Fuck Cars - Tumblr Posts
Okay hear me out,
Screw walkable cities, that's not enough.
We need car-hostile cities.
Paved roads. Single direction streets. Traffic cones. Traffic cones everywhere /hj. Parking lots? None! (Unless you can afford 20$/hr parking)
Bring back trams!
- Electric*, but no battery.
- Takes up road space -> can't be used by cars.
*Ik cleanliness of electricity varies from plant to plant bc of energy sources, but... no soot!
This is a dumb rant about a dumb argument I had ages ago but I am still bothered sometimes by this really, really stupid in-person argument I had once about urbanism, cars, trains, etc. this one time with a person who had the most absurd argument you could possibly imagine. I was trying to explain how trains are much more efficient and safer than cars because you need like hundreds of cars to transport as many people as you would with one train, combine multiple train routes and you have an extremely safe and accessible city, and that trains are on tracks instead of being like a highway and there's this constant stream of cars with drivers with varying levels of care for road safety. And they tried to tell me that no? Trains are not actually safe? Huh? Wuh? I explained that yes, they are. You wait for your train and you get on the train and then it takes you where you're going and there is one very well-trained driver for the entire train. You don't have situations where a pedestrian has to to cross a busy street and worry about somebody in a lifted truck not even seeing the top of their head while they mow them down, and this person I'm arguing with tells me that no, it's not safe... because, and I'm telling you, they provided no other reason besides this... because it's super easy to off yourself by jumping in front of the train? And then they simply would not acknowledge me when I tried to get them to understand that the exact same thing is true of cars??? Any suicidal person will have--at the absolute very least--a completely equal opportunity to jump in front of a car as they will jumping in front of a train? In fact, cars are probably a lot more easy to jump in front of because they are absolutely everywhere? Like, even in cities with lots of trains... the street is right outside your door? It's so much easier to just step onto that? This person tried to argue safety statistics, despite both of us having none prepared, and I tried to explain to them that even if we had such statistics to go off of, that statistics about suicide are not the same thing as statistics about accidental deaths... And then they acted like I was being... super fucking insensitive about suicide? Like, no, I'm not!? Suicide is about mental health rather than physical safety?! For the love of god?! It's not insensitive to point out that killing yourself on purpose because of bad mental health isn't the same as killing yourself by accident due to the hazards of a physically dangerous environment?! Because... like... think through this argument with me, right? You can make the world safer to be in by making less hostile architecture, better accessibility, etc. But to factor in making sure that the world is also safe enough that a person who is suicidal would not be physically able to kill themself? Like??? Think about what you are saying?? Do you realize that that very much in fact means we would basically have to toddler-proof the entire outdoor world? Which, is both a practically impossible task as well as one that would make for a really boring dystopia novel? You can't just get rid of every tall building!? You can't just get rid of every cliff or ravine!? You can't just get rid of every single person's access to every single dangerous environment, substance, or object?! And somehow I was the bad guy for pointing out that suicide is a mental health issue rather than a safe urban design question? How!? How on earth were they making this argument with me when I was trying to explain that trains are safer than cars?
You know what else isn’t profitable? Highways. They make zero money and they cost money every ten years if we’re being optimistic AND YET no one brings this up when we discuss funding them.
Driverless trains are almost comically easy to automate compared to cares, since they have predefined path. Its just a problem of non-collision
Yes, it's important to be mindful of other's needs! Also:
- Cars are inaccessible to many people for medical or financial reasons. My best friend is not eligible for a license, and is not able to work most jobs. There's a reason for the strong history of disabled people fighting for mass transit access.
- Cars and their infrastructure are responsible for 25% of the emissions that are quickly eroding our ability to exist on Earth.
Which is why I believe that hating the machines themselves is both reasonable and necessary.
It's not that I hate cars, I do see them as a very useful tool for those not living in cities or just non-able bodied folk. But the amount of them in urban really pisses me off. You can't walk anymore.
Inaugural post, I’d like everybody to internalize that the Netherlands did not rise out of the primordial soup as a cycling paradise.
In fact in the 1950s and 60s we were pretty busy making plans to roll highways through cities, looking at cars as the ✨ future ✨ and trying to follow America’s lead - including hiring American planners, some of whom advocated flattening entire historic neighborhoods to do so (like plan Joniken). In the 1970s Amsterdam was deciding whether to rebuild a historic neighborhood that had been partially demolished to build the new subway or build a four lane road there, and the road plan was defeated by just one vote (crucially the wife of one of the councilmembers who voted to restore the old street layout was about to have her baby, but he stuck around long enough for the vote).
In the 1970s many Dutch streets were what I’d graciously term car gutters, cluttered end to end with traffic, and the number of traffic deaths kept rising, peaking in the early 1970s with about 3300 deaths - 400 of whom were children. There was a growing “damn we can’t keep living like this” realization
Amsterdam traffic in the 70s
People began protesting and advocating for change, including the admirably bluntly named “stop de kindermoord” (‘stop the childmurder’) campaign, among many others. These campaigns did stuff like block streets and hold dinner parties there, holding demonstrations and illegally painting lanes on the road at night, but also by identifying traffic bottlenecks and producing a huge report with practical solutions. It was a constant struggle and they had to fight for every street, but they got results and their progress is reflected in the official standards that all streets have to meet, which over the course of a few decades of regular street maintenance and redesigns meant the entire country steadily became bike friendly. The effects can be seen in the statistics (below are traffic deaths per year, divided by type of vehicle, red is cars, light blue is bikes, dark blue pedestrians). The proportion of young children who died in traffic also fell sharply. Don’t let yourself be fooled into thinking the Netherlands just emerged as a place with a cycling culture out of nowhere - people fought tooth and nail to get the cars to fuck off
"GET OFF THE ROAD!", you say?
Well if it's called that, then why are you droaving a cahr on it instead of roading a skapedord like me is? Checkmate, loser.
YOU'VE GOTTA FIGHT!
FOR YOUR RIGHT!
TO BIIIIKE LANES!
They're just salty I decided to get forcibly rendered into a soup-like homogenate by the rusted-out buick skylark down the block instead.
yes i go out of my way to drive safely around bicyclists, no i dont care about their human lives, i know the fucking perverts are desperately slavering to be slammed and crushed by the beautiful steel of an automobile, trembling and hot with death-drive that only the merciless fenders of my foreverially dealerplated altima can answer, and i simply refuse to give them release.
How to fix a suburb.
Step 1) build a transit line to a central location within it, one that people can walk to and from easily
Step 2) implement densification policies around the transit stop, such as infill housing, ADUs and low-rise apartments.
Step 3) allow for small businesses to open via mixed use construction, yard shops, and additional infill
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitution
WW2 was the start of the petroleum era, which means a shitload of energy to work with. Efficiency was no longer necessary in wealthy countries, so the question went from "How can we get more out of our resources" to "How much more can we get more get moregetmoregetmore?". Thrift goes out the window once you can snort a line of economic output directly into your brain hole.
I find it insane how we created the most efficient form of transport and then proceeded to switch it for the most inefficient form of transport, like, what happened did we all just collectively go into shock after WW2????
not to go all Unabomber but the Authority of the Machine really fucked us up
Me riding the bus: I'm such a transportationpilled public-transitcell :3 :3
Me driving a car: I HATE TRAVEL I HATE MOTORIZATION I HATE THE CONCEPT OF DISTANCE
being so fr with you all we need to drastically accelerate anti-car propaganda.
we need to make it so clear to future generations that we no longer tolerate a world where you cannot conveniently go for a walk or get a coffee or get groceries without a car
