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I'd just like to add some context: People seem to be talking about this much more now because of the prominent placement of the r/fuckcars subreddit's parking

I'd just like to add some context: People seem to be talking about this much more now because of the prominent placement of the r/fuckcars subreddit's parking lot on the r/place canvas. If the whole fuck-cars premise or really anything about not owning a car, replacing car lanes with bike lane etc, sounds really radical/non-sensical to you, please spend some time on the Not Just Bikes YT channel, read a bit of r/fuckcars or r/lowcars and try to approach this with an open mind. I come from a rural European area, so some of the stuff these people say sounded a bit extreme to me, but you have to realize that some US/Canadian cities are absolute hellscapes compared to what we imagine a "city" to look like.

thanatos519 5y ago
I dread the idea of moving back to .ca from .nl for exactly this reason. Hellscape is right.
pm90 5y ago
Absolutely. Cities can be beautiful and livable and affordable and pollution free. Currently most US cities are not. Most Americans have to own cars or other vehicles just to get around. It doesn’t have to be that way.
ericmay 5y ago
I agree. I don’t see why we have to force ourselves to live with 2-3 car households, insane taxes to pay for the upkeep of roads, and dependency on oil, gas, plastic, car manufacturers, and all of this other stuff when we could just build better neighborhoods. It’s mind-blowing. Americans in particular go to Europe “wow it’s so awesome here I could totally live here!!” And then it’s like they land back home and their mind is wiped clean. We don’t have to not have cars either. Why not 1 car per household for most people and most of your day-to-day activities within a few miles? You could bike, ride a street car, walk, any number of things. You can still live in rural areas and have a truck. I like trucks and acreage too! Just stop dictating that we have to have life this specific, obviously bad way.
- Victerius 5y ago
  In order to have neighborhoods where cars are not required, you need density. That means fewer single family homes and more apartments. Many Americans have underdeveloped social skills and don't want to be/live near other people. Fortunately, in a country of 330M people, it is impossible for every household to be kings of their little kingdom, as house prices are teaching us. And, yes, I attribute the desire of some to go out of their way to avoid the company of others entirely on underdeveloped social skills. We are humans, not wild beasts, and we should not shun our fellow humans.
  - antattack 5y ago
    Many Americans have noisy and inconsiderate neighbors.
    - geraldwhen 5y ago
      I hated every apartment I ever lived in. Dear god, why do apartments allow dogs? Or music at 3am. Or anything. When I bought my first house, the first thing I noticed was the silence. I could finally relax.
      - ericmay 5y ago
        Yea until spring time. Then it’s endless lawn mowers, leaf blowers, drag racing, dirt bikes, and all sorts of other loud noises. Can’t keep the windows open because it’s too loud.
      - hombre_fatal 5y ago
        HOAs get a lot of hate, but they were the only recourse I had against neighbors who became hostile when I tried talking to them politely about their 24/7 barking dog in the adjacent lawn. It’s weird how socially acceptable it is to have a pet noisemaker in your backyard, and how socially unacceptable it is to have an issue with it.
        5y ago
zdragnar 5y ago
And then go to cities that implemented lightrail and bike lanes and got rid of some car parking to do it. Talk to the business owners there. None of them have recovered to anything like the preconstruction levels of business... And those are the ones who survived the long closure of the road to put it in. At least, that's the takeaway from the metro nearest me. At least they got a couple of shiny new luxury apartment buildings out of it. Maybe the hope is to gentrify all of the poorer businesses out to be replaced with hipster shops that won't complain.
- rhn_mk1 5y ago
  The article establishes that business owners are not the most reliable source on the impact affecting themselves. Got any actual data?
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    I drove through the area I'm thinking of a few weeks back. Maybe 40% of the businesses that were there before are gone, but much has happened in the past few years. I know of 5 that definitely closed because of it, at least 8 more that were torn down (including a grocery store and a Walmart) to put up a field for a soccer team right on the line (which may or may not have been built without the light rail going in). 3 more that I can think of didn't make it to COVID, but they were probably struggling beforehand and might not have survived anyway. YMMV.
forrestthewoods 5y ago
I feel bad for people who lives in cities without a car. It's sad life. You're stuck in a tiny bubble defined by a handful of transit stops. This is true in New York, London, and Paris all the same. Public transit is slow and shitty in every city in the world. If you compare travel time by foot to subway the subway merely cut it by 50%. Subways are about as fast as a moving sidewalk. The "better" a city's public transportation the longer the average commute time of workers. Spending two hours a day on the train isn't living. (Nor is spending two hours a day in a car.) I also refuse to accept that dense cities are cheaper than the alternative. Everything in a city costs 10x and takes longer. London's water pipes leak about 25% of their water. Replacing these pipes is effectively impossible. I'm hoping remote works kills the dense mega-city and lets people spread out a bit more.
- thatfrenchguy 5y ago
  You must live in the suburbs. Even in slow transit San Francisco, taking the bus is always faster, never mind Paris.that’s not counting we’ll never meet our climate goals with suburbs.
