Highway spending increased by 90% in 2021. This is one of many reasons why car traffic is growing faster than population growth.
Relevant xkcd:
50 people pureed and pressed into high-protien calorie-dense tiles:
It’s always relevant!
Hilarious 🤣!
see how efficient cars are (relative to human sized hampster balls)
Imagine seeing 69 random strangers walking down the street, densely packed in like that, for no reason. Just comin at you.
Finland: Oh look, tourists.
Are you saying that you DON’T walk that close to other pedestrians?
Average day in Mumbai railway stations
“Quick, say hello in Latin!”
Salvete!
You’ve never been outside your tiny town, have you?
A lot of those “highway programs” include things like removing barriers to aquatic organism passage, reducing congestion and emissions from the movement of cargo, and other things that don’t suck. It’s still weighed too heavily in favor of cars and highways for sure, but there’s more getting funded by the IIJA & IRA than just, like, freeways.
A lot
or two fifths of fuck all
Reducing congestion is mostly attempted by building and expanding highways, which is proven not to reduce congestion. The vast majority of the budget is spent on building and expending highways.
Are you not into
trainstrams?Does that make him tramsphobic?
We can’t be all trampholic (wait, why not?)
Explain to me how you solve the mass transportation issue in non metro areas. I live in Montana, where cities are an hour or three apart by vehicle, but even in said cities, outside of the main commercial areas, people are spread out. Like, really spread out. There is a single bus stop eight blocks from my house, with exactly four scheduled pickup/dropoff times. My kids go to school with other kids who live twenty miles away. Commercial rail doesn’t exist, except for a single cross-country Amtrak line with a station four hours away from here.
Images like this are illustrative, but they completely ignore the physical reality of how vast swathes of the US are laid out. You can’t just flip a switch and have bus stops on every corner and rail lines connecting your major cities and residential areas. That’s a massive undertaking that would cost way more in up front infrastructure than maintaining and augmenting existing highway program already does.
How do you change the culture away from cars where there is literally no realistic way to do it for 99% of people in areas like this? And how do you push for infrastructure change when there is no anti-car culture? It’s a chicken and egg problem where you have no chickens and you have no eggs.
- No one is expecting someone in Montana, hours away from others to give up their car. Although incorporating more of the externalized costs might incent some people to make other decisions.
- There’s always something we can do better.
Even the most remote area has some sort of gathering points that can be concentrated into a walkable area. Basically - when you drive your car to church, you should have the option of walking to a brunch place and a grocery store, picking up your niece arriving on Greyhound, and yelling at your local councilman, before driving back. You should have the option to do more with fewer trips
You can also connect rural towns by cycling routes. Some parts of Australia are doing this by adding cycling tracks to long-abandoned rail links (would be nice if some of these were used as rail again but that’s another story). Yes, not everyone is going to be willing and able to use these but it’s great for tourism, and even getting a small amount of people out of their cars now and then is a win.
Here too. I was just reading about a town in western Maryland giving financial incentives for people who move there, and one of the things they mentioned was a rail trail connected into DC, 184 miles. I guess they were trying to say it’s a rural town but you can still get into a city
Oddly enough, rail served more rural communities earlier on in the 20th century than they do now. This is due to disinvestment and the prioritization of personal vehicles. So not only is transit realistic, but it was the way for many railroad towns to be connected to each other and the rest of the country. Obviously that’s historical evidence, life is more complex now, but things can still be made to work with transit. Increasing bus frequency and coverage sounds like it would help your community.
Well you already expressed how to solve it. Issue is we have to think of a strong bus service and train service as a proper service rather than a for profit business. We can do it just we won’t.
Montana is around 147k square miles large it costs $1-2 million per track. We could cover every square mile of Montana for $147 billion which is half of the aid we have sent to Israel since it’s existence or 1/10 of our military budget. For $10 billion you can have train tracks every 15 square miles. For perspective there is 73k miles of public road in Montana supposedly.
If we brought all our troops back to the USA and used them as manpower and spent our military budget on infrastructure we could have 7 million miles of track laid in the last 10 years. For perspective we have 4 million miles of road in usa by quick glance.
The issue is solved at scale in cities. There is no need to change rural centers at the moment until the pressure is relieved where it will have the most effect. Maybe even freeing tax dollars for the state to help with rural areas instead of millions of intercity roads being damaged daily by large vehicles. Every dime you save in the city can be subsidized for rural areas if it is no longer needed. Or can be used to further assist struggling populations in the city. Everything that benefits people will find its way to also benefitting you in some way.
