this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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Fuck Cars

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A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!

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[–] observes_depths@aussie.zone 54 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I think there was at least one case where the city went broke maintaining roads and everyone left. That was a success.

[–] Deceptichum@quokk.au 27 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That was my every childhood game of SimCity.

[–] JayleneSlide@lemmy.world 11 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

My back was to put in rail everywhere with zero roads. People constantly complained about wanting roads, but there was never any congestion. And the desire for roads never seemed to affect anything.

[–] DrDeadCrash@programming.dev 2 points 1 day ago

Having been on a small town board, the truth is roads are funded at the state level (may vary by state) with funds distributed to the county governments, who maintain the county highways. The towns and cities get some amount from the county and more from the state to be used for anything highway related.

If this were not the case, and all else being equal many rural towns would go under. Private transportation is currently being subsidized at rates sometimes much higher than the property tax income the towns bring in. It's unsustainable and barely working like everything else, it's like long term vision is irrelevant and only short term gains are even considered....

[–] Gamechanger@slrpnk.net 22 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Examples of the opposite. The Braess-Pardox Enjoy!

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 16 points 2 days ago

CityNerd did a video explaining why this happens. It's because city planners and traffic engineers assume that the same proportion of people will drive in the future, just that there will be more of them. So if you assume everyone's still going to drive you have to build more lanes because everyone will drive.

[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 11 points 2 days ago

North American cities don’t build a lot of roads. Instead, they build stroads. Stroads are the worst of all worlds: ugly, noisy, unsafe, polluted, congestion-causing abominations.

[–] resipsaloquitur@lemmy.world 13 points 2 days ago

90% of city planners quit one lane before fixing traffic forever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWeFw0I-igI

Robert Moses needs to be more (in)famous as the pioneer of this kind of bullshit. The Power Broker by Robert Caro is a must-read book for anybody that wants to know how the US got so fucked up.

[–] hperrin@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 days ago

It works exactly as intended, to drive sales of cars.

[–] FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Yup. They're just going to add tolls to some of the lanes and make you pay more to use what you already paid for anyway.

Congestion pricing, on the other hand: observably a good policy.

[–] hildegarde@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 2 days ago

I call them bribery lanes.

[–] aeronmelon@lemmy.world 11 points 2 days ago

Doubles as the shelf where she keeps her fucks.

[–] jsomae@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] vithigar@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago

Some of that, probably, but also poor road planning combined with Braess' paradox.

[–] lugal@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 days ago

Just one more study bro

[–] ksigley@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

I think Veritadism just put out a video explaining some paradox about this topic.

Well, they're adding one more lane right now here for busses only...

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