  - forrestthewoods 5y ago
    > that’s not counting we’ll never meet our climate goals with suburbs. Nonsense. It's perfectly possible for us to achieve clean energy and clean transport.
    - ryukafalz 5y ago
      “RMI analysis indicates that the United States must reduce VMT by 20 percent before the end of the decade to limit warming to 1.5°C—and this remains true even under ambitious EV adoption scenarios.” https://rmi.org/our-driving-habits-must-be-part-of-the-climate-conversation https://rmi.org/our-driving-habits-must-be-part-of-the-clima...
      - forrestthewoods 5y ago
        Nonsense. The source article is discussing, without sharing their supporting evidence, the transition to EVs. If 100% of vehicle miles were driven by EVs charged with clean energy there would be no need to reduce mileage. We're talking about city design for the next hundred years. Not the transition to EVs over the next 5 to 20 years. Clean energy and clean transportation is possible. Some might even say it's inevitable. Once achieved there is no existential requirement to reduce vehicle miles.
jimmaswell 5y ago
I think bike lanes, pedestrian access, and other transportation options are great - I bike where I can these days for health - but ultimately most people /want/ to drive everywhere if they can afford to, otherwise cars wouldn't have taken off in the first place. They had bicycles through most of the 1800s and people generally chose to maintain a horse if they could. People seem to generally want to be able to go far, with little effort, directly where they want, independently. In this vein I think the improvements in ebikes will probably help drive more popular will for bike lanes. But I really don't see many people being convinced to give up cars.
- Ma8ee 5y ago
  I don’t want to drive everywhere, and I have chosen to live where I rarely have to drive. And I’m not alone. The first bicycle that looks somewhat like a modern bicycle was from around 1880. And many people prefer the car for the simple reason that car infrastructure has been prioritised.
- Scarblac 5y ago
  I think many people /want/ to drive everywhere, but at the same time would prefer to live in the kind of place you get when /not everyone/ constantly drives everywhere (if they had some experience with such places). There's a tragedy of the commons here.
- toss1 5y ago
  Your comparison in the 1800s about horses vs bikes omits consideration of the condition of roads - it wasn't until very late that cyclists started succeeding in getting roads more paved. This development was also of course welcomed by motorists who also demanded more paving. Now both are competing for space on those paved roads.
- ryukafalz 5y ago
  You're neglecting the decades of government policy that built out infrastructure for cars specifically, and neglected other modes of transportation. Of course people are going to drive if the government is pouring billions into making driving fast and convenient while transit, bike infrastructure, and dense housing are either neglected or actively undermined.
antattack 5y ago
I lived car free for couple years, until had a first kid. Carrying child car seat with you gets old very quickly. And, in winter time, biking is not only unpleasant but dangerous (or rather more dangerous than in summer). Even if it's only for 3000km a year, our lives, kids lives (and their activities) and business we bring would be negatively affected if we had no car.
- wardedVibe 5y ago
  It's fundamentally an infrastructure problem. Not just bikes has a good video on finnish biking https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU, and the difference is bike paths in the us/Canada usually get treated as a leisure, rather than an essential service.
  - hbrav 5y ago
    Man, the way bike paths, and even sidewalks, get treated in Canada is so frustrating. The city's instructions on shoveling your stretch sidewalk tell you that you must not shovel it I to the road... and then the city snowploughs come by and push a load of snow onto the sidewalk that you've already shovelled. There were places this winter where the sidewalk was impassable due to several feet deep on compacted "snow boulders" from ploughs. I get that you need to allow car access, but not at the expense of pedestrians being able to walk anywhere.
    - wardedVibe 5y ago
      The mere fact that the sidewalk isn't public property maintained by public works says a lot about the transport priorities.
kkfx 5y ago
I generally that those "against car ownership" are just PR and PR-convinced guys, really, that's not intended as an insult but as an (hopefully) open minded consideration: - those who work and live in a "small" area, witch means in bike/foot range for anything do consume far less, yes, but to sustain those sober lifestyle many others run on km and km on gasoline trucks & other transports means; - European style cities (where from I came from, switched to a mountain area few years ago) are a nightmare in the modern world because being dense means being unable to evolve. There is no room to change because there is no space to move and when something exceptional but not so exceptional happen is a disaster; - most tend to think living in apartments, very concentrate is efficient, like a big factory tend to be more efficient than various little and spread, that's false actually. Environmental costs of tall buildings is FAR superior to many equivalent (even bigger) single-family homes, those buildings demand structure and infrastructure that single home do not need at all and not only: as dense cities they can't evolve. So we can build a "A-class state-of-art" building today, in 100+ years it will be the same building, probably in a dangerous shape, very inefficient and can't be rebuilt. We need a certain density because transportation costs and social life, idea sharing etc demand a bit of aggregation but we all know pushing aggregation is a vary bad move. Actually the dominant idea is "small and smart cities" but even these can't really scale because today we can build them (well, at a hyper-big cost) for today needs, tomorrow we will be still unable to evolve them because of density. IMVHO the sole scalable model is the Riviera one, where living and working buildings are spread together but residential parts are single-family home with enough room to be rebuilt on generational change, and factories except for those who demand a certain size, can be single-purpose areas so something that can be rebuilt at a certain point in time with enough ground around to do so. That's also have another positive aspect: it stop the possibility to concentrate to many people in small places making them nightmare like many modern city-states. In the Riviera model we have schools like campus where students can aggregate to develop ideas and social life, but again they are single-purpose complexes so easy to rebuilt/change as needed, there is a bit of travel but not too much, a bit of aggregation perhaps less effective than a dense city one, but without risk to became too dense etc. In medio stat virtus. A lesson too many forget.
drstewart 5y ago
>so some of the stuff these people say sounded a bit extreme to me Excuse me? If the whole fuck-cars premise or really anything about not owning a car, replacing car lanes with bike lane etc, sounds really radical/non-sensical to you, please spend some time on the Not Just Bikes YT channel, read a bit of r/fuckcars or r/lowcars and try to approach this with an open mind.
scoofy 5y ago
I'll second this advice. https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes I'm a longtime mod in the /r/bicycling subreddit and have been a transit-alternatives advocate for years in 3 major cities, I'm a member of the lefty SF bike coalition, and am also a fan of strongtowns that leans toward the right side of the spectrum. This shouldn't be a left or right issue. I'd be happy to answer any questions about this topic. We a former football quarterback was killed today because of dangerous pedestrian infrastructure. We lose 100 people in America per day due to, trivial fixable, dangerous automobile infrastructure. It's a death toll we happily ignore, because it's better to just not think about it. https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/04/09/dwayne-haskins-dead/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/04/09/dwayne-hask...
- tomger 5y ago
  Sadly WaPo article doesn’t mention that the quarterback was killed by a truck. https://archive.ph/2022.04.09-161113/https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/04/09/dwayne-haskins-dead/ https://archive.ph/2022.04.09-161113/https://www.washingtonp... The article does link to a local newspaper that mentions the cause of death. https://wsvn.com/news/local/broward/dump-truck-fatally-strikes-pedestrian-along-i-595-wb-lanes-in-fort-lauderdale/ https://wsvn.com/news/local/broward/dump-truck-fatally-strik...
  - 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
    They apparently edited the article at some point to mention the truck in the lede: > Dwayne Haskins, an NFL quarterback drafted by Washington and on the roster of the Pittsburgh Steelers, died Saturday morning after being struck by a truck in South Florida. He was 24.
- steelframe 5y ago
  > I'm a longtime mod in the /r/bicycling subreddit I was a Reddit mod for a while, but after I reflected on the fact that Reddit pulls in nearly $200MM in yearly revenue thanks part to my unpaid labor where I primarily deleted Youtube video spam posts and idiotic flame wars in comment threads, I decided to spend my time and energy elsewhere. The next logical step was to stop contributing anything at all of value to Reddit. So every once in a while I'll visit a few subreddits to see if anything new or interesting happens (i.e., sort by Top for the last month). Unfortunately for r/bicycling I find the content to pretty much just be, "Hey everyone check out this picture of my bicycle!" If it's the goal of the sub to advocate for cycling infrastructure, I question how the top posts from just this past month accomplish that. * Check out this picture of my bike in the Ukraine! * Check out another picture of my bike in the Ukraine! * Truck driver slows down and stays behind cyclist going through a rather long tunnel with no shoulder to keep said cyclist from what seems like certain death otherwise * Cyclists near bike storage in the Netherlands lining up to leave the station * Cyclist climbing a steep hill * Cyclist forcing protesting trucks in DC to go slow * Check out this picture of my bike! (And I'm depressed!) * Check out this picture of my bike! * Silly stationary bike that actually moves * Check out this picture of my bike! * Cyclist holding up a line of traffic on a remote mountain road * Cyclists riding gravel * Check out this picture of my bike I got for cheap! * Check out this picture of my bike! * Calvin and Hobbes comic about bike/car drama * Video of flying down a remote mountain road * Picture of a mostly-empty bike storage room * 50-ish mile bike ride map * Video of a cyclist riding around for 60 miles * Tesla crashed into a shop with a sign against bike lanes * Check out this picture of my bike! And I rode 100 miles Anyway, you get the idea. r/bicycling could be so much more, but for some reason few visitors there seems to care much about anything except people posting pictures of their bikes, and for a lot of what gets upvoted, I just don't see why it's really even all that novel or interesting. I don't know how to fix that, or whether it's even really worth trying to fix. Like I said, I'm a jaded former mod on Reddit who just doesn't see much anything virtuous coming out of that platform.
RivieraKid 5y ago
> People seem to be talking about this much more now because of the prominent placement of the r/fuckcars subreddit's parking lot on the r/place canvas. I don't think r/place has caused this. There has been a massive increase in an anti-car sentiment in the last few years. Maybe the cause is people staying home more often now, so they care about whether their neighbourhoods are nice?
- SteveDR 5y ago