Hey fellow Montanan! Check out Big Sky Rail Authority’s arguments for implementing a southern passanger rail service, or think of the benefits of increased bus service connecting the larger Montana cities. We have main travel corridors across the state that could be greatly improved by a public transportation network, linking rural communities and connecting them to larger city centers. Combine that with local bus service, walkable communities, and biking infrastructure in places where it can be supported like Missoula, Bozeman, Billings, etc can improve traffic and livability of the towns. Also, think of the improvement to traffic conditions for people coming into town from surrounding rural communities if you can divert a good portion of traffic to public options. In a rural state like ours, there’s always going to be some need for personal vehicles, but there’s still lots of places where having more public transportation options could improve our communities and lessen our climate impacts. Sure, it’s going to look different than in other parts of the country, but still a lot of room for improvement around here.
Tha’st WRONG! That’s not how autonomous cars work!! They are AUTONOMOUS that mean you can get rid of (at least!) half the people and still have as many cars!
They are AUTONOMOUS that mean you can get rid of (at least!) half the people and still have as many cars!
Cruise’s robotaxis created a traffic jam in Austin, here’s what went wrong
According to the team at Cruise, the fleet ended up in a high-demand area, which also brought with it a slew of pedestrian and passenger vehicle traffic. As you can see in the video, one of the Cruise vehicles got stuck in an intersection while committing to a turn, thus further congesting traffic in three different directions.
Unfortunately, more and more Cruise robotaxis flooded the narrow Austin street to meet the peak demand, only to join in the traffic jam. But why were there so many robotaxis in this one specific area? Cruise states that at the time, there were limited routes going north and south through the city, and a detour from an alternative route led the EVs to the same doomed parkway.
Unfortunately, Cruise could not manually reroute the vehicles quickly enough, so there was nowhere for them to go.
Unfortunately, what you end up with automation is often more of a thing than what you actually need, as surplus saturates the market even when it isn’t desired. Rather than a single dedicated lane operating at maximum available capacity on a predictable schedule, you get a flood of functionally independent actors all congregating within a small area in an effort to maximize individual revenue.
Autonomous means you get more cars than there are people all contributing to the traffic that the people are looking to escape.
Agree. Transportation is a problem of flow maximisation. We won’t optimise the circulation in our system if we flood it with transportation machinery instead of focusing on the people.
Ah, but congestion creates scarcity and drives up prices. So there’s a perverse economic incentive to flood the system with machinery.
There is also an inventive to buy people expensive truck as personnal vehicule but I believe that people in this community are willing to look at the externalities.
You mean have twice as many cars as necessary! Let’s do it!
You actually need about half the cars if they are public.
People wouldn’t need a personal car if those autonomous cars were like taxis. Just tap a button and the nearest car will pick you up and deliver you exactly where you need to go, 24/7 from everywhere to everywhere.
It would be considered public transport.
I disagree. If you look again at the pictures, you will see that the subject is not car owners and their cars but rather people trying to move independently from their mode of transportation. If everyone is entitle to access an autonomous vehicle, then at any given point, you will need as much car as there is people. Despite the fact that some of the same people are not in a car but waiting for one. With personal car when the car is not used, it is kept away of the passage. Where an autonomous car, especially when use as public transport, will roam around town, clogging its arteries while empty.
You can reduce the problem by having the car stop for new people until its full (some countries taxies does that) but that’s not how the solution is sold to us. Self-driving car is sold as a way to keep moving in a five-seated vehicle even when along and having the vehicle kept driving even when fully empty.
TBF US highways are undermaintained and a collapse could endanger lives.
I’d rather have a railway expansion but we still gotta maintain whats been built.
It’s unsustainable. Your expectation for maintenance will not be met.
Expanding it is unsustainable. Maintaining major roads is not.
That is premised on the notion that the expansion that has happened until the present is sustainable.
It is moreso premised on the notion that highways and concrete passes/bridges have been recieving far insufficient maintenance for many years at a time.
I am not saying “replace every old road” I am just saying “keep important roads usable.”
Do you know what “triage” is?
killing people who use the roads will disincentivize the usage of roads.
Please go outside, I beg of you
instructions unclear: started walking in the center of the highway
Why are the cars spaced but the walking humans not?
Uh, they’re not? The cars are in fact much closer to one another than they could possibly be while moving at speed. They would only get this close to one another during a traffic jam. On the other hand, the walkers are entirely capable of moving in exactly the way they are pictured.
