Public Transit my beloved ๐
Public Transit my beloved ๐
I hate point 2 and 3.
I have an avarage travel of 45-55 minutes from my home city to the city I work in. By car and by train, while the train is usually on the slower end. It takes about 20-30 minutes to get from my home to the train station by taking the bus or riding the bike. When taking the bus I also have to factor in about 15 minutes between arrival at the station and departure of the train. Then there is another 20 minutes from the train station at destination to my place of work. So it takes me 40-65 minutes longer taking the trainโฆ twice a day, making it 1:20-2:10h a day (when Im lucky bc trains over here have frequent delays). One hour ish doesnโt sound like much? Well youโll feel it if you working 11-12h a shift or a 9-10 hour a day in a normal 9 to 5 job (starting work at around 7 a.m.).
Then there is a neat little think called night or late shifts. There is no way Iโm gonna take the train here. They either take an hour longer or the bus at my home city does not drive anymore on the way back.
Demand better public transportation. Demand functioning trains and frequent bus and tram connections. But do not tell people that need to take the car for whatever reason, that they should just take the worse option and make them feel like the problem.
I hate cars. I hate driving. And I love taking the train or taking the bike within my city. But sometimes I just have to take the car. That is not my fault tho, since public transportation is not the main focus of politics over here. And thats what needs to change globally.
When I switched from using the bus to going by bike, i cut my commute time by more than half. If I were to take the car, it would halve again. Public transport is great, and necessary. But it will never be faster than a personal car for anything but large distances.
If I rode my bike to work, my shift would be over by the time I got there. I'm really starting to like the idea of biking to work.
I'm in Vancouver, while the system needs some improvement, the skytrain gets me right to the airport, with trains every few minutes. No parking nonsense. Driving, with traffic, is much longer. Bussing has some express routes so the trips aren't so many stops also. until the system wxpands develooment the consideration is looking for a place nearer a stop or station.
A bike is faster in my city if you are decently fast, but a bus or trolley is faster than cars during rush hours, because we have public transit lanes, so while everyone in their tin cans is stressed yelling at the dumbass who just cut them off im breezing past, listening to a podcast, meditating or catching a quick ten minute nap before work.
I tried taking my family out on a weekend on transit. 40 minutes wait for a bus that had any room, an hour to travel 10km, and it cost us $10 each way for the family. I live in a major city but our transit is trash. It's not fit for a city of this size.
That sounds horrible. Public transportation is such a vital thing for citys to function properly as a place to live and not just work in. And dont get me started on small towns or the countryside where not owning a car basically means youโre fucked. I cannot wrap my head around how politicians just fail to see this. Climate change might be the most urgent, but by far not the only argument for better public transportation.
How likely is it that your home and work are 20 minutes away from train stations because your region prioritizes cars?
Its not just likely, thats the case. But living in the inner city is expensive here. And thats the case in most of the country.
This is one of my favourite meme format for some reason.
This memes community should be named 'Wannabe Activitists"
Literally
I'd love to see someone bring a shopping cart amount of groceries on a bus or train
You don't. If you live where cars are not needed, e.g. Tokyo, you'll just walk to your nearest small grocer and get the ingredients you need. That's what I did when I stayed in Japan for work.
So you have to essentially grocery shop before every meal? That doesn't sound super efficient. Especially when cooking for a family.
This also still doesn't help with throwing like a big party where you need a large amount of food.
Edit: So yes, all the responses are basically shop every day. I wish I had that kinda time.
The reason you haul entire shopping carts at once is because the trip to the grocery store is a big planned deal. Thatโs also the reason people buy bulk items and then let half of them expire.
The โidealโ for bikers and train riders would be easier, quicker trips to small stores to get ingredients for the next few days. I find Iโm able to fit most of my needs into one pannier.
This changes sharply if you're buying for more people than just yourself.
The reason I haul entire shopping carts at once is because I don't want to waste time shopping every day. A big 2-hour haul per month vs. 1-2 20-minute trips to the local corner konbini every day. Plus some of the bigger bulk stores deliver (this is Hinode, Tokyo; rural ones probably don't).
Buying in bulk is far less expensive: you pay less (duh), but you spend a lot less time on it too. If I'm buying groceries just-in-time and the nearest shop doesn't have the ingredient I need that day, I have to go to a different shop for that one item. Lots of time wasted, and a lot of stress on top. You can't change your mind later either, because you've already bought ingredients for that one meal. So I prefer to have things buffered in stock, and resupply in advance. You also use far less plastic packaging that way, e.g. buying a 25-liter premix syrup canister instead of hundreds of coke bottles.
