214
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
214 points (96.5% liked)
Fuck Cars
11120 readers
245 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 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Hot take: you DON'T.
The vast, VAST majority of current car drives can best be replaced by PUBLIC TRANSIT, not walking or cycling.
The anti-car fixation on cycling is actually doing a disservice to the necessary transition away from cars. Cycling at its heart is and always will be a leisure activity for the vast majority of people. Every dollar currently spent on cycling infrastructure and lobbying could do an order of magnitude more good if it was spent on better public transit instead.
When public transit is good, it naturally makes cycling more likely. But that's a side benefit. Public transit itself should be the focus.
This is exactly right. Americans need to ask why nobody is driving in big European or East Asian cities. It's not because they're all on bicycles! It's because they're on subways and trams which come every 90 seconds.
As far as I'm aware there are literally TWO small weird exceptions to this rule (Netherlands and Denmark - developed countries where people really do cycle a lot). America needs to forget about them and look at the vastly more common situation in countries where people don't drive, like China, Japan, Germany, France and so on.
There are cities in Europe where 30 to 50% of the population ride bikes to train stations or even directly to work
Yes, in the Netherlands and Denmark, as I mentioned. Nowhere else in the whole world.
~~American comment~~
This came off kinda rude, I didn't mean for it to be. I'm gonna leave it in the interest of transparency though
True, my statement applies to anywhere public transit is lacking, which is most of America (and many other countries). If your country already has good public transit, it doesn't apply.
On the contrary, it's countering a misconception of privileged Americans.
How are Americans privileged? Most Americans live in poverty (pay check to pay check, struggle to afford nutritious food, struggle to afford healthcare), they don't have the freedom of walkable cities or quality public transit, they live in constant fear that they can be fired without warning or cause, etc.
Americans don't even have a democracy or the freedom to unionize (without being fired and blacklisted). All we had was cheap consumer junk and nice national parks, but Trump is ruining both
Was talking about the privileged 20% of Americans for whom none of that is an issue, who ride fancy bicycles to their coffeeshop remote jobs and who imagine that what works for them personally is a replacement for proper public transit.