I understand your argument but there is a clear bias here. Unless youre in an exceptionally denly populated area, people dont travel this close to one another. Most leave at least 1-2 humans gap between eachother, especially if there are wheelchairs, kids and prams involved.
Thats all my argument was, the cars are spaced out per lane (albiet bumper to bumper) but the side to side space is not consistent with the walkers. You could fit cars in between the cars with how they are spaced in that pic. I live in a victorian town where the roads force you to drive wingmirror to wingmirror
Im on the fuckcars space here, trust me I agree cars need to be phased out/down but thats no excuse for bias in data
That and the fact that cars have a much bigger distance radius. So everything can be spaced out more.
15 minute walkable cities are cool. But lets not pretend like you can’t drive 2 towns over in 15 minutes by car to reach what you need.
Fuck cars, but that isn’t really an argument.
I completely agree, i live in a city where i can get everything within 15-20min walk. But unfortunately there are about 50-100 people within 25m of my living room at all times and i would rather have some space
You haven’t seen me walk buddy…
If you’ve ever tried to drive a car you’ll discover that you need to keep a relatively large distance between other cars, particularly when moving at high speeds in order to avoid crashes.
By contrast, when you’re moving through a crowd, you can get practically on top of someone else without risk of bodily harm.
Not me. I wear a Colin Furze style carrot slicer belt at all times. Watch a motherfucker try to ope right by me. Bitch gonna get cut.
I understand your argument but there is a clear bias here. Unless youre in an exceptionally denly populated area, people dont travel this close to one another. Most leave at least 1-2 humans gap between eachother, especially if there are wheelchairs, kids and prams involved.
Thats all my argument was, the cars are spaced out per lane (albiet bumper to bumper) but the side to side space is not consistent with the walkers. You could fit cars in between the cars with how they are spaced in that pic. I live in a victorian town where the roads force you to drive wingmirror to wingmirror
Im on the fuckcars space here, trust me I agree cars need to be phased out/down but thats no excuse for bias in data
The cars and walkers are both as close as they can safely be while moving?
Not sure where you drive, but those cars aren’t spaced at all- they’re very close to bumper-to-bumper, which you can only do at extremely low speeds that unrealistic for travel. Meanwhile, the people that are bundled together ARE actually capable of moving like that, though the average american (who has a larger ‘personal bubble’ that other cultures) would probably not like it.
Moreover, the car example could actually be worse than it appears- because they’re taking up all lanes of a road, so you’re assuming they’re coming AND going, which none of the other examples are assuming. If you did it properly, the line of cars would be two wide and twice as deep!
I understand your argument but there is a clear bias here. Unless youre in an exceptionally denly populated area, people dont travel this close to one another. Most leave at least 1-2 humans gap between eachother, especially if there are wheelchairs, kids and prams involved.
Thats all my argument was, the cars are spaced out per lane (albiet bumper to bumper) but the side to side space is not consistent with the walkers. You could fit cars in between the cars with how they are spaced in that pic. I live in a victorian town where the roads force you to drive wingmirror to wingmirror
Im on the fuckcars space here, trust me I agree cars need to be phased out/down but thats no excuse for bias in data
I understand your argument but there is a clear bias here.
Welcome to fuckcars. Nobody is here to have an honest or productive discussion, this place only exists to let people vent.
Yeah tbh it’s a problem of mine, I expect too much from the average user.
thanks for grounding me
Clearly they are spaced compared to the bus.
The car/bus comparison is useful, the others aren’t because they travel at different speeds.
Probably walking can still move more people than cars. If walking is 5 kph and driving is 50, people need to take 10x less space to break even. They probably do, as cars need to keep distance.
Well, it’s still a useful comparison for cities. Good traffic planning brings people into the city center via rail and buses, and then they make sure the city center is walkable.
That way, they can fit the most people into the city center, without it turning into a massive traffic jam.
The people are following this guy.
Alternatively, so they don’t get struck by vehicles.
Thinking of riding a bicycle so close to others at any speed scares me a bit.
Doing 50 that close to other cars would also be very uncomfortable.
Stay away from the Netherlands you’d have a heart attack
I think I’d be fine if I did it every day, heh. Cyclists in Japan are fairly nuts, but cycle infrastructure isn’t great here. Technically, only the young and elderly can ride on most sidewalks but there’s a basically-undefined carve out for “those who feel they cannot ride safely in the street” which means that nearly everyone gets on the sidewalk and nearly take out pedestrians all the time. This got really bad when uber eats first became a thing in Tokyo.