I've done that. You just bring something appropriate to carry it in.
Although now that I live closer to a smaller grocer, I just walk twice.
I will say that I've been able to bring 3-4 grocery bags onto a bus, which is enough to last me around 2 weeks. I've done this fairly consistently (basically whenever it's too cold/snowy to bike) for the last couple years. It might not be possible for a family without more than one person making the trip, but for an individual it can definitely work.
In civilized countries, it's common. Even on bicycles, by the way.
Buses where I live have a cargo rack at the front. If you had four bags of shopping (though that's really quite a lot - the bags are big) you would tie the tops closed and leave them in one of the racks until you reached your destination
Why would anyone do that?
This is ok though, going once per 14days for that 90% of stuff and having your car for that is ok. Otherwise if you run out of something, hop to your nearest store. Also here some of my friends and family are not reachable via public transport so I use car for that. But dont use it for commute every day, going to the beach/mountains every weekend, going to the store every other day, taking kids to school and back etc. For many this is completely doable but people are lazy
I have my own cart that I walk to the store with, I never have much trouble with it, and itโs super useful when I need to get heavy things like milk. Iโve never brought it on the metro as Iโve never had any reason to, but it would not be too difficult to do so. Itโs no more difficult than carrying a suitcase or two to the airport.
Grocery delivery is quick and cheap to 99% of UK. Also I've been on a bus plenty of times with enough shopping to last two humans a week.
Problem is the people who have 5 mouths to feed and want enough food for 3 weeks. In that case, get a delivery
Am from Germany and went to Nuremburg to visit a convention.
The public transit is night and day between those two places.
Only had to wait about <10min for the next bus.
I believe the accomodation is not very outside or inside of the transit serving area but it is surprising what a subway and a good schedule can do for one."Stop driving cars because places were not supposed to be driven to." Wow that's a good point /s
Engineers designed these roads, not urbanist.
Traffic engineering isn't a university program and we're still using studies from the 50's to dictate our traffic engineering. It's civil engineers in NA who are forced to follow outdated policy which maximizes for car traffic flow, regardless of body count or overall flow of poeple across all transit options. Generally, city planners are all for public transit and walkable and bike able cities but have to battle with politicians appealing to suburbanites with cars.
I don't understand why this is such a hard thing for people and government to understand. Your car isn't going to a place, you and the stuff you need to carry are. The car is just the means and there are many other means to do so, they just get a lot less attention and funding. Cars and traffic infrastructure have been subsidised for over a century now. Of course cars more developed, and of course we build our cities for cars, we're socializing cars.
Yes, there are many areas that have been developed so car focused that it's a necessity to own a car. People living in rural areas will always need personal cars. People in urban and suburban areas probably don't and should give up their personal vehicles so Farmer can keep theirs.
Traffic engineers are hilariously bad at their jobs in the U.S.
Great meme and even better because its true.
Imagine getting driven everywhere and still choosing doing it on your own. These people need Steam Decks, I tell you.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannonball_Run_challenge
Are you sure about that second one?
And here i thought it was just a funny movie all hese years!
From my understanding, the movie is pretty close to what actually happened.
all the mad car lovers in the comments lmao
I love how people just come up with this shit with their knowledge of their local area. Any train here requires driving to, and does not come and go frequently, and takes longer. Our infra is terrible.
On the flip side, some places have awesome infra and I wish I had that. I'd prefer to pedal bike if I could. But where I'm at you're very likely to be killed without bike lanes or sidewalks, and it would take hours to get anywhere important - IE work.
I wish people didn't assume we know what country they live in when the reference "here".
Also mobility issues factor in. There is no better way for such people to get around. This anti-car movement is ableist.
Yet again, this is not a meme. This is an idealogical pamphlet. I don't even disagree with the message. But it's not a meme.
Also, the ideology I agree with but I swear these "memes" are made by the deranged. It's the kind of handwritten scrawl you expect to see taped to lampposts by the guy who wanders around with empty tincans cellotaped to his patchwork hat
yes, that's the point. the first one was about how math is just nonsense.
Cool lemme just build a train really quick to my work, great idea
Like I get what this is saying and all, and I will vote for anyone who supports this kind of thing, but telling me not to drive my car is not the solution.
PLACES WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE DRIVEN TO
Says who? Is there some natural law when the universe was created that said mankind are not allowed to drive?
YEARS OF BUILDING CAR INFRASTRUCTURE yet NO DECREASE IN OVERALL TRAVEL TIME
Ok you go and set off on foot on a 200km journey, and a car sets off at the same time to get to the same place, who will get there first?
