The person on the left is carrying bags, the one in orange is a delivery driver and a couple of people are wearing backpacks. Aside from car brained, Damaris is also blind.
Alright, I don’t generally agree with you guys in this subreddit since cars man freedom from landlords to me. This person in the pic though? Absolute lunacy! I’m just dying to see the look on their face when someone sets them straight!
yesyes the stores are all just there to be pretty, you can’t buy things from them, everyone was completely stumped by how to get the stuff into the place so nobody tried and now we’re all dead of brain herpes. Jesus.
Three entirely different use-cases there. Commuting, logistics and… Well, the port thing is also logistics but it kinda shouldn’t intersect with a city downtown?
Not to mention that nowhere are cars completely restricted, you can have professional trucks and such.
Now, does everyone need to own their own car to move pianos, or should it just be a piano-moving service you hire the one time a year you need a piano moved?
I’m all for way less cars on the road, but, what do all these people with some form of physical disability that limits their movement abilities? I rarely ever see this brought up in the debate, what form of independent travel can these people use in a carless society that won’t be impeded by their physical issues? Something that gives them the freedom to live their life and not rely on some form of ride sharing experience that takes their freedoms from them?
We can’t leave people behind for a quick solution.
it’s not like a lot of disability that would still allow them drive in the first place, and if they need someone else to get them around, other form factors still work just as well. Just making places walkable will still accomodate mobility devices better than roads for cars anyways.
None of this is about total 100% bans on cars, just making the option of not using a car nicer than using one. Even where car bans exist options still exist for delivery vehicles.
Public transit exists and is often better than driving depending on the disability.
In the current system we leave behind everyone that can’t afford to buy and maintain a car, which is a staggeringly large number already.
Mobility scooters, public transport, ect. Because of the overfocus on cars, acessibility is badly neglected and this needs to change.
What about the people that are unable drive a car because of physical or mental disabilities or age? Or the people that are allowed to drive but shouldn’t? There are vastly more of them than people who couldn’t ride a bike but can drive a car.
And yeah, unfortunately getting rid of cars completely is not going to happen, but cars will work so much better when the only people driving are those with no other alternative.
Fuck cars is about using our resources better to improve mobility for all.
When I used to be on twitter and in response to idiotic comments like that, I would post the video of the guy cycling with a fridge on his back, one of someone moving a piano, several tradesmen that quit their vans to use cargo bikes, the pedal cab company in London (proper cargo bikes not the shitty tourist things) and the mother of 6 from Portland that had a cargo bike to take them all to school.
You’re a fucking idiot if you think roads were only built for the transportation of goods & services as they were superceded by canals then by railways.
It was a massive step backwards in inefficiency in an orchestrated move by vehicle manufacturers that freight was shifted back to roads.
And the guys (yes, more than one) carrying fridges on their shoulders while cycling, have more fucking balls than you’ll ever dream of having.
Ok so before your anti car brain downvotes this… Read me out.
It’s a legitimate question for cities that do remove most car access, some essential items (fridges for example) do break and they do need to be replaced. A Bike won’t do to transport these types of things (mattress is another example) what’s the solution to this logistics issue?
I’m all for car fucking don’t get me wrong but the image does raise an reasonable question, and i feel it deserves reasonable answers not just ‘fuck you you stupid car brained fuck head’ which is the majority of these comments.
See, the way you’re phrasing it is a legitimate question. I notice you didn’t give a smug description of what a road is for and you didn’t continue to point out that bicycles don’t fit all use cases.
To answer the question, there’s a few ways. Some furniture stores rent out cargo bicycles (like IKEA) and inner cities do allow traffic specifically for delivery of goods in a lot of places.
I don’t think car access should ever be completely removed. The way it’s done in most pedestrian/bike areas around here is that trucks (delivery and trash pick up) are all done within a small window of time. Outside of that, no cars are allowed besides the one or two security vehicles that move at walking speed if they even move at all.
