this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2026
666 points (99.1% liked)
Fuck Cars
16381 readers
1242 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 Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don'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 topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do 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:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How do you think your food and other needs gets to you, what do buses operate on? How does your mail get delivered.
You use roads.
I don't think the user implied we should have no roads ever though, no? I may be losing track of who you've replied to.
I'd say the majority of even the fully car free urbanist crowd, which is a pretty narrow and more radical version, still want roads for access to things like delivery vehicles or emergency vehicles, even if they want a total ban on private cars. They're just pointing out we spend a huge cost on roads in terms of space that we don't often consider and sometimes should when deciding if a full road is really necessary.
Buses are shit. They're a way to shoehorn transit into a network built for cars, and they can never be faster than the cars because they're in the same traffic. (BRT is a special thing to solve this problem.) It would be a net gain if buses went away along with the cars.
My mail gets delivered by a guy walking.
Roads and streets built for food delivery vehicles would need to be far smaller, and less extensive. And all of the land for parking lots and interchanges and turn lanes and drive-thrus and gas stations...
This "you use roads" argument falls flat when the car industry and drivers arrogated all of the space and forced it upon us.
How many packages do you think the guy can carry at once? Every block as a box that the guy walks to and collects to deliver before moving onto the next. Do you think that they’ve walked all the way from the postal office to your house with your mail…? You can’t seriously think that do you?
How do you think those get supplied? Your coffee shop? How did they get the utilities in to provide everything to the block?
You just don’t understand distribution and concept of scale. The argument only falls flat if you ignore major points along the way, like how the mail gets to your guy that walks. Or how those shops get supplies for the food delivery trucks.
And instead of that, why not multi use high rises? The bottom floor has a coffee shop, grocery store, and other amenities, how would you supply those without a road…?
You gotta look past your own nose and see the entire picture dude.
Actually, I live less than half a mile from the post office. I used to work next to it, doing deliveries myself. The carrier brings mail and packages in a van, and parks it at the end of the block, and walks around the neighborhood. For big packages, he may pull up in front of a house. And to do that, all that he needs is a lane maybe 12 feet wide.
Yet, the street in front of my house has a standard 64-foot wide right-of-way. The pavement is nearly 40 feet wide, so that two cars can pass in opposite directions, with cars parked on either side. It's stupidly big for a residential street, and of course leads to people speeding like mad while using it as a commuter rat-run. It's noisy and dangerous, and polluting.
I never said anything about abolishing all vehicles. But between the postal carrier, the buses, the garbage, and recycling trucks, about 50 vehicles a day through here would be reasonable. Instead, it's closer to 2,500. There's no reason all those people need a 4,500lb. vehicle just because the postal carrier needs a van.
Oh, the really funny part is that the street is also a bicycle boulevard; somebody's idea of a sick joke, I think, but still better than the arterial streets. Anyway, there's a local roaster, Cargo Coffee, that delivers their product by cargo bike. I see the delivery guy pedal by here all the time. As well as at least one CSA that delivers by cargo bike.
The coffee shops don't even need cars to get their beans.
Ahh yes, the classic 'I live in a city, so obviously everything can be dense and done by human power alone'. Except for the massive amount of people who don't. I have incredibly few areas in the US or even Europe where no cars or no roads are needed. Can you reduce your reliance on them with a lot of changes? Sure. Can you eliminate them? No.
We didn't need cars 200 years ago and we don't need them today. Has our technology turned our entire society into a finely tuned swiss watch with no tolerance for change? No! We have better technology than ever for living without cars. Look at this stuff:
It's easier than ever for town planners to design a small rural town that doesn't need cars.
The only cars I support are fire trucks and ambulances.
You slayed that strawman but good.