Want to go somewhere fast? We have a vehicle for that; It's called a "TRAIN"
Trains are great at moving people / goods between urban areas, but are awful (obviously) for point-to-point journeys. Want to the doctors fast? Can't exactly get on the the train directly outside your house to the front door of the doctors. I like trains, I use them where I can and always use them whenever I go into the office, but you cannot seriously suggest using trains to totally replace cars, it's so ridiculous that I'd swear you've never even seen one.
"i am DRIVING my...."
Not sure what's deranged about it? In fact that case is very valid as you're likely to have a lot of shopping (two weeks worth) that you'd really struggle to carry on public transport. It might have a bit more authenticity if you said it was just to get some bread and milk.
I get the sentiment, we should totally be trying to reduce our car usage and planning our urban environments to favour walking, cycling and public transport, but the fuckcars community on here are totally deranged. Your arguments look ridiculous and aren't going to convince anyone.
It's a rehash of a meme about math it's not really making thee points in earnest.
There does seem to be a high proportion of city dwellers wondering why somebody who lives four miles from the nearest shop that sells something more substantial than Budweiser and crisps would need a car...
Was there ever any doubt that people who dislike cars live in walkable cities? They can't conceive that someone could live in another place that doesn't have the same infrastructure they do. The idea of being out in the middle of nowhere with 40 acres of land doesn't even cross their minds because to them everyone lives in an urban environment or should be able to make the same solutions work.
It's also weird that they classify getting groceries for two weeks as strange, like do you guys not have natural disasters? You just buy groceries for the next day? What do you do when the shelves go bare during things like Covid or a hurricane? I guess you turn into looters, since you apparently think planning for anything beyond the next day is "deranged." God forbid someone has some extra rice and beans to get through a period of logistics failure.
Excellent discourse right there
People responding to the meme that needing cars isn't evil, and is required for many areas, are missing the point of the meme.
The meme is complaining about areas we built that can exist as they are only if everyone owns a car. If we weren't so consumerist, and if white people could better tolerate living near black people, we wouldn't have so much of the population living in suburban areas where cars are so necessary. A lot more people would live in circumstances where public transport is more viable for them.
And, of course, some shade thrown at the car buyers who buy comsumptively-extreme cars to do piddling stuff in. The number of basic sedans that can be had with 200+hp engines, or F150 pickups with massive gas-guzzling engines, that only get used for surface road driving one or two people around, is pretty ridiculous.
The main wrong thing about the meme is that it's assuming our situation was created specifically so that evil corporations could sell cars and gas... no, they're profiting from, and exacerbating, the problem of white flight from cities. Most of the country's problems come in large part from racism first, and then profiteering on top of that.
We were not supposed to go to the moon! Years of building rocket infrastructure and yet nobody other than a select few people have gone to the moon!
Stop building rockets!
To be fair going to the moon wasnt about going the moon. It was about proving you could deliver mutual destruction wherever you wanted through general rocket superioririty
And yet very few people actually get to launch nukes these days. One rule for them and another for us.
Yeah I want to go to the shops and back faster than a trip to the moon thanks.
Stop doing physics! Motion was not meant to be analysed.
convert that speed from nautical miles to miles please
let me calculate the snap, crackle and pop of that missile
Statements dreamed up by the utterly insane.
"I would love to live here"photo looks like a typical suburb - with a population density that is at a level where everyone still needs to own a car. I'm thinking European cities like Bern. Most people don't need one to get to work but basically every household still needs one for non-work use.
Car-free population density should be more like minor Japanese cities (like Kanazawa, etc), or old towns in Europe (downtown Bordeaux).
car apologists are seething
ye but what if i have to go to a tiny village that has no public transport nearby
Trains are good for short distances, like going to work.
When you compare trains to planes, why would you take a train for a long distance journey? It takes much longer to get there and it's also more expensive.
Depends on what you call short distance and where you live
When I travel a lot of the time train is (definetly) cheaper but also more convenient and faster (up to like 500km).
I live in the country and shop for two weeks. OP can eat a dick. Unless they are into that, then they can eat something they don't like.
Lol yeah, who would want their own personal vehicle they can use to go where they want and on what route they want without having to share with total strangers who can and will hurt you when you can ride the filthy, bedbug-ridden, urine-soaked train next to the crazy homeless guy jacking off right in front of you?
Thinking anyone who has ever seen violence on a bus or a train gives a shit
You're not going to sway anyone into giving up their autonomy just because you don't like the way they live. If you're so butthurt about it, why wouldn't you just band together with the other NPCs, put a pot of money together, buy a shitload of land out in the boonies, incorporate it into a separate county and just build a walkable city of your own?