If the above is about the Netherlands then cars are rarely every completely banned. Mostly restricted and trucks for supplying businesses are allowed (although they often have to be low emission if it’s downtown).
The Netherlands does have access for those things. Its the petrolheads who make up that they dont. Otherwise we’d see their cities failing. And there are cargo bikes for many things. My Cousin’s partner rides one thats like a mini boxvan, half electric with a solar panel on the top.
Throughout history, most people have lived within an hour of work.
The biggest difficulty is retrofitting cities that have developed in the last century. Places that have been around for centuries were developed with walking in mind. Places that were developed around the automobile and climate contril are very difficult to convert.
The world has both quadrupled in population and urbanized over the past century as the car became the primary mode of transit in much of the world.
The only thing that makes transitioning even possible is that the landlord class would love to return to feudaliam.
It’s actually still doable, but requires some creative thinking to undo the damage done for half century. Train can carry people from suburb into the city, the last mile can be solved either by brt, tram, or by micromobility. Bus, tram, and bicycle need their own dedicated lane for this to work nicely. This won’t necessarily prevent people from driving but it will make driving not the only way to go to work.
Places that were developed around the automobile and climate contril are very difficult to convert.
Iirc Amsterdam is basically that, it used to be car-centric but the government take away that monopoly and give it back to bicycle and micro-mobile. Paris is another recent example on how bicycle usage is rising if given the proper safety infrastructure to ride around. It’s also a car-centric city before this.
It’s not that it’s hard, it’s just lack of political will and dinosaur way of thinking. It’s something that never crossed their mind.
Cities design around walking is technically harder because the space limitation if they want to share it with car, but tend to have everything in close proximity, which in that case it’s far easier to just ban car from entering and cater the street to just pedestrian and bicycle/non-electric scooter. Cities design around car however, is easier to convert, as they tend to have wider road and more lane for car. They just need to take away one lane and give it to cyclist and that’s it. The only hard part is going through the legislation and carbrain.
The thing about auto-centric design is that it covers transportation from end to end. Other methods require a much more complicated network of fist and last-mile solutions that aren’t easily adapted.
“Just use park and rides” doesn’t solve the problem. It just moves the traffic to the transit stations. And now it’s more expensive and slower than the existing system.
Houston put in a light rail system that costs 1% of every dollar spent in the city, costs a ton to ride, adds 45 minutes to a trip downtown, and drastically increases the odds of your car getting broken into at the park-and-ride. So yeah - there’s pushback against expanding it.
@chiliedogg@Annoyed_Crabby@fuck_cars
I'd bet that a lot of that inefficiency was built in as a precondition of its passage. That's how it works in red states. Let blue islands implement "woke" policies, but only in ways that kneecap them from the beginning, so you can campaign against their "failure" in a few years.
There’s also inherrent difficulty when the city is so spread out (The Grand Parkway outer loop has a 60-mile diameter, compared to Paris’s 15), and walking outside is a health hazard 3-4 months out of the year.
@chiliedogg
I understand the impulse to call them inherent, but they're really just consequences of the same bad policy that kept people off public transit for 60 years.
What’s a concrete, real way to fix these cities that doesn’t require millions of people to give up their homes to move into more-expensive apartments they don’t own, addresses the fact that being outside for more than a few minutes simply isn’t safe for a significant portion of the population for almost half the year, and doesn’t significantly add to commute times?
@chiliedogg wow this is a nice summary from which to start defining possible solutions. Off the top of my head, it would be low-rise residential co-op ownership clusters with adjoining, enclosed spaces like small Milan gallerias. Residential clusters will be connected by main commercial streets with offices and stores. Cluster groups form towns and cars would only be allowed to travel between towns but not within. Millions of people still need to transition to this, there’s no way around that.
Absolutely. I work in the planning department of a municipality that’s a tiny enclave for the super-wealthy. The average new home here is over 10 times the price of the regional average. I recently issued a permit for a 5,000 square-foot guest house with a tennis pavillion on the roof.
