- cross-posted to:
- fuckcars@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- fuckcars@lemmy.ca
cross-posted from: https://pawb.social/post/23351353
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Me, 15 miles from town, independently waiting for the bus to arrive (it’s a hour long ride, and only comes twice a week):
Look I am for an efficient mass transit system instead of building all of these perpetually-under-construction-roads. I would happily pay for bus / train tickets to get to work! It would be like a raise not being forced to pay for all that crap illustrated in the comic. I keep seeing comics like this on my front page and it’s kind of annoying. It’s somehow MY fault I choose to drive a vehicle instead peddling a bike on a path that would be a suicide mission to get to work. How about voting in the local elections instead of cheeky little comics that just seem annoy people? Lots of plans for transit systems get killed at the voting booths nobody goes to. Or not. I don’t care. I’m just screaming at the sky now.
I fail to see how this comic blames people driving cars for the problem. Just that we should strive to improve how we build our society so that we could have meaningful and good lives without requiring an automobile.
This doesn’t make any sense. The only way to move around without depending on other companies is by walking, and there’s no way that can replace cars, trains, buses, bicycles, etc.
Not depending on anyone else is not a sensible goal. We live in a society.
The only way to move around without depending on other companies is by walking, and there’s no way that can replace cars, trains, buses, bicycles, etc.
If you have all of those options available, you can never be stranded when one of those options fails.
But with a car-centric society, all it takes is a single point of failure, and you are no longer free to move about the society.
They are not advocating for society to be less interdependent. They are explaining that a car-centric society has less freedom of movement, because the “independence” of a car is a lie.
Well that’s just nonsense. There are enough downsides to cars without having to make up fringe lunacy like this.
“Cars aren’t a symbol of freedom. They are a symbol of dependence in places designed to be prisons without them.”
Paraphrased from a book I read (sorry, it was 10+ years ago)
Might also be noted that cars are a class symbol and a means of engaging in conspicuous consumption.
People who make the most noise about the “freedom” a car affords them are very often people who flout their vehicles a exotic hobbies or luxuries. They are, incidentally, the same folks who denounce bike lanes, bus stops, cross-walks, speed cameras, and parking shortages. Almost as though they don’t value freedom in the abstract at all.
Thank you for wording it so eloquently.
I learned quickly the car took away my freedom. I needed a car to get a job.
I was suddenly forced to have a job to pay an auto loan. By the time I paid the loan I needed a new car as the first broke down.
Then I needed my job to pay for the 2nd car. If I lived closer to the city with public transport I likely would have never gotten a car in the first place.
Cars are basically a life tax
I grew up with great public transit, and having access to a bicycle, (NYC.) In my 20s I realized that attempting to own and maintain a car would be so expensive that I would not be able to save money for the future. I ride my bike everywhere. If I want to go somewhere more than 50 miles away, or where transit doesn’t go, I rent a car. I rent a car maybe 2x a year tops. Depending on how long I’m renting the car I probably spend $400 a year on rentals + insurance. My last bike I had for 20 years. Cost me $1400 brand new, spread that cost out over 20 years, owning the bike cost me $70 a year. It was easy to repair myself, and the tools to repair it were inexpensive to purchase. Fuck cars indeed.
Also, people younger than the legal age for driving are unable to get around safely and independently if they live somewhere car-dependent. I know this from personal experience (although where I live car dependency is not the only problem of course)
@callyral @grue don’t forget disabled people. Cars are always touted as the solution for disability but there are *many* disabilities which completely remove driving as a possibility (blindness, epilepsy, many learning disabilities, many physical disabilities … And generally being elderly, if we’re honest) and car dependence leaves you entirely reliant on a chauffeur of some kind for any and every time you want to leave the house.
true but America hates public transportation
That’s only because America makes terrible public transit
It’s because they purposely make sure it can’t get anywhere because they don’t want “poor” people to go nice places. Anytime it does they move the nice shit away.