But you won't, because you're too lazy, selfish, and lack initiative, and that's why you'll never get the world you want.
total strangers who can and will hurt you when you can ride the filthy, bedbug-ridden, urine-soaked train next to the crazy homeless guy jacking off right in front of you?
What post-apocalyptic hellscape do you live in? And here I was, thinking I live in a third-world country.
Cars are fine, they're just a terrible default for everyone.
If only public transport was actually a usable replacement for using a car. Hint: It isn't.
In the next town, the mayoress claims to like bikes, and "reforms" the city. So far all she managed were some cheap fixes like painting bike paths on roads and making some key connections useless for non-bike traffic. Which led to - more car-traffic, as now many cars have to drive nearly once around the city to reach their destination. What it didn't lead to - a significant move to use of bikes and public transport, as the bike paths are not really safe and mostly patchwork, anyway, and public transport is too expensive and basically useless to anyone from outside the city.
I'm not against a bike-friendly city. But you can have good implementations and seriously bad ones.
And asking people to "stop driving cars" is a very narrow-minded and stupid idea from the start. There are a lot of reasons to drive a car. I mean, do you expect that they stock the supermarkets with cargo bikes? Do you want to force old people who cannot use the tram as it has high and steep stairs for entries to, what, walk into the city? Do you think the plumber or electrician will come to fix your flat with all the tools on a bike?
This "stop driving cars" is an idea cooked up by young and able people who live in the city and usually don't leave it. Who maybe use a bike to ride to the next shop two roads over, or to university. And who actually can go on even longer rides occasionally, if they must. They have nothing better to do. Those who bear not much responsibility and drive, well, like bikers in a city, feeling overconfident and ignorant of the risk of dangerous driving behavior.
The pedestrian-friendly cities I know often allow vans and trucks to resupply stores on the walking streets, even if normal traffic is disallowed. Theyโre also encouraged to deliver in the morning.
Trying to point the issue to disabilities is often extremely counter-intuitive; itโs often hard for disabled people to use a car for everything (picture wheelchair transfers every time), as well as walking across huge parking lots or inside megastores. Itโs often far better if they can just make it to a small store directly without excessive worry about high-traffic crosswalks. Public transit is often wheelchair accessible by default.
The mindset of completely banning cars is not one Iโve joined up with; as you say, contractors or the slim minority of workers transporting heavy goods should likely still be using cars. But that experience of driving is often terrible when every single person (on their own with no heavy cargo) is using a car for every trip.
But that experience of driving is often terrible when every single person (on their own with no heavy cargo) is using a car for every trip.
OK, but what would be the alternative? Especially for those living outside and entering the city either for work of for shopping?
When I was young, I went basically everywhere by bike, as I neither has a car, nor could I afford public transport (which would have cost me about 60% of available money). So I went to work and back on my bike (15km each way), and then to university and back in the evening (another 20km each way). Well, that was when I was young. Nowadays, this is no longer an option.
I don't expect people to commute 20+km a day by bike. A safe bike garage at a P+R place would be nice and reduce at least part of the way by bike, but it does not exist. And public transport, well, at this P+R, there are good connections into the cities, but they have a low frequency and take quite some time, apart from costing a shitload of money for what they offer.
Are you braindead or just a rightwinger? It's difficult to tell, sometimes.
Have you ever heard about other countries existing? Not everywhere is a car-centric shithole.
I don't live in that car-centric shithole. So much for assumptions.
And I take calling me "rightwinger" as a serious insult.
There are cities in my country that managed to strike a good balance between cars and bikes. E.g. with continuous bike paths and stuff like that. But most cities here have two problems: They simply jump short with bike paths and leave safe bike access as a crazy patchwork on the city map, making it more or less useless. And they keep public transport back because it actually costs money.
I've nothing against bikes. Occasionally I rant against stupid and irresponsible bikers, of which there are too many, and that give normal bikers a bad name. I would love to see bike-friendly cities, but I also see cities stumbling around like a beheaded chicken when it comes to implementation.
So, as long as public transport is no usable alternative, a city has to deal with cars as a means of people coming into a city as workers and customers. The alternative would be a city that completely relies on local people. Might be environment friendly, but simply not realistic. They just don't have the purchase power to keep a cities businesses alive.
All correct, and points made that have virtually no rebuttal, so they just downvote you out of spite. Here's my upvote.
Their comment is missing the point. It essentially boils down to "the current infrastructure is bad" which is entirely what people advocating for less car centric design have been saying for a long time, but instead of using that as a reason to advocate for better they're using it as a reason not to do anything
Thanks.