Our residents don’t want neighbors. They don’t want a sense of cummunity. They want their special enclave with a police force that exists to keep out the homeless people from the major city that surrounds us.
I don’t live here of course. I have to drive 90 minutes every morning because my annual salary won’t cover a week’s mortgage for some of these houses.
I don’t live in the US so maybe I’m mistaken but in my opinion a possibility could be :
Wait for a small group of houses in the suburbs to be available (preferably towards the center) and transform them in convenience stores, schools, office space, etc
Next you can link multiple suburbs like that with train/tram or metro for exemple. And you can even leave roads connecting zones for delivery or for people needing to go to another town or things like that
Couple that to a good public transport system overall and now you’re living in a space were there’s less danger due to car circulation, you don’t need to drive multiple km to do groceries, kids can walk(or commute via PT) to school, etc
Do you think we don’t have offices, schools, and C-stores in the suburbs?
We also have sidewalks, bike lanes, walkable shopping districts, etc, but in Texas they don’t get used because it’s 110° for months at a time and you don’t want to have to take a shower every time you change locations.
But the problem is those C-stores and small offices don’t bring the jobs required to support the suburbs. Most people have to work in the city, so they have to commute, and getting from their house to the office is what creates traffic.
I’ll accept that maybe my vision of the suburbs is biased by films and TV shows 😅
I live in a city where temperature could realistically go to 110° F (that’s about 40~45° C for me) in summer but here bus and tram have AC and there is water fountains (decorative and drinkable) everywhere + the city try to maintain vegetation despite heat waves. So even if it’s hot outside, felt air temperature is actually way cooler.
I’ll admit this is very dependent of where you live, the climate around you, water availability and other things, but certainly it’s doable in some places of the US. For others places, in between accomodations can be found. Walkable cities are not a black and white sets of solution there’s levels, hierarchical implementations, etc
The first step and the mindset is already wrong, focusing on moving traffic instead of removing traffic. So yeah, of course it wouldn’t work. Houston failed at it doesn’t mean other city would fail too.
People can’t travel 30 miles from their home to the office entirely using public transit. Walkable cities and light rail are Last-mile. Heck - throw in high-speed for the majority of the transit and you still have a huge first-mile problem, which is by far the hardest to solve.
The reasons modern cities are designed around cars is because cars are flexible. Add a street for a new row of houses and every single one of those points is connected to every end point in a single step. No new scheduling, routing, or transit lines required. Problem solved with a little asphalt.
It’s an easy solution, and backing out of it is very, very difficult because it must be replaced with a complicated, expensive solution that’s less-convenient for most users.
I’m not anti-transit at all, but people around here seem to believe that a city can be fixed with the power of wishes and fairy dust just because another city that covers 1/10th the area and was developed hundreds of years before auto-centric decelopment ago managed to do it.
People can’t travel 30 miles from their home to the office entirely using public transit.
Does ALL Americans travel 30 miles for work?
Walkable cities and light rail are Last-mile. Heck - throw in high-speed for the majority of the transit and you still have a huge first-mile problem, which is by far the hardest to solve.
The reasons modern cities are designed around cars is because cars are flexible.
So does all those micromobile.
Add a street for a new row of houses and every single one of those points is connected to every end point in a single step. No new scheduling, routing, or transit lines required
That’s what called lazy design, and that’s why american and all the people from car dependent city are so miserable about their daily commuting.
Problem solved with a little asphalt.
Our definition of “little” might be a bit different.
It’s an easy solution
And a costly one. Maintaining road for car is far more expensive than for public transport because of the amount of people each mode of transport carry.
backing out of it is very, very difficult
It’s difficult because it’s written into stupid law by stupid politician. That’s what i called lacking political will.
because it must be replaced with a complicated, expensive solution that’s less-convenient for most users.
It’s not even about replacing one for another, it’s about providing a good, viable option, and not a half done one then call it a day, to people who want to use such infrastructure.
