I agree that personal muscle cars are a “go fuck yourself” to the climate, but look at that bus. It doesn’t look fast because it has no reason to be aerodynamic. That thing is either stopped or going like 30 mph a majority of the time. If driving takes you 15 minutes but taking the bus takes you an hour, those with enough money will trade it to get that time back.
That’s why good public transit networks using multiple modes are important, as well as reducing car infrastructure to disincentivize driving at the same time
Why does it need to be aerodynamic? You know you don’t need a Formula 1 shaped car to go faster than 30mph right?
Also the bus pictured is a London city bus. They can’t go faster anyways because of all the traffic in London. There’s busses designed to go on the highway at least like 60 mph.
It’s also the reason why dedicated bus-only lanes are so based. They let the car owners wait in the stupid traffic jam lineup with all the other car owners while the bus chads all fly past them in the bus lane 😎
My point was that it doesn’t need to be aerodynamic, because it won’t be going fast. I’m sure it is still capable of going fast, and that some bus routes go on the highway, but if the designers expected that to be happening with any regularity, they would have designed it with that in mind. Most busses are not aerodynamic because its not necessary. Busses are generally slow.
My commute to work is literally 15 minutes by car or 60 minutes by bus. Traffic is rarely a significant factor for me. It may sometimes add as much as 5 minutes to my travel time.
Would there be significant benefits if everyone used public transportation? Yes. Do I want to spend an extra 90 minutes commuting every day? Not even a little bit.
What a dumb community. I’d be fucked without my car, so you’re going to disparage me for using one? Sorry I don’t live in fantasy land where public transport is readily available.
Fuck cars refers to what they caused with car centric infrastructure. The lobbying that reduced that “fantasy” of public transport to rubble. It’s advocating for people centric cities.
At least check what is about before getting offended.
The idea of fuck cars isn’t to make drivers lives worse but to make everyone who can’t drive for any number of reasons (age, finances, anxieties and other disabilities, etc) have access to an equitable life.
My brother has crippling anxiety behind the wheel. He’s tried driving and physically cannot do it without putting his life and the lives of those around him in danger. Should his life be worse, or should he be subjected to only living in dense metro areas his whole life because of this? Or should he have a viable transportation option no matter where he lives?
That’s the real idea behind fuck cars. Unfortunately when people with so much are asked to share with people with little to nothing, they see it as an attack on their freedom (which only goes one way) rather than a equalization of the playing field.
They seem to think it’s only a point A to point B thing about transit to and from work, like everybody is an office worker. I have to go from job to job during the day and carry my whole kit of tools with me… I can’t carry the tools in public transport or from job to job without my car. So maybe they think independent small contractors like me need to be eliminated because we have to use our cars? If I get bigger I would be even more evil with a little van, or god forbid a pick up truck 😅
The way I perceived it is the point isn’t to disparage people people for using cars but to point out how ridiculous car oriented infrastructure is. Places were designed to have poor alternatives to driving, that’s the problem.
Nah, there’s a lot of disparaging people for having cars in that community. Say one good thing about cars and you’re immediately deemed “carbrained”, no matter what the nuance of the situation may be.
This is the internet. Everything is black or white.
As far as I’ve seen they only disparge people for having these gigantic pickup trucks because they’re kinda really dangerous to pedestrians in traffic.
And that’s exactly the point of this community. We don’t want you to just stop using your car. We want you to have the choice to stop using the car. We hate the fact that car-centered infrastructure led to the point where you can’t go anywhere without a car.
This is an issue because first of all, cars are the thing that makes traffic as dangerous as it is for pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers. Secondly they create traffic jams and everyone hates those. Thirdly, something something CO2 something something climate change, you know the jazz. Fourthly, not everyone can afford a car, driving lessons to get a licence, petrol and car insurance.
I could keep going but I hope you see why infrastructure more centered around pedestrians, cyclists and public transport could lead to safer and quicker traffic, cleaner air, lower emissions and more freedom for those who can’t afford it.