  I heard of “r/fuckcars” for the first time a few days ago, and I’ve seen it mentioned ~4 times since then, and I’ve never visited r/place. From my perspective it seems like r/place has boosted this topic’s prevalence. Kinda cool.
  - Firmwarrior 5y ago
    r/fuckcars is really suspicious I saw it a couple of times on my semi-nightly super deep Reddit trawls, it was a sub with a few hundred people. Then suddenly a few days later it exploded and took over the site I've only seen that happen before with political subs, and I'm pretty sure those were coordinated offsite by bot armies (at least, I'd assume it's impossible for 50,000+ people to suddenly jump into brand new subs and rocket them to the frontpage a couple of days after they're created without some coordination) edit: Ah, maybe it is organic.. I have to admit that I do really hate cars. If the news blasted us every time someone dies in a car accident the way it does for guns, maybe more people would hate them.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  That's because there's been a huge, sustained rise in pedestrian and cyclist injury and general reckless driving through the pandemic. Many cities relaxed traffic enforcement during the pandemic because cars are such an important part of the American transportation framework. This lead to predictably horrific consequences for non drivers and drivers alike.
rmason 5y ago
Detroit has the concept of twenty minute neighborhoods and they've created several. The idea is the basics of what you need are all within a twenty minute walk. The idea is unless you're doing something out of the ordinary you won't need to use your car. Or even own a car. They have executed pretty well with one glaring exception. Nearly everyone needs a weekly supermarket visit. Until fairly recently the city had no supermarkets for a population of 650,000 people. Recently a Whole Foods opened downtown as well as a couple of supermarkets on eight mile on the edge of the city. Those eight mile supermarkets were created to cash in on a multi-million dollar incentive offered by the state. However it was poorly worded, so while they're technically in the city the suburbs are right across the street. Many affluent highly educated people live in downtown Detroit and are forced to own a car so they can travel to the edge of the city to buy groceries. https://detroitgreenways.org/twenty-minute-neighborhoods/ https://detroitgreenways.org/twenty-minute-neighborhoods/
- FerociousTimes 5y ago
  What about grocery delivery services in the city like Instacart?
- wasmitnetzen 5y ago
  There's no intrinsic need to use a car for your weekly groceries, if the infrastructure is built accordingly. A lot of European families in big cities manage that without having a car.
  - lovemenot 5y ago
    Even framing shopping as a weekly activity is inherently car-biased. A family of four consumes more in a week than could realistically be hand-carried in a single trip by both parents. Better to do shorter and more frequent visits on foot or bicycle. Combined with delivery services which are much more resource efficient than private cars for this purpose.
    - namibj 5y ago
      Yeah, 1-2 trips a week with a cargo backpack do the trick, for the person carrying said backpack. Bonus: replaces some gym visits.
mdoms 5y ago
I think you're vastly overestimating the cultural impact of reddit on the general public. This is a huge talking point in New Zealand right now and I promise you it has nothing to do with /r/fuckcars which even I, a Reddit user, had never heard of.
young_hopper 5y ago
I have lived in a US city with pretty decent public transportation without a car for several years until recently. The problem is just complete lack of flexibility. Want to do anything an hour out of the city - you're either begging for a ride or trying to fight the absurdities of renting a car. I now live in a cheaper area, more outside the city where it makes even more sense to own a vehicle, and its definitely worth it. All that being said, all of the shops I most frequently patron are walkable from my home or work.
DoneWithAllThat 5y ago
“If you don’t agree with my position, spend some time listening to my side’s propaganda.” Not Just Bikes and StrongTowns is not where one should go to educate themselves, because those sources are highly, highly biased.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
hellscapes? lol. I've been to Europe several times, the cities there have their own problems. I never have problems getting around a city in either place.
seanp2k2 5y ago
My favorite is Detroit and their absolutely ridiculous approach to planning the city, which was along the lines of “hue hue hue hue let’s make it look like a wheel and spokes!!” then only a decade later “hmm wait never-mind”, leading to an awful mishmash of design ideas resulting in a downtown that is basically impossible to drive. Luckily, no one really goes downtown in Detroit since the riots in the 60s, otherwise the traffic would be terrible. https://detroitplanninghistory.weebly.com/1700-1900.html https://detroitplanninghistory.weebly.com/1700-1900.html This was fun too: https://panethos.wordpress.com/2020/11/22/the-worst-failures-of-american-urban-planning/ https://panethos.wordpress.com/2020/11/22/the-worst-failures... They also displaced whole neighborhoods to build highways and bridges https://www.luc.edu/eminent-domain/siteessays/detroitmi/ https://www.luc.edu/eminent-domain/siteessays/detroitmi/ Add in the collapse of the American auto industry that was keeping Detroit relevant and these days it all adds up to be a place I never see myself going back to in this lifetime, and an example of how bad in so many different ways a city can be. Bonus: they have an above-ground train that goes between places no one actually ever goes between https://gizmodo.com/i-spent-a-day-on-the-world-s-most-pointless-transit-sys-1723996796 https://gizmodo.com/i-spent-a-day-on-the-world-s-most-pointl... it’s like if BART went between the SAP Center and Levi’s Stadium with no other stops.

