this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2026
874 points (95.4% liked)
Fuck Cars
16490 readers
706 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
Half of the problem with that phrase is that this line of thought is far more common from Americans than Europeans. No European think France = US in any other context than geopolitically, maybe. But a lot of US citizens do think that way. The phrase “Americans think 200 years is a long time, and Europeans think 200km is a long distance” is of US origin. It's literally the result of US ignorance that compares the geographical distances of a single European state, like Germany or France, to the entire extent of the continental US. Europeans are perfectly aware that 200km are 200km anywhere on the planet. Whether you are driving to another country or another state, it is irrelevant.
The other half of the problem is that the political dynamics of the European Union are fundamentally different to the United States federation. Just by the fact that the US was forged in war while the EU is an economics first agreement. Their nature is vastly different and not comparable at all. Maybe one day in the future the EU will just be a federation of states, a single country with a single constitution, but today that's not the case. There's no executive power in the EU that can override a country's authority. That alone sets them so very far apart.
There is a difference in the way distances are perceived; I was talking to a British person bemoaning that airfare was 200 lbs more expensive in Manchester than London, and treated the notion of driving just 4 hours as if it was crazy. I've heard similar stories about not visiting family because they're just a few hours away by car.
The classic saying "In Europe, 100km is a long distance. In the US, 100 years is a long time" holds a lot more truth about perceptions in the respective cultures than you'd expect. I've had a very pleasant 100km daily commute - seriously, I quite miss that - and at the same time, there's a building down the street that's just been added to the historical registry and was built in the late 80s.
Meanwhile I've had German friends offer to book me a hotel when I went from Cologne to Essen to give them a visit (admittedly this might have just been learned pragmatism, I was taking the trip on DB...) and said hotel dated back to before my ancestors had a written language.
That really just depends on the scale they are personally used to though, for a fair few years I lived ~5 hours from my family (relatively far within the country), but it didn't feel like very much because I/we visited my partner's family on the other side of the continent at least once a year. Prior to that, I don't think that I would have visited anywhere near as frequently.
The lack of Schengen and now EU membership may make British people more prone to being on the smaller side of this.
Sure, perception can change. When all you have is a car and a highway. It seems outrageous to want an alternative. When you are used to high quality public transport, driving there is a chore.
Driving four hours is an effort that you have to actively take. Plus costs for ownership or rental, fuel and lodging. Americans treat these factors as mundane (and the cultural romanticization of road trips that doesn't exist anywhere else), but they have real costs. Sure, a plane or a train are more expensive. But it offloads a great deal of cognitive costs as well.
The distance itself doesn't change though.
Are things really that bad in Europe? In Japan, non-HSR is cheaper than driving, in China HSR is slightly cheaper than gas, and in vietnam I can even put my motorcycle on the train for less than it would cost to drive.
Trains being more expensive than driving sounds like what happens when you have politicians trying to kill your train system.
Totally depends on the country and the route. I don't live there but have family. They say some train lines are comparable to a plane ticket. Some are cheaper, some are more expensive. The most expensive ones are usually the ones that cross national borders. Though overall the train will always be considered a tiny bit more expensive, it will also be a lot more comfortable. Since the airlines with tickets cheaper than trains usually offer the tiniest seats with zero amenities.
Some countries are better than others as well. In England, trains can get you almost anywhere relatively comfortable and fast (yes, some caveats exist). Spain is rather good in the central regions but many places have spotty coverage. While in Switzerland you can go virtually everywhere except the alps without ever sitting in a car.
The big comparison, that most people fail at, is not just the price of gas. Cars are taxed heavily almost everywhere in the EU. And the tight emissions regulations also require a lot of regular maintenance. So the train will always be more expensive than just the gas, but not more expensive than the bigger picture of car ownership. Plus, if you drive, you're the sod stuck driving the whole way.
"Offloading cognitive costs" for the sake of convenience is ruining this species.
I meant like paying someone else to drive the plane/train/bus. Not the AI kind.
Having to drive everywhere makes people misserable.
Edit: we take for granted the infrastructure required to support a society that drives everywhere in personal cars. That is what is actually driving the species to extinction via climate change.
I wasn't just talking about AI.
Being trapped and anxious makes people miserable; lots of people are scared of driving (because they're bad at it and/or have attached anxiety), and sitting in traffic is frustrating. There's lots of very good reasons to choose mass transit. The unwillingness to be engaged with the task of driving a car for a few hours is not a good reason, it's a symptom of a totally cooked attention span.
A car is not freedom. And the absence of a car is not being trapped. Those are false equivalences. I've been perfectly free and lived a fulfilling anxiety free life without a car. I know how to drive, just never owned one. Because, I've never had a financial or otherwise incentive to do so. You can own a car and still be a trapped and anxious ball of cooked nerves, as I've met many people who are. And on top of all of that they are financially trapped by owning a car they can't afford to pay but also can't afford to not own.
I never once claimed otherwise, that's an argument you invented for me.
You are a bad faith comementer. But it is nice to see a, even if indirect, admission that your comment was just a personal attack and you have no intention of actually owning your words. So, eat them.
What are you even talking about. I said "Being trapped and anxious makes people miserable" in response to your "Having to drive everywhere makes people misserable." It's not the need to drive that sucks it's the circumstances of the drive that suck. Being stuck in traffic is a very different experience than an oceanside highway with nobody around. But that's only half the point because you're ignoring the context of my attention span statement, which was with respect to the "offloading cognitive costs" point. I don't think offloading cognitive costs is a good thing in most circumstances, you should be aware of what you're doing and where you are. It gets complicated with anxiety and hyperawareness and such wherein passive existence is overwhelming (and this is one of the things I was flagging as a "good reason to choose mass transit")
If you choose a slower, more expensive way to get somewhere because you can't put your phone down and focus on the task of getting from point A to B for four hours, and it isn't due to mental fatigue or a disorder like ADHD, then I think it's wasteful and reflects poorly on your character.
Here are more things you pretended I said because people in this community are so used to fighting caricatures of car culture. Calling me a bad faith commenter.