I think the point of the community isn’t ‘Fuck you for driving a car!’ but more like ‘We should focus on affordable public transport, proper cycling lanes and walkable neighbourhoods instead of focussing on expanding car infrastructure, turning nature parks into parking lots and urban sprawl’.
god forbid you tell them you own an XUV or a Truck and use the bed for actual work…as much as i dislike the lifted trucks in florida. they don’t get flooded when the rain comes, they can tow half the state because most of us live in trailers, 5th wheels or other ‘recreational’ housing, i love my Hyundai Accent for the commute and all, but one bad rainstorm and its Good night sweet south korean prince.
I definitely want a more expansive public transportation system out here in the foot hills. A high-speed rail network to connect us to other parts of the state would be awesome. But it isn’t feasible to get rid of all cars completely. A single parent out here can’t be expected to make multiple bike trips for the equivalent of one grocery store run, up and down hills to feed multiple children and work a full time job. Some people out here live on roads where cars can barely drive on let alone a bus. edit: typo
Apparently i need more schooling. And akshuwally I’m not even sure where the group I’m subscribed to is hosted😒. I’ll be best next time, thank you Citizen!
The man in the car has to be at work at 8AM. He has a 15-minute commute, so he can leave at 7:40 to give himself a bit of extra time to get there. At 12:30, he gets a call that his mother is in critical condition in the hospital. He leaves immediately, drives 30 minutes to the hospital the next town over, and is there to say his last goodbye before she passes away.
A man on the bus has to be at work at 8AM. The bus runs hourly with the scheduled pickup being x:20. Normally, it takes 30 minutes to reach his stop and another 10 minutes to walk, but sometimes the bus runs 10-15 minutes late, so he has to take the 6:20 bus to make sure he can get there on time. At 12:30, he gets a call that his mother is in critical condition in the hospital. The man pulls up Google Maps to find the quickest bus route to the hospital, runs to the bus stop in 5 minutes, and waits another 10 minutes for the bus to arrive. Unfortunately, this stop does not have a direct route to the hospital, so he must ride the bus for 10 minutes and make a connection to another bus at a different stop. On the way there, the first bus stops in front of a retirement community, and 10 elderly passengers spend a good 5 minutes fumbling through pocketbooks for bus fare because they don’t understand how to use the newfangled reloadable transit cards. One elderly man gets violent because he has no change and the bus driver won’t take a check, so he has to be removed from the bus. The man gets off at his first stop and sprints across the block to his next bus stop, but he realizes that he has unfortunately arrived late, and the second bus he had to catch just left. The bus runs hourly and this city is too small for there to be an abundance of taxis, so his options are either to wait an hour for the next bus or to call an Uber. The man opens his Uber app and, after 5 minutes, it matches him to a driver. The man waits around, watching the map as the Uber driver circles around the city for a bit, before eventually that driver drops and he is connected to a different driver. Another 5 minutes pass, the Uber driver arrives, and the man is now in a car on the way to the hospital. A 20-minute drive later, the man is now at the hospital, but his mother has just passed away before he had the chance to say goodbye.
The answer to these problems is just better public transport… buses coming more often. Problem solved. No need to resort to individualised transport because public doesn’t run often enough.
wouldn’t you just take a taxi/uber in such an emergency situation?
Also, buses don’t exist in a vacuum, and PT can easily be faster than cars. Think of metros in the city, dedicated bus lanes on congested roads, and bicycle paths to stations and stops
I take the bus to work almost every day. I have a choice of three bus routes that work for me, one of which runs every 15 minutes. The one I take runs every 30. The only time they have been behind schedule was during a blizzard, but I got an alert on my phone about it.
No one has ever slowed down everyone else while fumbling for change because the busses are fare-free.
Public transportation can work, but we have spent the last 80 years developing a culture of individual car ownership so that we haven’t prioritized making public transportation that works for the people.
So the model only works if you have a large number of free (at point of service) buses which go between everywhere anyone may want to start to anywhere they may want to go?
I lived in a larger city and for me it is normal to switch trains or busses a few times when i travel from a to b. But because they made a relatively smart system changing is in most cases fast.
