Fuck Cars
This community exists as a sister community/copycat community to the r/fuckcars subreddit.
This community exists for the following reasons:
- to raise awareness around the dangers, inefficiencies and injustice that can come from car dependence.
- to allow a place to discuss and promote more healthy transport methods and ways of living.
You can find the Matrix chat room for this community here.
Rules
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Be nice to each other. Being aggressive or inflammatory towards other users will get you banned. Name calling or obvious trolling falls under that. Hate cars, hate the system, but not people. While some drivers definitely deserve some hate, most of them didn't choose car-centric life out of free will.
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No bigotry or hate. Racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, chauvinism, fat-shaming, body-shaming, stigmatization of people experiencing homeless or substance users, etc. are not tolerated. Don't use slurs. You can laugh at someone's fragile masculinity without associating it with their body. The correlation between car-culture and body weight is not an excuse for fat-shaming.
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Stay on-topic. Submissions should be on-topic to the externalities of car culture in urban development and communities globally. Posting about alternatives to cars and car culture is fine. Don't post literal car fucking.
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No traffic violence. Do not post depictions of traffic violence. NSFW or NSFL posts are not allowed. Gawking at crashes is not allowed. Be respectful to people who are a victim of traffic violence or otherwise traumatized by it. News articles about crashes and statistics about traffic violence are allowed. Glorifying traffic violence will get you banned.
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No reposts. Before sharing, check if your post isn't a repost. Reposts that add something new are fine. Reposts that are sharing content from somewhere else are fine too.
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No misinformation. Masks and vaccines save lives during a pandemic, climate change is real and anthropogenic - and denial of these and other established facts will get you banned. False or highly speculative titles will get your post deleted.
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No harassment. Posts that (may) cause harassment, dogpiling or brigading, intentionally or not, will be removed. Please do not post screenshots containing uncensored usernames. Actual harassment, dogpiling or brigading is a bannable offence.
Please report posts and comments that violate our rules.
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Your comment meanders through so many propagandized items I don't know where to begin. There's like, 12 separate points you hit and none of them go together, it's just a brainddump of everything you believe to be true.
This is called the car sized arms race, the idea that bigger cars = safer. The problem is crash compatibility, which we have lost due to the larger cars. It's not that small cars are unsafe, it's that when you have an F150 smash into the front of it when it's 3x the mass and has the frontend the same shape as a brick wall, they're no longer crash-compatible. By making cars larger the manufacturers have quite literally artificially made smaller cars less safe.
The solution isn't that older folks should be more comfortable driving. The solution is that we should have cities/towns that don't force our elderly to drive. We should be pushing for transit and walkability so the elderly can move around without needing to get behind a wheel in the first place.
Agree, which is why we should stop buying places that require a car. Do the math on if you live in the sticks how much it would cost to commute into the city. Those high rents can be negated, especially with today's gas prices. I also think we as Americans demand way way way too much living space, we do not need a McMansion, but that's another conversation.
This is completely unfounded, prove to me that bigger car = longer lifespan. I still see sedans from the 70s and 80s on the road.
That's my point, that if you take into account the cost of gas even a slightly more expensive EV or Hybrid is going to save you much more down the road.
This is my #1 annoyance with truck owners. "What if you gotta move something"? Ha gotcha you idiot, I can move stuff! You know what I do? I rent a truck. It's 20 bucks at uhaul or home depot. Seriously, twenty dollars. I go, I move the couch, I drop the truck off, I return the truck. I've done the math, if you think spending 50, 60, 100 grand on a truck is worth it because you have to move a couch, you need to sit down and do the math. It is not. I've done the math, for you owning a truck to be worth it compared to renting you need to use it for hauling/towing/moving minimum twice a week. If that's what you're doing, then congrats you need a truck. If you aren't literally moving something every week or more, then it was a waste of money. "We need to haul or kids stuff". False. You need a van. "We are outdoorsy" Great, you need a van or a hatchback.
Fun fact time, auto manufacturers have a higher emission standard for smaller vehicles. This is the cafe standard, and it requires being under a certain emission amount. They lobbied successfully for the "light truck" exception, which was meant originally for Farmer Dan who has his truck who needs to haul hay around daily shouldn't have to suffer. So Congress passed it, and surprise surprise auto manufacturers suddenly start marketing more trucks, and a brand new concept called the "SUV", on - you guessed it - a light truck frame. American's haven't chosen the trucks, there's no safety reason, it was 100% marketing from auto manufacturers to convince you that you need a light truck because thanks to that exception, they are cheaper to manufacture. You do not need a truck. Auto marketing has spent billions convincing you that you do.
Car size arms race doesn’t explain everything. Basically throughout the 80s and 90s every manufacturer deployed a crazy amount of technologies to get good crash ratings. Those technologies take up space. Engineering a crumple zone into an alloy unibody design takes up space. Sticking a million airbags all over everything takes up space.
Those technologies aren’t bad things. I’m glad my cars have had them. They contribute to the size of the cars.
The Toyota Camry didn’t go from a compact to a mid size because of the ford f-150. To claim so would be to gloss over how literally every compact car since the beginning of crash testing has been declared a death trap.
You rebutted some things stated with “should” statements and then talked about McMansions. I talked about how things are in response to the ops question and rooted everything in the experience of aging, poor rural populations. We’re talking about two different things.
There are more bigger cars on the road as a percentage of sales for any given year. I see a geo metro once a month but I see about a hundred suvs and trucks from the same era during that same time. It might not even be that a large car necessitates a larger, thicker frame and bodywork that can tolerate more rust before it just breaks in half. It might be that a larger car holds value longer and stays in the “worth doing maintenance on” category longer because of that.
I can go into more detail about the engineering reasons small cars don’t make it if you want. Idk if you want that.
If people were wealthy enough to buy good quality boots they’d save a lot of money.
I lived without a car for many years and did just what you describe. Renting pickup trucks to move things. Idk what you’re talking about. It sucks to rent a pickup truck and isn’t reliable or as cheap as you say.