I’m not anti-transit at all, but people around here seem to believe that a city can be fixed with the power of wishes and fairy dust just because another city that covers 1/10th the area and was developed hundreds of years before auto-centric decelopment ago managed to do it.
Nobody think that, that’s just strawman argument. You know why people around here don’t take you seriously? Because you never pay attention to what their stand are. There’s a reason carbrain is a popular term with urbanist/pro-strong town because car people just can’t seems to wrap their head around on the concept of giving people the option for viable alternative transport. Literally every car brain i met seems to believe everyone is living on some edge case hence car should be the only transport, they never seems to think edge case is just that, edge case.
I’ll get downvoted being in this community, but in extreme climates where it goes down to - 30 Celsius and has up to 230cm of snow a season, bikes don’t work.
This is another version of the comment people are mocking. ‘Ah, but in this incredibly extreme situation, bikes are inefficient!’ Yeah, I know, mate. I wasn’t planning on biking to the south pole with a fridge on my back, was I? The point is not that bikes are the best solution for every single journey any human has made or will ever make, but that cars aren’t the best solution the vast majority of the time.
I’d be keen to know your (or others) experience of biking and driving in those conditions because in my experience cars aren’t well suited to those temperatures either. I don’t have direct experience of biking in that low but I know people who do and they swear by it.
Of course you could throw fuel at it and keep your car running all the time to stop it from freezing. 😷
I throw studded tires on my bike in about 15 minutes and go about my day as normal. It takes about 30-60 minutes to do the same to my car and I’m sore for a couple days after. Also, unless I’m driving 5+ miles, the car is usually slower or equal in time for the commute. The bike is faster and far easier to maintain. The commute isn’t much different, but I’m forced to ride sidewalks because my city plows into the bike lanes. Maybe if I had a car with heated seats, I’d miss the car.
On the bike, I fall probably once per season, but that’s always the result of doing something reckless like jumping over a small snow bank or riding into large chunks of ice that I should have gone around.
They work better than cars do. Not long ago on my bike commute in a blizzard I had to keep getting off to help get stuck cars moving again, then if happily ride off…
And handling the cold is easier when riding than walking to and waiting for trains and buses because you generate your own heat. People ski in those conditions. It’s just a matter of the right clothes and equipment and not being soft as fuck.
The only reason bikes don’t work in -30 is because there isn’t infrastructure to support them and if there is it isn’t maintained properly. I was going to link examples, but it seems other people already have.
I do 65 minutes in the morning to work, and 80-85 coming home
I think you’ll find most !fuckcars members will also be big advocates for zoning reform that enables more people to live closer to their work. Nobody should be living a 65 minute drive from their work unless it’s purely by choice. They shouldn’t even be a 65 minute bike ride away from their workplace.
I know, unless you absolutely need the job and it’s the only one that accepted your offer.
In my case however, the company lied to me; they said at the start I can shift to full remote over time, but 4 months in and they’re saying that I need supervision to work (even though no one helps me with anything all day).
But this community thinks you didn't just get fucked by your employer but by zoning and planning and such too. Better zoning and infrastructure would have you looking at a 10m cycle plus a 15m train ride to the office of the employer that fucked you.
To be clear, I am in no way blaming you here. The fact that most people have to live a long way from their workplaces is a result of restrictive zoning laws that mean there aren’t very many homes near the centre of cities (where most jobs are located for practical reasons), and what homes there are tend to be very expensive. Better laws would make it so more people are able to live closer to work if they want to.
A totally reasonable question, but in summary, the answer is no, it’s not better.
There will always be some people who do prefer to live rurally, that’s true. And they should have that option. But most people prefer the amenities of a city. The problem with how the US, Canada, and Australia do things currently is that the majority of the living area is “suburbia”, which tries to provide the peace of rural living with the amenities of a city. But it ends up doing poorly at both.