…i have slight beef with that.
- We made cars more complicated than they need to be due to electronic systems and all that. I don’t say that we should simply go back, that’s dumb. But I cannot help but wonder if a line of simple, less advanced ICE cars promoted on their ease of maintenance wouldn’t get popular with, for example, rural folks. After all, being able to fix the beast yourself would lover your costs a lot.
- Walkable cities are great, I know cause I live in one. My city (or town?) has around 7 km length (at least the parts that matter). Distance an average person can go in ~70, maybe 80 minutes by foot. But if I wanted to hit the relatively nearby lake or beach, getting there by foot is another story. And yeah, bikes exists and make it easier but if I need to hit another city that is 60km from here…yeah.
- Author also forgot that these companies won’t fail, because these are not “one and only” of each in the world. Each contry, hell, each county has multiple of them. It’s highly unrealistic for them to all fail at the same time.
But I cannot help but wonder if a line of simple, less advanced ICE cars promoted on their ease of maintenance wouldn’t get popular with, for example, rural folks. After all, being able to fix the beast yourself would lover your costs a lot
No car company will make a car which is maintainable by a common man because it affects their bottom line. We can dream of alternate concepts (open-source car design/metal 3D printing) but government regulations and lobbying will kill such concepts. We have to focus on the current scenario.
But if I wanted to hit the relatively nearby lake or beach, getting there by foot is another story
The majority of the anti-car people are not saying “destroy all cars. Nobody should have cars”. We are just saying “please don’t make our entire lives car-dependent. Please design cities/governments/social life in such a way so that it’s accessible to non-car folks.”
I also have a car, but I only use it for going to places which are not reachable by public transport. For traveling to work, I use public transport 5 days a week. Cars should be (IMO) a recreational mode of transport.
Author also forgot that these companies won’t fail, because these are not “one and only” of each in the world
I agree with you; they won’t fail. However, they surely can make our lives hell if they want to. This is a power that I don’t want them to have over me.
- Are you saying the problem is cars are too expensive and too expensive to maintain because they are too complex?
Cheap cars are more dangerous. Simpler cars have higher emissions. I think the more complex ones are better. I would like to see legislation against the anti repair methods manufacturers use
- Cars let you take longer trips. One of the Australian capitals had a train to the beach towns. That right of way was taken by a highway and the railway now only runs a tourist route between the three or four beach towns but not to the city
With cars less needed other transit methods get built for popular trips
Failing all that, hire a car the few times of year you want an out of town holiday would be cheaper even than a very cheap car
- This one is completely correct. Last time I had a car problem I had a choice of tow companies and mechanics. Government services are monopolies but they’re pretty proof against failure. The worst that might happen is you might buy a car that turns out to be less valuable than you expected because it’s bad quality or the company owner turns out to be a nazi. But even that only costs you if you need to sell the vehicle.
I envy you for your walkable city. I don’t think I did better by getting a thousand square metre block and a detached house. I’d like to see our cities made walkable and the outer suburbs connected by rail so no one needs a car. I’d like to see cars banned from the city centre except working vehicles, taxis, disabled people, tourists with a hotel in town. For long trips off the transit network one would take a train to a car hire depot out of the city and drive from there. Hopefully cars will be sufficiently smart that the fact the drivers will have little practices will be mitigated
We didn’t make cars more complicated because “of the electronics” or “because we had to”.
Car companies make cars more complicated because they make huge amounts of money from warranties, maintenance that you can’t do yourself for some reason, and of course the leases.
Cars being as complicated and impossible to work on as they are today is because line must go up. Everything else is propaganda.
maintenance that you can’t do yourself for some reason
Also helps hide shoddy low quality parts.
The condensers on 2017-2021 Honda Civics are basically guaranteed to fail. There’s a warranty, but the only people who can open up the AC are the dealerships, who have been trained to find some speck of dust to justify denying the warranty.