thanatos519 5y ago

I dread the idea of moving back to .ca from .nl for exactly this reason. Hellscape is right.

pm90 5y ago

Absolutely. Cities can be beautiful and livable and affordable and pollution free. Currently most US cities are not. Most Americans have to own cars or other vehicles just to get around. It doesn’t have to be that way.

ericmay 5y ago

I agree. I don’t see why we have to force ourselves to live with 2-3 car households, insane taxes to pay for the upkeep of roads, and dependency on oil, gas, plastic, car manufacturers, and all of this other stuff when we could just build better neighborhoods. It’s mind-blowing. Americans in particular go to Europe “wow it’s so awesome here I could totally live here!!” And then it’s like they land back home and their mind is wiped clean. We don’t have to not have cars either. Why not 1 car per household for most people and most of your day-to-day activities within a few miles? You could bike, ride a street car, walk, any number of things. You can still live in rural areas and have a truck. I like trucks and acreage too! Just stop dictating that we have to have life this specific, obviously bad way.

Victerius 5y ago
In order to have neighborhoods where cars are not required, you need density. That means fewer single family homes and more apartments. Many Americans have underdeveloped social skills and don't want to be/live near other people. Fortunately, in a country of 330M people, it is impossible for every household to be kings of their little kingdom, as house prices are teaching us. And, yes, I attribute the desire of some to go out of their way to avoid the company of others entirely on underdeveloped social skills. We are humans, not wild beasts, and we should not shun our fellow humans.
- antattack 5y ago
  Many Americans have noisy and inconsiderate neighbors.
  - geraldwhen 5y ago
    I hated every apartment I ever lived in. Dear god, why do apartments allow dogs? Or music at 3am. Or anything. When I bought my first house, the first thing I noticed was the silence. I could finally relax.
    - ericmay 5y ago
      Yea until spring time. Then it’s endless lawn mowers, leaf blowers, drag racing, dirt bikes, and all sorts of other loud noises. Can’t keep the windows open because it’s too loud.
    - hombre_fatal 5y ago
      HOAs get a lot of hate, but they were the only recourse I had against neighbors who became hostile when I tried talking to them politely about their 24/7 barking dog in the adjacent lawn. It’s weird how socially acceptable it is to have a pet noisemaker in your backyard, and how socially unacceptable it is to have an issue with it.
      - 5y ago

zdragnar 5y ago

And then go to cities that implemented lightrail and bike lanes and got rid of some car parking to do it. Talk to the business owners there. None of them have recovered to anything like the preconstruction levels of business... And those are the ones who survived the long closure of the road to put it in. At least, that's the takeaway from the metro nearest me. At least they got a couple of shiny new luxury apartment buildings out of it. Maybe the hope is to gentrify all of the poorer businesses out to be replaced with hipster shops that won't complain.

rhn_mk1 5y ago
The article establishes that business owners are not the most reliable source on the impact affecting themselves. Got any actual data?
- zdragnar 5y ago
  I drove through the area I'm thinking of a few weeks back. Maybe 40% of the businesses that were there before are gone, but much has happened in the past few years. I know of 5 that definitely closed because of it, at least 8 more that were torn down (including a grocery store and a Walmart) to put up a field for a soccer team right on the line (which may or may not have been built without the light rail going in). 3 more that I can think of didn't make it to COVID, but they were probably struggling beforehand and might not have survived anyway. YMMV.

forrestthewoods 5y ago

I feel bad for people who lives in cities without a car. It's sad life. You're stuck in a tiny bubble defined by a handful of transit stops. This is true in New York, London, and Paris all the same. Public transit is slow and shitty in every city in the world. If you compare travel time by foot to subway the subway merely cut it by 50%. Subways are about as fast as a moving sidewalk. The "better" a city's public transportation the longer the average commute time of workers. Spending two hours a day on the train isn't living. (Nor is spending two hours a day in a car.) I also refuse to accept that dense cities are cheaper than the alternative. Everything in a city costs 10x and takes longer. London's water pipes leak about 25% of their water. Replacing these pipes is effectively impossible. I'm hoping remote works kills the dense mega-city and lets people spread out a bit more.