Like trains meeting up at a station and people can simply walk to the other side to get the other train.
So it does not need all possible solutions, it needs a few that work well together.
I know you’re trying to say the opposite, but what I’m thinking of when reading your comment, is that more money should be invested in building better infrastructure to make buses and trains more reliable. Like 90% of the traffic hindering the buses is made up of cars. With less cars, more people could ride buses, trains etc. and people could ride a lot more frequently. People shouldn’t have to fumble through their purses, because busrides should be mostly free.
I’m not even talking traffic. Buses are just inherently slower than cars.
A car gets me from point A to point B with little to no interruption. To go the same distance in a bus, I first have to walk 10 minutes to the closest bus stop, ride the bus down a less direct route with a dozen stops along the way, and then when I get to my stop, walk another 10 minutes to get where I need to go. And the entire time, you are at the mercy of a schedule that is often unreliable. I am not kidding when I say taking a bus would triple my commute time. When I am working 50+ hours a week, it’s just not feasible.
Everyone in here apparently lives in a fantasy city where public transport takes you exactly where you want to go, is never late, and runs every 5 minutes. And when the whole thread here is full of “Just take a taxi/Uber”, how is that a solution to the problem above?
And this is what so many people seem fail to realise here. You can’t have a flawless public transport system in an area with 1 person per square mile.
Is the suggestion here that nobody should be allowed to live in a remote location in order to remove cars from society? Or do people actually believe that a decent system exists for people with their nearest neighbours a mile away?
Feels like the issue has been simplified to the point of absurdity sometimes. I don’t love cars but I couldn’t live without mine, even if public transport was improved to perfection in my area.
Is this world that’s being proposed one where nobody can go camping? How do we get to places with no towns or cities? Charter a bus of our own or wait until 67 other people want to go with me? How do parents of 3+ young children manage? If you have triplets you’re making a very hard job (something simple like going shopping) 5x harder. Is this world one where food delivery is the only option for a big shop? Or are we expected to shop daily so we can carry everything home on a bus?
Omg. Let’s argue a once in a lifetime situation and use it as the reasoning for people driving daily let alone the whole environment point the ad is about.
It’s one-in-a-lifetime situations that people typically try to account for. And the average person is likely to have more than one emergency in life that they need to be somewhere ASAP for.
Taxis are expensive and have the fuel issue per the post were replying to. They were pretty long winded but busses do take longer than driving yourself that much is true.
you use mass transit (buses, trains) normally, and you use personal transit (taxis, cars) in emergency situations like the comment was referring to. I think that’s what they are trying to say.
Also, buses, trams, and trains CAN be much faster than cars if they are built correctly. Going to a mall in the center of a >1mil population city is much easier and faster on a metro than a car.
Don’t think of buses in a vaccum, consider other modes like rail and bike paths as well.
You don’t walk to a freeway, get in a car and get off the car at the end of the freeway to walk right?
Have you used Uber? Last time, I was stuck waiting on the sidewalk for 30 minutes as my request got passed from driver to driver. It’s fine when they’re quick, but when your solution to “I need to go somewhere now” is to rely on borderline slave labor who don’t have to pick you up if they don’t like where you are, it’s not great.
I doubt it. Reduce both directions of car lanes by a couple of meters and suddenly you’ve got a bus lane. Alternatively if it’s narrower work it into a one way system and the lane that was the other direction becomes space for the bus lane.
For the first, if you can’t find a job where starting 10 minutes later is not something you can negotiate, then probably you working at a low end job, in that case you shouldn’t spend your hard earned money on car payments and gas anyway.
Cars are obviously more convenient, but also more expensive and less environment friendly. Noone force anyone to give up your convenience so no need to go defensive, just consider it as an option for all the good reasons.
A man in a place with bad public transit gets the call that his mother has been in a car accident and is being rushed to the hospital at 8AM. Since it’s rush hour, he spends the next two hours stuck in gridlock traffic (bad traffic today, something about a big car accident…). He doesn’t make it in time for her last goodbyes.