It really fucking sucks - I’d love the option of being able to make some money on doordash, but the “reliable” Honda Civic I bought gets up to 100+ F with the air on full blast.
That’s…effectively what they said. The added electronics make it infeasible for normal people to maintain their own vehicles. They never speculated on why the electronics were added.
The way you came at them makes it seem like they’re provided a scapegoat when they didn’t.
But “electronics” don’t mean “impossible to repair yourself”. And to be clear, I’m not expecting someone to become a shade tree mechanic. Remember, “right to repair” also includes the ability to go to a 3rd party repair service.
But requiring your mechanic to buy $15k+ in licensing per year, making specialized (and proprietary) fasteners, taking months to get replacement parts to the mechanic, or not honoring warranty because you went out of network are not things that are intrinsic with an electronic system.
- Also implied that other methods of transportation are devoid of failure points.
Sure wish I lived in a walkable city though 😢
Isn’t anyone else disturbed by the concept of independence being a problem for this person?
I’d like more public transportation in America, but I’m not really interested in anything else they have to say.
@moakley @grue Unless you’re living in a forest that’s nowhere near another human being, hunting and gathering all of your own food, moving around entirely on foot (or on animals you personally captured and trained), wearing clothing you made from materials you personally gathered from the environment around you, YOU ARE NOT INDEPENDENT. Even the smallest rural settlement has interdependence as a fundamental requirement.
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@moakley @grue Car drivers depend on a whole bunch of things, as noted above. But farmers do too. They rely on people making tools, and in the case of motorized ones, supplying fuel and maintenance for them. They rely on markets to sell the products of their efforts to permit them to exchange with other people for other necessities like clothing or food other than the food they themselves produce. Etc. etc. etc. Everybody depends on everybody else in a society.
🧵 ▶️
No, because your premise is incorrect. This person is completely in support of the concept of independence, but simply rejects the notion that car-dependency provides it. Real independence is achieved by removing the dependency on cars.
You didn’t read the second line?
“Now the whole idea of independence is a messy social construct with a bunch of issues that I won’t get into right now.”
I don’t see how anyone could interpret that as anything other than a blanket statement about independence.
I searched up the artist to find more evidence and saw that I wasn’t the only one who thought that, because they posted a follow-up attempting to clarify that specific line. The clarification just reiterates the point of the original comic and doesn’t try to explain why that phrasing was used or what it could have meant.
So maybe they just phrased it poorly, but I’m not the only one who took issue with it.
How is claiming that independence is a complicated, nuanced concept problematic?
It sounds like you are interpreting it as if they are saying it doesn’t exist or something similar which is not at all what they said.
Acknowledging that a concept is complicated is different from being opposed to it. You deciding to interpret the statement the latter way instead of the former is your own problem, not theirs.
They literally say:
“Now the whole idea of independence is a messy social construct with a bunch of issues that I won’t get into right now.”
(Emphasis mine). They are not just saying, “it’s complicated.” They literally use the word “issues.”
Yeah. And “issues” means “issues,” which is not the same as “bad.”
“Issues” in this context means “problems”, and problems are bad.
Yeah, and check this out!
That’s the type of independence I want to strive for.
They want to “strive” for “issues”? We know what they think independence is. Why do they want to destroy society??
The concept of independence can be a problem because it tends to manifest in a “I’m a lone ranger that doesn’t need anyone” mentality.
If you’re someone who generally just wants to live alone off-grid in a cabin in the woods and interact with people once a year that’s fine.
If you’re massively dependent on your neighbors and international trade and are in a self-destructive anger spiral about it because the realities of living in society damage your sense of self-worth, which has been tied to the fiction that everyone is an island, it’s an issue.
So if you value independence over community and you’re an asshole, then that’s a problem.
On the other hand, if you value community over independence and you’re an asshole: also a problem.
We can extrapolate further and say that if you drink water and are an asshole: also not good. I don’t think drinking water is the problem in that case.
