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.
A perk of belonging to my city’s bike advocacy group is that you can rent this for no additional charge:
64″ aluminum truss-frame trailer; easily carry a 4×8 sheet of plywood, eight bags of groceries, or whatever else you can fit on it up to 300 lbs; holds 4 plastic tote boxes before stacking
Nosireebob, can’t haul stuff around with that… /s
My dad has a solid bike trailer. It’s not as big as your group’s one, but he can do about a WinCo shopping cart worth in it. That’s plenty for the vast majority of their household needs.
Trying to persuade the (amazingly) only contractors on the entire planet that think they need a tiny-penis truck because they occasionally need to pick up some wood from Howm Deeepo to ride a bike is like trying to get blood from a stone
People lived before cars, people will live without them.
Not if cars destroy the planet with us first.
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.
Your examples are cities that are hundreds of years old and we’re absolutely initially designed around walking.
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.
Okay. Great. Downtown is now walkable.
How do people get downtown?
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.
It just moves the traffic to the transit stations
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.
@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.Edited for clarity.
#texas #publictransit #tx #houston #waroncars #fuckcarsThere’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.
Also many pedestrianized streets allow for deliveries with larger vehicles! These just have to drive more carefully and slower for the last couple hundred meters. Usually just a city block or two.
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!
since cars man freedom from landlords to me
what a fucked up society we live in…
How?
Our housing supply is so shit that people have to sleep in cars.
And where I live, people were having too much fun living in vans, so they even made that difficult.
That’s one of the busiest intersections in Utrecht, especially in the weekend with buses, cyclists, pedestrians and some cars. It’s pretty easy to navigate too
This is one of the busiest intersections in Greater Victoria, British Columbia. Yes, it’s as awful as it looks. It also cuts in half what would have been a really great trail-rail. It’s like they just gave up.
Idunno, maybe they don’t get all’ their shit delivered in front? Maybe there are trucks in back instead of clogging up the front door that customers use to get in and buy things? Maybe there’s a damn train underneath all’ this! How 'bout that! Nyeehh!!! 😝
Looks at literally the front bike in the picture…
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.
Don’t remember where I heard it first, but I always love to hear it.
“Whenever someone brings up bikes, suddenly everyone needs to move their refrigerator 100 miles in the rain”
I’m gonna steal that.
You’re living up to your name, lol 😉
The solution? Rental vans…
It’s like people think they need mega trucks for the time once a year or less that they have to move a couch.
“But what about when I have to haul wood for my yearly porch renovation?”
“Rent a fucking truck!”
In this vein, I saw a comment on Lemmy that speaks to this. I’m paraphrasing but it really woke me up. The person said that Americans choose on edge cases and not standard use case. I realized I felt that way about ICE cars vs EV and I am a cyclist. It is amazing how we can have blinders on.
Have it delivered by the people selling you the wood.
“That’s so expensive!”, having big goods delivered costs a fraction of maintaining your own car…
or hitch a trailer…
It’s weird because all, and i mean ALL, furniture and electronic shop in my country will do delivery for you, most even do it for FREE.
Then there’s 3rd party delivery service via an app.
How do workers carry goods from the ports to the stores?
Did they forget what century we live in?
And here I thought roads were for people… I’m so silly
How often does one need to transport a sofa, table, or desk? That’s what delivery trucks are for, which is a legitimate use of that type of transportation.
The drugstore cowboys driving Dodge Rams clogging up the streets aren’t transporting anything more robust than a 12-pack of Mtn Dew and complaining about the price of gas
Oddly enough, the discussion is never on the other side.
“WHY DO YOU NEED BIKE LANES?! NO ONE IS EVER GOING TO RIDE A BIKE! JUST DRIVE!”
That person clearly hasn’t witnessed Dutch students carrying a whole bedroom on the back of their bike.
Moving out a whole apartment with bikes : https://youtu.be/qCraLSgVx6E?si=x_UZpk--c5Kkdgcu
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.
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.
-
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.
-
i must consume!!!
