatever the current price is with no other viable transportation method.
Infrastructure takes time. Sadly the US govt isn't even at the starting line for any meaningful public transit system in most cities.
If gas prices went up 10x overnight, some higher earners could switch to working from home (a positive result), but other industries such as retail don't really get that luxury.. Contributing to more wealth inequality
You do realize the post here said gradually, right? Why are you strawmaning them and saying overnight?
No shit, I'm not saying that.
Yes, but that alternative infrastructure needs to be in place before you can start really discouraging cars with, for example, high gas prices. Raising gas prices to that extent right now in most places outside of a few major cities would just cause people not to be able to get to work.
@heatofignition @mondoman712
Nah. Public policy isn't a neat project plan you can accomplish in chronological order. The measurement of good policy isn't whether or not there are zero negative impacts on lower income folks.
The status quo is bad. Do what's possible. If you can raise gas prices do it. If you can increase transit do it. Each improvement will virtuously reinforce other improvements.
#transit
@owen @heatofignition @mondoman712 Put enough good quality alternatives in, and you can get modal shift without resorting to punative measures.
If walking, cycling, or catching a train to a given destination is faster and easier than driving, then that's what many people will do.
But those alternatives — fast metro systems, frequent busses, light rail, barrier-protected and off-street cycling paths — need to be in place first.
So because you think alternatives that don't exist should you would raise gas prices and obscene amount and put people on the streets?
I live in a small rural town where everybody commutes to their factory job and is already barely scraping by. What do you think all those people should do to stave off being homeless when they can't afford to drive?
I think the alternatives should be good enough that raising gas prices isn't a problem.
Please tell me your plan to collect all of the people spread across half of a state who commute to a central location.
Mobility enables poor people. Not all poor people live in an idealistic 15-minute city.
I don't think rural living makes sense if you're also commuting. Small towns can have good transport links to other nearby towns but I don't think it makes sense to support those who decide they want to live beyond the practical reach of public services just for the sake of it.
I understand that you're doing a thought experiment about futuristic utopias but I am talking about the current situation right now and a comment that started this chain.
People live in rural areas whether you think they should or not and raising gas prices to reduce car travel disproportionately affects those people.
Now, if there was some way for poor people to get fuel credits or something so that they're empowered with mobility maybe that would work.
We also should probably not make farming any harder than it already is.
It's not a utopia, it's perfectly possible if we work towards it.
And I said
Specifically to exclude farmers
In 2020 according to statistics 82.66% of all americans lived in cities, not spread across half the state. Urban areas and country side should be developed differently of course.
And as everyone knows, all those 82% are commuting to the same place
There are other places in the world who do this much better than the US. How about instead of assuming it's impossible because you haven't seen it you consider that it is, in fact, possible but the image has been designed to make it appear impossible by those benefiting from it not being done.
Also, choosing to live away from work is a choice. Suburbia is a choice, and actually one that costs more money in taxes than it makes over time, requiring it to continue to expand or admit it doesn't work. You can choose to live closer, or even choose to bike to a bus stop/train station/whatever that is positioned reasonably if things weren't designed around making car and gas company executives rich.
True
Dude, i live in the fucking state of mexico, we don't even have rail. And even when we touch the city it's at least half an hour to get to the city center of Mexico city.
And yet, u know what makes it possible for me to come work every day to the city? Public transport.
So yeah, fuck that idea about how it wouldn't work, put some buses to work out there and even the traffic problem will be lessened since there will be less cars on the road, not to mention how it should be even cheaper since the cost of transportation its gonna be equally split in a bigger ammount of passengers.
We're trying that in Canada right now, and it's making a lot of people very angry.
Those people are ignorant and wrong, but they're loud enough that even parties on the left are saying "maybe we should try something else."
It is really interesting to think about how we built our entire society around gas being insanely cheap. You can buy a gallon of it for $3, which is as much as you would pay for a large cup of coffee in most places, something which we have essentially an infinite supply of.