thatfrenchguy 5y ago
You must live in the suburbs. Even in slow transit San Francisco, taking the bus is always faster, never mind Paris.that’s not counting we’ll never meet our climate goals with suburbs.
- forrestthewoods 5y ago
  > that’s not counting we’ll never meet our climate goals with suburbs. Nonsense. It's perfectly possible for us to achieve clean energy and clean transport.
  - ryukafalz 5y ago
    “RMI analysis indicates that the United States must reduce VMT by 20 percent before the end of the decade to limit warming to 1.5°C—and this remains true even under ambitious EV adoption scenarios.” https://rmi.org/our-driving-habits-must-be-part-of-the-climate-conversation https://rmi.org/our-driving-habits-must-be-part-of-the-clima...
    - forrestthewoods 5y ago
      Nonsense. The source article is discussing, without sharing their supporting evidence, the transition to EVs. If 100% of vehicle miles were driven by EVs charged with clean energy there would be no need to reduce mileage. We're talking about city design for the next hundred years. Not the transition to EVs over the next 5 to 20 years. Clean energy and clean transportation is possible. Some might even say it's inevitable. Once achieved there is no existential requirement to reduce vehicle miles.

jimmaswell 5y ago

I think bike lanes, pedestrian access, and other transportation options are great - I bike where I can these days for health - but ultimately most people /want/ to drive everywhere if they can afford to, otherwise cars wouldn't have taken off in the first place. They had bicycles through most of the 1800s and people generally chose to maintain a horse if they could. People seem to generally want to be able to go far, with little effort, directly where they want, independently. In this vein I think the improvements in ebikes will probably help drive more popular will for bike lanes. But I really don't see many people being convinced to give up cars.

Ma8ee 5y ago
I don’t want to drive everywhere, and I have chosen to live where I rarely have to drive. And I’m not alone. The first bicycle that looks somewhat like a modern bicycle was from around 1880. And many people prefer the car for the simple reason that car infrastructure has been prioritised.
Scarblac 5y ago
I think many people /want/ to drive everywhere, but at the same time would prefer to live in the kind of place you get when /not everyone/ constantly drives everywhere (if they had some experience with such places). There's a tragedy of the commons here.
toss1 5y ago
Your comparison in the 1800s about horses vs bikes omits consideration of the condition of roads - it wasn't until very late that cyclists started succeeding in getting roads more paved. This development was also of course welcomed by motorists who also demanded more paving. Now both are competing for space on those paved roads.
ryukafalz 5y ago
You're neglecting the decades of government policy that built out infrastructure for cars specifically, and neglected other modes of transportation. Of course people are going to drive if the government is pouring billions into making driving fast and convenient while transit, bike infrastructure, and dense housing are either neglected or actively undermined.

antattack 5y ago

I lived car free for couple years, until had a first kid. Carrying child car seat with you gets old very quickly. And, in winter time, biking is not only unpleasant but dangerous (or rather more dangerous than in summer). Even if it's only for 3000km a year, our lives, kids lives (and their activities) and business we bring would be negatively affected if we had no car.

wardedVibe 5y ago
It's fundamentally an infrastructure problem. Not just bikes has a good video on finnish biking https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU, and the difference is bike paths in the us/Canada usually get treated as a leisure, rather than an essential service.
- hbrav 5y ago
  Man, the way bike paths, and even sidewalks, get treated in Canada is so frustrating. The city's instructions on shoveling your stretch sidewalk tell you that you must not shovel it I to the road... and then the city snowploughs come by and push a load of snow onto the sidewalk that you've already shovelled. There were places this winter where the sidewalk was impassable due to several feet deep on compacted "snow boulders" from ploughs. I get that you need to allow car access, but not at the expense of pedestrians being able to walk anywhere.
  - wardedVibe 5y ago
    The mere fact that the sidewalk isn't public property maintained by public works says a lot about the transport priorities.

kkfx 5y ago

I generally that those "against car ownership" are just PR and PR-convinced guys, really, that's not intended as an insult but as an (hopefully) open minded consideration: - those who work and live in a "small" area, witch means in bike/foot range for anything do consume far less, yes, but to sustain those sober lifestyle many others run on km and km on gasoline trucks & other transports means; - European style cities (where from I came from, switched to a mountain area few years ago) are a nightmare in the modern world because being dense means being unable to evolve. There is no room to change because there is no space to move and when something exceptional but not so exceptional happen is a disaster; - most tend to think living in apartments, very concentrate is efficient, like a big factory tend to be more efficient than various little and spread, that's false actually. Environmental costs of tall buildings is FAR superior to many equivalent (even bigger) single-family homes, those buildings demand structure and infrastructure that single home do not need at all and not only: as dense cities they can't evolve. So we can build a "A-class state-of-art" building today, in 100+ years it will be the same building, probably in a dangerous shape, very inefficient and can't be rebuilt. We need a certain density because transportation costs and social life, idea sharing etc demand a bit of aggregation but we all know pushing aggregation is a vary bad move. Actually the dominant idea is "small and smart cities" but even these can't really scale because today we can build them (well, at a hyper-big cost) for today needs, tomorrow we will be still unable to evolve them because of density. IMVHO the sole scalable model is the Riviera one, where living and working buildings are spread together but residential parts are single-family home with enough room to be rebuilt on generational change, and factories except for those who demand a certain size, can be single-purpose areas so something that can be rebuilt at a certain point in time with enough ground around to do so. That's also have another positive aspect: it stop the possibility to concentrate to many people in small places making them nightmare like many modern city-states. In the Riviera model we have schools like campus where students can aggregate to develop ideas and social life, but again they are single-purpose complexes so easy to rebuilt/change as needed, there is a bit of travel but not too much, a bit of aggregation perhaps less effective than a dense city one, but without risk to became too dense etc. In medio stat virtus. A lesson too many forget.