I want you to realize for a moment that you are arguing with one sentence in a comic that said of itself “I will not explain what this means right now.”
Can confirm.
My car has been “on loan” to my parents for a year. I’m lucky to live in an area with decent public trans, but my sense of freedom is definitely vastly diminished.
Buy a bike, and often that sense of freedom comes back.
Still getting around, still able to use public transit at its best, but also able to fill in the other parts of trips with a form of low-stress exercise.
My Australian town is almost as bad as American ones because it was built after cars became necessary
It has decent bike paths and painted bike lanes on many roads. Riding to local centres is easy, or to any of the five or so nearby schools (which gets a lot of kids onto bikes), but if you work a desk job it is probably in one of the three big centres and you’re likely to live up to an hour by bike away. So few adults get around by bike
I get the feeling you’re not from the US. In the vast majority of US cities, bike infrastructure is either non-existent, or so limited/unprotected that it’s still dangerous to use.
Let me try to give a good comparison. Telling people to switch to biking in US cities is like telling someone to switch to biking on the Autobahn. It’s impractical, it’s dangerous, and often it’s even illegal. You might think that’s hyperbole, but I promise it’s not. For many major cities, 40 MPH (65 KPH) is considered a low speed, found on side-streets and other non-major roads; in neighborhoods, where kids play, it drops down to 30 MPH. On highways, you’re looking at 50 MPH minimum, sometimes up to 75 MPH, and these are inner-city highways.
Americans don’t choose not to bike out of laziness, but because, in most places, biking as a form of transportation will get you killed.
I am American, but I’m lucky enough to live in a city where bikes are relatively practical.
You have public trans? Can you just like rent them for a while or how does it work?
In my city you can just use your library card. Pretty convenient
One addition to this is also winter upkeep, which is very relevant in Finland.
People like to talk about “winter cycling”, because it’s somehow so much different from “every other season cycling”. Mainly it comes down to winter upkeep; snow plowing and such. Then some people complain how nobody rides in the winter and they shouldn’t use too much budget for it.
It would be fun to see people talk about “winter driving”. How much we actually spend making driving possible during the winter.
It’s not just spending money. In my city, we’re poisoning the groundwater with road salt to support winter driving. One well near me has sodium levels in the water high enough that the water utility has issued a no-drink advisory for people with hypertension.
Where I live in the US that’s in the millions, hundreds of millions even. Also, if that budget dries up then they don’t plow shit. They’ll usually get an emergency fund but it takes a few days, while it’s snowing…
How do I get to and then around Michigan’s Upper Peninsula? I don’t want to go be in cities like at all? What’s the plan for that?
I never said that it shouldn’t be improved. But even with good public transit I would still feel trapped without my own vehicle.
@5in1k That problem sounds like it would be better dealt with by consulting with a counsellor than by feeding a continuing environmental disaster.
You use a car.
Do not mistake cars being appropriate for the 20% of population that’s rural for them being appropriate for the 80% of population that’s urban, 'cause they’re not.
With a car, you can fix it yourself if you are determined enough. However, if you’re using public transport, the same arguments apply + now things are enirely out of your control. There’s no way in hell the public transport company will let you tinker with their broken stuff. The insurance company can pull out of them at any time for any reason. The company can go bankrupt, etc.
i feel like independance and not having to rely on someone would work better as an argument for the car.
@Rin @grue It’s hilarious watching people like you tout the “inevitability” of public transit failure as if **THE MAJORITY OF THE PLANET DOESN’T USE IT WITHOUT ANY OF THESE “INEVITABLE” FAILURES COMING TO FRUITION!**
It’s almost as if you’re spouting bullshit from a position of abject ignorance and a deep-seated aversion of analysis and/or introspection.
Almost.
My brother in christ, you missed the point.
@Rin Yep. Position of abject ignorance.
Buh-bye.