Hope that bus is going to 69 very separate locations some of which are at least 20 miles from the closest urban area and in opposite directions to accommodate those who cannot afford or don’t want to live in a city.
What you are dong there is actually an argument against the other side of the issue. Exclusively Residential zoning plans are what create the situation you are referring to and they also account for the constant risk of bankruptcy of car centric cities. Dense, multi-use zoning allows for the creation of transit corridors where a single bus stop can serve several hundred people within a 5 minute walk, instead of serving just a handful of people within a 20 minute walk (the problem you are complaining about).
Valid and I had not considered that.
However, this post is in “fuck cars” not “fuck poor zoning laws.” The solutions and complaints I see in this thread have NOTHING to do with remapping the way cities work, which would be necessary to even be able to consider saying “fuck cars” for the vast majority of suburban / rural residents.
The comments here seem entirely fixated on “solving” a symptom of a much larger problem by creating several more problems for other people because it would be more convenient for them.
And while your solution is nice for those in the city I ask again, what if someone lives 20 or 30 miles (not 20 mins walking) away because they can buy a 3 bedroom house in a neighboring city or unincorporated rural area for the price of renting a small studio apartment in the city, and have a nicer view.
They are both the same single problem. Remember that fuck cars is not about the hate of cars solely, but about the car centric infrastructure and its externalities on society. “Fuck cars” as a phrase is just the succinct summary of a largely complex and multifaceted social issue.
Thank you that’s a helpful explanation. I found (find) the name of the group misleading if that’s the case, though I understand group names are supposed to be catchy.
How is it misleading? It’s right there in the community description. It’s been this way ever since the time it was an advocacy community on reddit obsessed with the not just bikes YouTube channel. There are some issues that always come inextricably integrated, abortion and contraception, school shootings and gun laws, police violence and racism, and car centric culture and zoning laws. Without cars we don’t have the need for a slew of laws meant exclusively to accommodate cars. Overly wide streets, exclusive residential zoning, mandatory parking space, to name but a few. Sorry the community isn’t called fuckdetachedsinglefamilyhomes but it just wasn’t that catchy.
This person has never lived anywhere close to an actual small American town and has no idea how small towns are structured.
“What if things were better?”
“No, you imbecile, you absolute buffoon, things can never be better because they are the way they are”
“Here’s a solution”
“That solution doesn’t work for A LOT of people”
“Well you don’t think it’ll work for valid reasons you must not want anything to work ever”
“That solution doesn’t work for A LOT of people”
Mass transit is how you create large population centers. A big reason small towns collapse stems from the degradation of their incredibly expensive per-mile asphalt system collapsing under the weight of heavy trucks and eighteen wheelers. The cost of maintaining the road infrastructure cripples the municipal budget.
Commercial Rail takes that weight off the back of the local community. And busing allows for denser housing closer to the center of town, which saves money on everything from municipal plumbing to trash pickup to public schooling to health care delivery.
Historically, small towns have relied on centrally located city services to both fuel local commerce and keep cost of living down. The death of a small town’s city center is typically the prelude to the collapse of the township on the whole. That’s a fact people who actually live in these towns are keenly aware of. But it is routinely overlooked by big city suburbanites who think everyone in the family owning a $40k personal vehicle is normal and taking the bus or the bicycle into town is something rural communities are totally unfamiliar with.
I’m not a big city suburbanite nor can I afford a $40,000 car.
I’m not sure what small towns are collapsing under the weight of roads, though I’m sure its a problem for some.
Our biggest financial issue is an unnecessarily bloated police force. The state maintains the major roads here and many smaller roads are private, dirt, maintained by an HOA, etc. Though yes, some areas have some potholes, though not nearly as bad as those in large cities I visit like Memphis or Louisville.
Also small cities, within the town center are perfectly walkable and small enough that we don’t really need a bus. But to get to that walkable area, you need a car.
If you and your buddies want to invest and run a train though every small town in the US, I’m all for it.
However,
"Mass transit is how you create large population centers. "
Some of use don’t want large population centers or we’d live in the city and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
I’m not sure what small towns are collapsing under the weight of roads
…
The ASCE’s 2017 Infrastructure Report Card notes that at least 27 states have “de-paved” roads in the past five years in order to reduce ongoing maintenance costs. In one particularly notable example, Stutsman County, North Dakota — which spends $32,000 per year on each mile of their 233-mile asphalt road network — estimates that if those same roads were de-paved, the cost per mile of maintenance would drop to just $2,600.