In contrast:
A man in a city with a good public transport goes to work easily and there is minimal traffic. His mom doesn’t get hospitalized because there are fewer cars on the road and the streets are designed for pedestrian safety.
or
His mom gets to the hospital more quickly because there is less traffic. She survives.
or
He runs (or bikes) to the hospital within 20 minutes because he lives close to it in a dense neighborhood without endless sprawl caused by parking lots and cars.
or
He gets to the hospital quickly via an efficient transit route since there are many routes going to a hospital because… it’s a hospital!
or
He calls a taxi that arrives quickly and gets him to the hospital in 1 hour because there is less traffic.
Also, in all these scenarios everyone in the society is wealthier and healthier due to spending less money on their cars and breathing less pollution. They all get to work quicker because of less traffic congestion.
Nowhere in my post did I mention traffic. Traffic is not a concern in my area.
Emissions are a non-problem as EVs become more common.
The scenario involves a need to get out of your city and into another ASAP. How dense your city is irrelevant if the place you need to go is somewhere else.
The point of the scenario is about balance of time in life, and how to immediately get somewhere in an emergency. Regardless of whether the mother lives or dies in this scenario, is a loved one in the hospital ever not an emergency? Would anyone in the real world ever think “Well I’m sure the ambulance got there quick enough, no need to rush”?
Point 2: actually a very significant portion of pollution from cars are micropollutants from tires and not related to emissions Point 3: trains. Point 4: if we’re considering random scenarios: “oh no my car broke down” is… much more common than “my loved one is in the hospital”. Good public transport is only marginally slower, and is a more pleasant experience as a whole.
Most of these are from you never having had actually good public transport, it seems to me.
I lived in China, which supposedly has good public transport. I’ve spent a bit in Japan as well, which supposedly has god-tier public transport. Leagues above the rest of the world I’ve visited, but still less than ideal in a number of ways.
I’ve never felt more trapped than I did during the years I spent not owning a car. You’re stuck to transit schedules. You can’t stay out too late or all of the lines stop running and you end up having to walk home in the dark for miles or sleep on a park bench until dawn. There’s a severe lack of options to visit anywhere interesting outside of the city using public transit, so your entire world may as well be nothing but bleak urban sprawl. And it’s one thing to deal with trains and buses when you’re living on schedule, but when unexpected scenarios happen, you just get fucked.
I love how much hate this reply got. Yes, its over the top and unrealistic, but the point is that private cars are extremely convenient while public transportation isn’t. Yes, private cars are very bad for the environment. So is pretty much all modern human industry.
Stop having kids, if you’re so concerned about the environment. Your stupid butthole babies and their progeny will cause more environmental harm than any of your personal lifestyle choices.
“15 minute drive” at rush hour. My man could walk.
This entire comment could be summarized by “butbutbut people who live in areas with shitty public transport have to drive”
We already know this. The point is to make it better, because good public transport is better for literally everyone. I live on the edge of town, and I’m 5 minutes from 7 bus stops for 5 different bus lines, and a train station. Most of those buses come every 10-15 minutes, and are up to 5 minutes late at rush hour. It is by far a better experience to take the bus than to drive for me.
I’m imagining more of a 15 minute drive down the interstate at 70mph. I am not going to walk or bike 15 miles to and from work, particularly in the rain/snow/heat.
Can I just say how much I loved Edinburgh for that? I was able to go to pretty much any bus stop, and have one that goes where I needed to go like every ten minutes.
That was quite a while ago though, and I think they wanted to build a tram network, so maybe that’s changed
Best not to mention the trams in Edinburgh. They finally finished the line (all the way from the airport to the port in Leith) but it cost waaay more than planned, had to be done in two phases and was a massive ballache during the construction.
That said, it is an absolute win for public transport in the city but it did knock the confidence of residents. Mostly down to the piss poor management of the project by the council.
I transported them. I transported them all. Every single one of them. And not just the men, but the women and the children, too. They’re like passengers, and I transported them like passengers! I LOVE THEM!
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