this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2026
55 points (89.9% liked)

Fuck Cars

16350 readers
620 users here now

A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!

Rules

1. Be CivilYou may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.

2. No hate speechDon't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.

3. Don't harass peopleDon't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.

4. Stay on topicThis community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.

5. No repostsDo not repost content that has already been posted in this community.

Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.

Posting Guidelines

In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:

Recommended communities:

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

No. No you do not. You need to force your local governments to campaign for better public transport and infrastructure.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] essell@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Utter tripe.

Where I live it's dozens of little villages scattered about here and there, with four sizable towns.

Weaving public transport through all of those places is impractical.

I can't function using public transport that'll take me an hour or two to get between appointments in different places when it's a fifteen minute drive.

To get close to that you need so many buses running empty and so many routes it's insane.

Maybe let local people decide what's right for them instead of making blanket proclamations for everyone and every place?

[–] jtrek@startrek.website 14 points 2 days ago

You don't need to bring car usage to zero. It's a win to bring it down.

Maybe let local people decide what’s right for them instead of making blanket proclamations for everyone and every place?

Local, non-expert, people are famously wrong. You'd have everything paved over for more parking if you listened to them.

[–] SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zip 9 points 2 days ago (2 children)

So, basically, you're living in a geographic area that's incompatible with your lifestyle, and it only works with taxpayer subsidies for the roads.

[–] essell@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Nah, lifestyle is well suited to the area.

We have roads here older than every American country and traditions even older.

The land and the people are one.

[–] DudleyMason@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Then get rid of everything with an internal combustion engine and live like your ancestors did on that land, don't expect modernity to be delivered to you by truck while you live your stupid medieval peasant fantasy

[–] essell@lemmy.world -1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah we don't have trucks here. Except for a few industrial people so you're not making sense.

Hands up anyone who thinks my ancestors had public transport?!

[–] DudleyMason@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Ok, that was definitely the point of what I was saying and you aren't being disingenuous at all.

How many of those ancestors wound up marrying their cousins, do you think?

[–] essell@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago

Has that got anything to do with whether I need a car or a bus?

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world -1 points 1 day ago

If you didn't pay for roads, but you wanted public transit, I don't see how that works.

There's plenty of room to improve cities without having to bemoan that rural people are living wrong. About the only place I could see is making rural people switch over to intra-city transit instead of trying to have the cars wiork to get within a block of any given destination. That's probably about as far I think to inconvenience rural people to meaningfully improve things.

Mass transit is only efficient if you have a density of people going the same way at the same time. A bus is only better when you have significant occupancy, and that's not going to happen in very low density living.

[–] AbsolutelyClawless@piefed.social 5 points 2 days ago (3 children)

You're getting downvoted because it's a fuckcars com, but you're not exactly wrong. Plus, I don't see how we could effectively get rid of cars without making everyone move to the cities.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago

Plus, I don't see how we could effectively get rid of cars without making everyone move to the cities.

80% already did, and the other 20% can be ignored.

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 7 points 2 days ago (2 children)

If they could run more busses with fewer stops, it wouldn't be a choice between driving yourself and getting to work on time. The only way they would or could run more busses is if people demand more public transit and public transit received more funding.

It's a god damn catch-22. Public transit kinda sucks because it doesn't get enough funding, and it doesn't get enough funding because people think it sucks.

[–] essell@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago (2 children)

That's very true.

I think it's a failure of imagination that the people running things believe public transport should turn a profit.

If it's run well, the economic benefits cover the costs indirectly.

And still, there will be places where it isn't the right answer, that an optimised and popular public transport system can not cover enough for people to be done with cars.

[–] eksb@programming.dev 6 points 2 days ago

If we taxed private car use enough to make that break even, we could easily afford to have great public transit.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I think it's a failure of imagination that the people running things believe public transport should turn a profit.

It's not a failure of imagination, it's deliberate sabotage. They don't want transit to work because they're classist and transit is egalitarian.

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 2 points 2 days ago

Im not sure about this. I live near a city with incredible public transit. metro trains run often and its a grid system with plenty of buses and the artierials run often connecting lines. Its affordable and a monthly pass costs less than mandatory liability insurance for a car. Lots of people do take it but lots of people also still have cars. Even in poor neighborhoods. There is just a wierd car brain in the us. My wife feels a car is freedom but all I see is a ball and chain around the ankle with costs and possibility of breakdown at any time. If im on a bus and it breaks down you get out and catch the next bus. public transit to me is the ultimate feeling of freedom.

[–] essell@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I agree.

Rural public transport could absolutely be way better, especially if it was viewed as a public service, not a business.

There's plenty of places where even an optimised solution would mean cars aren't needed.

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Question is to cover rural communities as-is, do you and up practically replacing every car on the road with a bus? Bus is generally only better if you have significantly fewer of them to scale.