It’s particularly bad for people who cannot drive, like children, teenagers, and people with certain disabilities. Car-dependent suburbia is extremely restrictive on them compared to being able to, for example, hop on their bike a ride to their friend’s place, or to soccer practice.
You might say you want “only residential housing”, but isn’t it more convenient if there’s a cafe within walking distance? Or a community pub/tavern you can grab some food at? Isn’t it better to be able to stop off at a grocery store on your bike home from work, or the walk from the train station, than to have to take a dedicated weekly car drive to a large shopping centre 10–15 minutes by car away to do a single large shop (and hope you don’t forget anything on that weekly shop, or you’ll have to make a dedicated trip especially for that one thing!)? Wouldn’t most people be better off if they can walk or cycle conveniently to nearby sports clubs, community centres, etc. in order to partake in their hobbies and leisure activities?
There are also economic reasons behind it. More dense places like I’m describing have enormous economic benefits. People spend more in the local economy when they walk or cycle to shops, rather than driving. Because when driving they’re more likely to go to a big box store on the periphery where the profits go to a large national or multinational chain rather than a local business. Denser living costs a lot less for the government, because the cost of infrastructure like electricity lines, sewerage, and road maintenance are much, much lower than in lower density suburban or rural areas. And it makes the building and operation of public transport networks more feasible and affordable.
It’s also cheaper for the people who live there. Having a shared wall means you lose less heat in winter, reducing your heating cost. Being able to walk or ride most places means you don’t need a car, or maybe your family which would have had 2 cars now only needs 1, which dramatically reduces your transportation cost. (Seriously, an average car costs tens of thousands of dollars per year in petrol, maintenance, and the upfront cost. It’s a huge financial burden.) And, obviously, because of the above paragraph, your personal council tax/rates bill will be lower.
I’m not talking about everyone living in soviet-style concrete blocks, either. The ideal form of development is medium density. 2–3 storey townhouses and duplexes, 3–5 storey comfortable walk-up apartments. With modern building standards these are incredibly comfortable and quiet.
If that isn’t your intention, then i’m sorry, but i’m not the only one getting the same vibe, and i genuinely not sure why you bring out extreme condition where other mode of transport doesn’t work either.
Montrealer here. When roads are unplowed, cars also struggle. When it’s too cold, cars also struggle.
I live at the top of a gentle slope and as soon as it starts snowing, cars are slipping and sliding down the slope. There’s even a famous video of exactly this kind of thing, with cars, buses, police and snow plows just sliding down the slope.
Cars need very well maintained roads to work in winter. Those roads can also be used by bikes. And if you plow bike paths and bike lanes, just like we do for cars, cycling in winter is usually no big deal. Sometimes while cars are slipping down I can observe cyclists being able to climb the same slope. Or they just push the bike up on foot and continue on their way.
I use my bike in winter and can assure you that it is working.
Addendum: I am a simple man. When is starts snowing I just sit by my window and watch cars struggle to go uphill. In fact, I record it.
Also, just to continue on your points. It’s not -30C every day and snow here is usually plowed within a few hours, AND removed within a few days. Extreme weather is extreme, and one should avoid driving in during heavy snowfall anyway. So either you’re on a bike, or in a car that you must dig out of a snow bank, or using public transit, if the weather is extreme, everyone is going to have a less than perfect day.
Furniture gets moved by bike here all the time in the Netherlands ? We got this amazing invention called a bakfiets (tub bike) or we just balance it on the back.
Bicycle trailers are a thing for a reason. I’m sure hauling a washer and dryer would be difficult but a sofa is easily achievable. For heavy stuff most places offer delivery for free or really cheap
You can stack at least 3 crates on the back of the bike if you have a bag carrier, 2 otherwise. Then 1 or 2 on the bar between your legs, and 1 on the steering bar, or 2 if you also have a bag carrier there.
Ebike recommended if they’re full, but it’s way doable when bringing them back to the store.
I live in the very non flat south East of the Netherlands. We still do everything on bike. Groceries, mail, like 4 children while carrying groceries and being on the phone.
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