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Car dependency is an enormous burden on the least well off

• noduerme 3y ago
  Yes, that's true! Which is a way of affirming my original point, that biking to work is for the most privileged.
• bluescrn 3y ago
  Imagine what would happen if the cars all disappeared, and suburban living was no longer viable. To eliminate the car, we'd need to move all of humanity into tiny apartments in super-dense cities, something that isn't practical nor desirable given the current design of cities and the current state of society. (There's also the issue of 'where does food come from?', and the fact we can't fully automate farming yet, so still need people to live and work where the food is produce, in places where cars are essential)
  • JoeAltmaier 3y ago
    That bit about farming is perhaps less relevant. Fewer than 2% of us farm. That part of the car equation is small. Oh, and we could live in villages. Like we did before cities grew into such megaliths. That might work too.
    • bluescrn 3y ago
      We can't go back to villages and working the fields by hand or with horses for the same reason we can't go back to living in caves and hunting/gathering. There's simply too many people now.
      • JoeAltmaier 3y ago
        That's further than I meant to suggest. There's plenty of land, plenty of places for people that aren't mega-cities. Those of us out here know that. And my commute? Down the hall to my computer. Put small towns on train lines, the car issue is lessened. Make the shopping districts walkable, again lessened. I do use a car out here - to get to a city center where I walk from then on. A train or bus would have worked too.
        • SoftTalker 3y ago
          > I do use a car out here - to get to a city center where I walk from then on. Is that appreciably different from driving to a mall and then walking through it to do your shopping? A quaint downtown square with a hardware store, a grocer, a butcher, and a barber shop is nostalgic but doesn't serve large populations as well.
          • JoeAltmaier 3y ago
            The city center I walk has two malls, 20 coffee shops, 100's of businesses. Art, museums, outdoor parks with bandstands. Some people live there and rarely leave. Pretty different from driving to one mall I guess. And who goes to 1 mall to do their shopping? I know people who visits three grocery stores and a big-box store to get their groceries. Different places have different stuff, different prices. I guess that's all part of the car mentality. Takes as long to walk a mall, as drive to another one. The village/train idea is, make geography meaningful. So you go to a place to do a thing, invest value in the activity.
  • pja 3y ago
    You are making a classic straw man argument of the form: ”I shall take the thing and crank it up to the max & insist that only instantaneous change happen to show how ludicrous that would be”. This is a wildly disingenuous argument! Incremental change is possible. Partial change is possible.
    • bluescrn 3y ago
      Increasingly popular slogans like ‘Just Stop Oil’ or ‘Fuck Cars’, or talk of imminent human extinction, don’t seem to be calls for incremental change, though.
      • sclarisse 3y ago
        I recall a billboard in New York asking us to ban cars and “reforest” all the roads, which would likewise seem to present hazards to local cycling