drstewart 5y ago

>so some of the stuff these people say sounded a bit extreme to me Excuse me? If the whole fuck-cars premise or really anything about not owning a car, replacing car lanes with bike lane etc, sounds really radical/non-sensical to you, please spend some time on the Not Just Bikes YT channel, read a bit of r/fuckcars or r/lowcars and try to approach this with an open mind.

scoofy 5y ago

I'll second this advice. https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes I'm a longtime mod in the /r/bicycling subreddit and have been a transit-alternatives advocate for years in 3 major cities, I'm a member of the lefty SF bike coalition, and am also a fan of strongtowns that leans toward the right side of the spectrum. This shouldn't be a left or right issue. I'd be happy to answer any questions about this topic. We a former football quarterback was killed today because of dangerous pedestrian infrastructure. We lose 100 people in America per day due to, trivial fixable, dangerous automobile infrastructure. It's a death toll we happily ignore, because it's better to just not think about it. https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/04/09/dwayne-haskins-dead/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/04/09/dwayne-hask...

tomger 5y ago
Sadly WaPo article doesn’t mention that the quarterback was killed by a truck. https://archive.ph/2022.04.09-161113/https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/04/09/dwayne-haskins-dead/ https://archive.ph/2022.04.09-161113/https://www.washingtonp... The article does link to a local newspaper that mentions the cause of death. https://wsvn.com/news/local/broward/dump-truck-fatally-strikes-pedestrian-along-i-595-wb-lanes-in-fort-lauderdale/ https://wsvn.com/news/local/broward/dump-truck-fatally-strik...
- 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
  They apparently edited the article at some point to mention the truck in the lede: > Dwayne Haskins, an NFL quarterback drafted by Washington and on the roster of the Pittsburgh Steelers, died Saturday morning after being struck by a truck in South Florida. He was 24.
steelframe 5y ago
> I'm a longtime mod in the /r/bicycling subreddit I was a Reddit mod for a while, but after I reflected on the fact that Reddit pulls in nearly $200MM in yearly revenue thanks part to my unpaid labor where I primarily deleted Youtube video spam posts and idiotic flame wars in comment threads, I decided to spend my time and energy elsewhere. The next logical step was to stop contributing anything at all of value to Reddit. So every once in a while I'll visit a few subreddits to see if anything new or interesting happens (i.e., sort by Top for the last month). Unfortunately for r/bicycling I find the content to pretty much just be, "Hey everyone check out this picture of my bicycle!" If it's the goal of the sub to advocate for cycling infrastructure, I question how the top posts from just this past month accomplish that. * Check out this picture of my bike in the Ukraine! * Check out another picture of my bike in the Ukraine! * Truck driver slows down and stays behind cyclist going through a rather long tunnel with no shoulder to keep said cyclist from what seems like certain death otherwise * Cyclists near bike storage in the Netherlands lining up to leave the station * Cyclist climbing a steep hill * Cyclist forcing protesting trucks in DC to go slow * Check out this picture of my bike! (And I'm depressed!) * Check out this picture of my bike! * Silly stationary bike that actually moves * Check out this picture of my bike! * Cyclist holding up a line of traffic on a remote mountain road * Cyclists riding gravel * Check out this picture of my bike I got for cheap! * Check out this picture of my bike! * Calvin and Hobbes comic about bike/car drama * Video of flying down a remote mountain road * Picture of a mostly-empty bike storage room * 50-ish mile bike ride map * Video of a cyclist riding around for 60 miles * Tesla crashed into a shop with a sign against bike lanes * Check out this picture of my bike! And I rode 100 miles Anyway, you get the idea. r/bicycling could be so much more, but for some reason few visitors there seems to care much about anything except people posting pictures of their bikes, and for a lot of what gets upvoted, I just don't see why it's really even all that novel or interesting. I don't know how to fix that, or whether it's even really worth trying to fix. Like I said, I'm a jaded former mod on Reddit who just doesn't see much anything virtuous coming out of that platform.

RivieraKid 5y ago

> People seem to be talking about this much more now because of the prominent placement of the r/fuckcars subreddit's parking lot on the r/place canvas. I don't think r/place has caused this. There has been a massive increase in an anti-car sentiment in the last few years. Maybe the cause is people staying home more often now, so they care about whether their neighbourhoods are nice?