…
David Hartgen, lead author of the Annual Highway Report, notes that a few states are “really falling behind on maintenance and repairs.” And there’s an estimated countrywide road maintenance backlog of $420 billion.
Telling townships to maintain large, far flung asphalt road networks is demanding the impossible.
Our biggest financial issue is an unnecessarily bloated police force.
In biggest municipalities that’s true. But then the largest time sink for police is… traffic enforcement.
If you and your buddies want to invest and run a train though every small town in the US, I’m all for it.
Much of the rail infrastructure already exists, although cities have been cannibalizing it to expand the highway capacity for decades. Show me a small town in America that’s older than 50 years and I’ll show you the rail line that runs through it.
But getting permission to actually use it? That’s not a money problem. It’s a politics problem.
Come to think of it, the town in from had a train, as did most of the neighboring towns.
That is until they ripped all of them up to make bike paths. Florida Rails to Trails I think it was called. And they did a half-assed job in a lot of places, just ripping up the rails and then not really providing or maintaining the “trail” part.
Wait, me or OP?
another 20 years of progress put on pause.
aint democracy great lol
Democracy is. Capitalism isn’t. And honestly people aren’t either. I can trust any one person but I cannot trust all the people. But any other system other than democracy is bound to fail its people in one way or another. Haven’t heard of a functional technocracy surviving very long but it may be the only viable alternative
have you ever seen normies riding bikes that close? it doesnt end well. lol
not everyone has the coordination to ride in a peleton.have you ever seen normies riding bikes that close?
Yes. In the Netherlands. It ends fine.
…You mean the people with plenty of experience in riding bikes because they do it constantly?
I’m referring to the country named in the title of the post.
69 people, eh?
Walking: Can’t cover large distances quickly. Not sure why that’s even included in this?
Bus: Pollution source whether it carries passengers or not. No service in rural areas. 1 crash = 69 people injured. Pathogen hotbox. You can’t smash in one.
Bicycle: 1 thunderstorm = misery. Limited range and can’t travel on motorways/freeways.
Car: Only pollutes when you use it. Goes anywhere you want 24/7/365. You can definitely smash in one. Carries big things like a trolley full of groceries or IKEA furniture.
E-Cars etc.: All the benefits of the car plus no pollution. Huge smugness boost.
I’m not against having a car for when I need it. I’m against pretty much requiring it to be a functional adult to do just about anything without public transit becoming my new hobby.
Work: 20min drive, 1h 20min transit, 2h bike
Groceries: 10min drive, 45min transit
This includes a bunch of walking to/from stops and half the time spent waiting since my city’s public transit hub/spoke model is designed for airplanes requiring you to bounce between hubs.
There also isn’t consistency. A favorable route might only come once every few hours. If one hop is running late, it can wreck the whole route.
My work route is pretty direct but it takes 12min walking, 0-20min waiting for a bus to my local hub, 0-40min waiting for the right train, and another 15min walking to the office. If they got those wait times down to like 10-20min total, I’d be more inclined to use it. Right now “something” comes every 20min, but sometimes the routes alternate so your route may come every 40min instead of 20min.
adventures in missing the point and faulty comparisons.
Also, cars are extremely wasteful when not in use. They have to be parked somewhere and that’s space not used productively.
You mean you CAN smash on a bus?? Outstanding :)
A car pollutes as its materials are mined from the ground and smelted into metals. A car pollutes when oils are refined for its various plastics and lubricants. A car pollutes when it is retired to a scrap yard to sit leaking oil until it is crushed and recyled (polluting through that process too).
None of this is true for busses. They’re made of and run on magic
Buses service more people per pollution over their lifecycle.
That’s a MUCH better argument and the one you should stick with.
That was the argument the entire time, you smug imbecile
No his argument was that cars pollute when they’re not running and implying that buses don’t, you smug imbecile.
To be honest, I hadn’t even noticed that I was commenting in the “Fuck Cars” group cos I just responded to something that popped up in my feed. I’m not about trying to be disruptive in someone else’s house. I was going for humor more than anything. Sorry.
Walking: a great form of transportation for short distances. However too much modern infrastructure gets in the way of walking. We should be able to walk more places than we do, even just from one store to the next. I did live in a city carlessly for a while and the combination of transit and walking was much more convenient than cars, most of the time
Bus: if you don’t mind the audience ….
Wheres the light rail?
It’s identical to the bus, but has a very hard time moving on the tarmac.
