if you are for using technology to mitigate climate change, being against expanding public transportation can really only come from ignorance of the harms done by car infrastructure in urban environments, or some sort of bias against city dwelling people.
Or an awareness that public transportation is too slow to be useful. Life is short these days, and sleep is scarce.
like 80% of all people in the US live in urban areas, at least according to US Census data.
And not in suburbs? I find that difficult to believe.
they can be dirty and expensive (though that isn’t an inherent property of urban areas, just a failure of policy)
I’ll believe that when there are urban areas that aren’t dirty and expensive, and no sooner.
the thing about them being dangerous, or at least significantly more dangerous than rural areas, is just not factual.
They are significantly more dangerous than suburban areas. I cannot speak for rural.
i don’t mean to be hostile, just check yourself a little bit.
…says the one who’s advocating for something that would ruin my entire family’s lives.
for the majority of americans [access to public transportation] is an important climate justice and civil rights issue
For those who have cars, it is equally important to not lose them, because losing them means losing a significant fraction of their lives and incomes to time spent in transit. The boss doesn’t pay you to sit on a bus; he pays you to work, so the faster you can get to and from work, the less impoverished and sleep-deprived you are.
the immense burdens placed on urban working class people by the ownership of cars
Nonsense. Most car owners are working-class, and if car ownership were more burden than benefit to them, it wouldn’t exist.
our current legislation about who can build what where has led to suburban sprawl, vast, “”bleak”” wastelands of energy-sucking McMansions
At least they have enough space to keep their possessions, and their pets can freely wander around outside. A McMansion would be a major improvement over the tiny apartment I live in.
connected by acres upon acres of heat-absorbing asphalt road (i’m joking, kind of), miles from the nearest grocery store
My parents live in a house 3 miles from a grocery store. They never walk there, because they’re old and groceries are heavy. Your expecting them to walk or ride a bus with a full grocery load is ableist as hell.
I live next door to a grocery store. I walk there for small purchases, but drive to a more distant grocery store for most shopping, because the nearby store is overpriced, groceries are heavy even for me, and there isn’t enough space in my tiny apartment to store a cart capable of carrying larger loads.
Keep in mind that, thanks to America’s famously unhealthy tap water, bottled water is part of a typical grocery run. That stuff is heavy—10 gallons of water weigh 83 pounds. You’re not going to carry that on a bus and you’ll be hard-pressed to carry that on foot even with a cart, especially if the walk home involves climbing any hills.
Mixed zoning does absolutely nothing to make it faster to commute to work. You still have to take a bus and it’s still glacially slow and life is still far too short for that.
Even with mixed zoning, cars are still necessary. That is why car infrastructure is a thing, not some conspiracy.
so many cities had robust networks of electric cable cars and other forms of public transit back before the car was a thing
And people stopped using them because they’re slow and impractical, and cars aren’t.
for urban living, the material realities of car ownership are miserable, dangerous, slow, and cause significant financial burden.
Urban living in general is miserable, dangerous, slow, and significantly financially burdensome.
in an equitable society, freedom of movement should be just that, freedom. it should not be locked behind financial barriers, or behind private ownership
Public transportation does not give you freedom of movement. You can only move to places along a public-transportation route. If you need to leave the city, you’re going to be riding a privately-owned vehicle—either your own car or someone else’s privately-owned vehicle (airplane, Greyhound bus, passenger train, etc)—not public transportation.
for those reasons, the idea of car ownership as a tool for freedom of movement is kinda laughable to me. what kind of freedom needs a down payment? why should that freedom be in the hands of auto companies?
Why should it be in the hands of Uber, Lyft, Greyhound, Amtrak, and the airlines? At least the car is yours to keep, and doesn’t take you on a sub-optimal route to artificially cost you more money.
how in the fuck is rush hour traffic, claustrophobic strips of sidewalk, and barren paved over earth freedom?
Crowded buses and trains are not an improvement. Especially not when somebody picks your pockets and disappears into the crowd before you even realize your wallet, keys, and phone are gone. Doubly especially not when there’s a deadly airborne plague going around.
Public transportation is dangerous. People just don’t think about dangers that don’t immediately and spectacularly kill you like a car crash does.
federal and local public transportation policy allows everybody to access transportation, rather than just those who are wealthy enough or rural enough to benefit despite the costs imposed by car-centered infrastructure on urban environments.
The buses around here are mostly empty most of the time, and you want to send them on interstate routes at my expense? No thanks. Oregon already spends more than enough tax money on stuff nobody uses.
in an equitable society, freedom of movement should be just that, freedom. it should not be locked behind financial barriers, or behind private ownership
Then you’d best hurry and invent practical fusion power, because as long as energy remains scarce, so will transportation.
when you’re out in a rural area, storing cars is not a big issue, because there is an abundance of land to put cars on.
Precisely. City living creates artificial land scarcity. This is an extremely bad idea, especially during a housing crisis, because it robs the common people of both money and space.
part of the reason why state level anti-trans and anti-abortion rules will negatively impact so many people when access is just a state away is exactly because the US as it exists currently has a pretty big problem with freedom of movement.
Indeed. Those people need cars too, with which to escape from their oppressors and find someplace safe to live.
You realize that no tyrannical regime in its right mind is going to just give its own victims an easy and affordable way to leave, right? Hitler did not put the Jews on trains out of Germany; he put them on trains to concentration camps. If you’re in a state where they’re rounding up and executing trans people, and you’re trans, then trying to leave the state on a publicly-owned vehicle is suicide.
we currently live in a dystopian state of affairs
Yes, and depriving people of their cars and houses would make it even worse.
Your proposal is an example of crab mentality: you don’t have a car or a house, and instead of demanding those things for yourself so that your life can be as good as those who do have those things, you demand that those things be taken away from others so that their lives will be just as miserable as yours.