No matter how determined I was to work on my car, it didn’t matter. That shit sucks, is hard to do, especially if you don’t have previous experience.
Also, cars today aren’t roomy 1990’s (or before) engines. They pack it so tight in there, with the need to specialized tools and knowledge.
Cars have become increasingly hard to work on oneself. Especially as computers and mechanical engines have been fused together.
I’d rather have my bike with a lane, or a sidewalk, lined with trees, than have stroads with rubber dust, smog, and noise, uninhabitable to pedestrians.
In the past 25 years I’ve used public transport, I think the bus broke down once while I was aboard, and I think it ended up in the newspaper. I think it’s a good thing public transport folks spend a lot of time maintaining the vehicles and especially on regular preventive maintenance.
I can barely fix my bicycle, so I don’t want to tinker with the bus company’s broken stuff. I trust that stuff to the certified mechanics they employ. Doubly so for trains, that’s for some serious mechanics only.
Consider a bicycle. Very low maintenance, simple to fix, no need for fuel, unlimited range. Complete independence, with the sole exception of winter maintenance of paths, but that’s also a problem for cars and public transport.
bikes absolutely do not have unlimited range, at some point the human will die of exhaustion or starvation without food or dehydration without water. cars needs far less winter path clearing than all but the best fat tire bikes. cars suck in cities the majority of the earth is not a city.
cars needs far less winter path clearing than all but the best fat tire bikes
I drive a regular city bike, nothing fancy, just studded tires. I’m talking about Norway here, so studded tires are the norm in winter for almost any vehicle. I prefer biking especially in winter because of the amount of cars stuck on the roads. With the bike I’m flexible, I can drive around obstacles or impasses, worst case lift it over a ditch to make my way somewhere else. On an average day I’m at least twice as fast biking than I would be driving.
You live in an urban area right? If you’re in the North of Norway and you still think like this you must be superhuman (I’ve only visited the North of Sweden once in February and I wouldn’t want to cycle anywhere further than 5-10 km in those conditions).
You live in an urban area right?
Yes, like about 80-85% of Norwegians inhabitants do. https://www.ssb.no/en/befolkning/folketall/statistikk/tettsteders-befolkning-og-areal.
Of course, if you live in the woods in the middle of nowhere a bike won’t get you far in winter, but neither gets you a car until the snowplow has come through and dug you out. Skis are much more useful in these conditions.
I’ve lived in the North and commuted by bike except for days with extreme weather conditions. And again, you shouldn’t be driving then either. Now that I’m a bit older I’d go for an electric bike though, I think.
The range of the bicycle is constrained only by the rider. Assuming that the rider eats, drinks and sleeps (as most of us tend to do anyways for the sake of staying alive), the range is unlimited. You can’t drive a car either if you starve to death.
I’m not disagreeing with you on the rest, I was just talking about dependencies, which the bicycle has the least (apart from walking or skiing for example).
You need less energy per km to cycle at a relaxed pace compared to walking.
Most public transit in Europe is government backed, they’re not just going bankrupt or lose their insurence, and I don’t know why I’d tinker with a broken bus, the company has people for that.
Exactly. Also, public transport is a system. Even if the vehicle you are currently traveling in breaks down, there’s usually replacements and alternatives to get to the same destination.
@wintermute @MBech I had a bus break down here while I was riding it.
(OK, it was a bit more dramatic. It caught fire.)
The replacement bus was there in under two minutes. It’s almost like people design systems with fallbacks and failsafes.
Almost.
cute! I love informative comics like this.
people always jump to assuming creating an infrastructure that requires less reliance on cars means a flat out ban on cars when really we just desperately need more alternatives to being stuck on the car-only model. of course, rural areas and disabilities and such will mean that cars are sometimes necessary, but there’s so much that a fully functional public transit system can do!!
exactly - I saw a couple of bad faiths in the comments and I just thought like “c’mon guys, be serious.”