SteveDR 5y ago
I heard of “r/fuckcars” for the first time a few days ago, and I’ve seen it mentioned ~4 times since then, and I’ve never visited r/place. From my perspective it seems like r/place has boosted this topic’s prevalence. Kinda cool.
- Firmwarrior 5y ago
  r/fuckcars is really suspicious I saw it a couple of times on my semi-nightly super deep Reddit trawls, it was a sub with a few hundred people. Then suddenly a few days later it exploded and took over the site I've only seen that happen before with political subs, and I'm pretty sure those were coordinated offsite by bot armies (at least, I'd assume it's impossible for 50,000+ people to suddenly jump into brand new subs and rocket them to the frontpage a couple of days after they're created without some coordination) edit: Ah, maybe it is organic.. I have to admit that I do really hate cars. If the news blasted us every time someone dies in a car accident the way it does for guns, maybe more people would hate them.
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
That's because there's been a huge, sustained rise in pedestrian and cyclist injury and general reckless driving through the pandemic. Many cities relaxed traffic enforcement during the pandemic because cars are such an important part of the American transportation framework. This lead to predictably horrific consequences for non drivers and drivers alike.

rmason 5y ago

Detroit has the concept of twenty minute neighborhoods and they've created several. The idea is the basics of what you need are all within a twenty minute walk. The idea is unless you're doing something out of the ordinary you won't need to use your car. Or even own a car. They have executed pretty well with one glaring exception. Nearly everyone needs a weekly supermarket visit. Until fairly recently the city had no supermarkets for a population of 650,000 people. Recently a Whole Foods opened downtown as well as a couple of supermarkets on eight mile on the edge of the city. Those eight mile supermarkets were created to cash in on a multi-million dollar incentive offered by the state. However it was poorly worded, so while they're technically in the city the suburbs are right across the street. Many affluent highly educated people live in downtown Detroit and are forced to own a car so they can travel to the edge of the city to buy groceries. https://detroitgreenways.org/twenty-minute-neighborhoods/ https://detroitgreenways.org/twenty-minute-neighborhoods/

FerociousTimes 5y ago
What about grocery delivery services in the city like Instacart?
wasmitnetzen 5y ago
There's no intrinsic need to use a car for your weekly groceries, if the infrastructure is built accordingly. A lot of European families in big cities manage that without having a car.
- lovemenot 5y ago
  Even framing shopping as a weekly activity is inherently car-biased. A family of four consumes more in a week than could realistically be hand-carried in a single trip by both parents. Better to do shorter and more frequent visits on foot or bicycle. Combined with delivery services which are much more resource efficient than private cars for this purpose.
  - namibj 5y ago
    Yeah, 1-2 trips a week with a cargo backpack do the trick, for the person carrying said backpack. Bonus: replaces some gym visits.

mdoms 5y ago

I think you're vastly overestimating the cultural impact of reddit on the general public. This is a huge talking point in New Zealand right now and I promise you it has nothing to do with /r/fuckcars which even I, a Reddit user, had never heard of.

young_hopper 5y ago

I have lived in a US city with pretty decent public transportation without a car for several years until recently. The problem is just complete lack of flexibility. Want to do anything an hour out of the city - you're either begging for a ride or trying to fight the absurdities of renting a car. I now live in a cheaper area, more outside the city where it makes even more sense to own a vehicle, and its definitely worth it. All that being said, all of the shops I most frequently patron are walkable from my home or work.

DoneWithAllThat 5y ago

“If you don’t agree with my position, spend some time listening to my side’s propaganda.” Not Just Bikes and StrongTowns is not where one should go to educate themselves, because those sources are highly, highly biased.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

hellscapes? lol. I've been to Europe several times, the cities there have their own problems. I never have problems getting around a city in either place.

seanp2k2 5y ago

My favorite is Detroit and their absolutely ridiculous approach to planning the city, which was along the lines of “hue hue hue hue let’s make it look like a wheel and spokes!!” then only a decade later “hmm wait never-mind”, leading to an awful mishmash of design ideas resulting in a downtown that is basically impossible to drive. Luckily, no one really goes downtown in Detroit since the riots in the 60s, otherwise the traffic would be terrible. https://detroitplanninghistory.weebly.com/1700-1900.html https://detroitplanninghistory.weebly.com/1700-1900.html This was fun too: https://panethos.wordpress.com/2020/11/22/the-worst-failures-of-american-urban-planning/ https://panethos.wordpress.com/2020/11/22/the-worst-failures... They also displaced whole neighborhoods to build highways and bridges https://www.luc.edu/eminent-domain/siteessays/detroitmi/ https://www.luc.edu/eminent-domain/siteessays/detroitmi/ Add in the collapse of the American auto industry that was keeping Detroit relevant and these days it all adds up to be a place I never see myself going back to in this lifetime, and an example of how bad in so many different ways a city can be. Bonus: they have an above-ground train that goes between places no one actually ever goes between https://gizmodo.com/i-spent-a-day-on-the-world-s-most-pointless-transit-sys-1723996796 https://gizmodo.com/i-spent-a-day-on-the-world-s-most-pointl... it’s like if BART went between the SAP Center and Levi’s Stadium with no other stops.