- cross-posted to:
- fuckcars@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- fuckcars@lemmy.ca
cross-posted from: https://pawb.social/post/23351353
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cute! I love informative comics like this.
people always jump to assuming creating an infrastructure that requires less reliance on cars means a flat out ban on cars when really we just desperately need more alternatives to being stuck on the car-only model. of course, rural areas and disabilities and such will mean that cars are sometimes necessary, but there’s so much that a fully functional public transit system can do!!
exactly - I saw a couple of bad faiths in the comments and I just thought like “c’mon guys, be serious.”
One addition to this is also winter upkeep, which is very relevant in Finland.
People like to talk about “winter cycling”, because it’s somehow so much different from “every other season cycling”. Mainly it comes down to winter upkeep; snow plowing and such. Then some people complain how nobody rides in the winter and they shouldn’t use too much budget for it.
It would be fun to see people talk about “winter driving”. How much we actually spend making driving possible during the winter.
Where I live in the US that’s in the millions, hundreds of millions even. Also, if that budget dries up then they don’t plow shit. They’ll usually get an emergency fund but it takes a few days, while it’s snowing…
It’s not just spending money. In my city, we’re poisoning the groundwater with road salt to support winter driving. One well near me has sodium levels in the water high enough that the water utility has issued a no-drink advisory for people with hypertension.
“Cars aren’t a symbol of freedom. They are a symbol of dependence in places designed to be prisons without them.”
Paraphrased from a book I read (sorry, it was 10+ years ago)
Might also be noted that cars are a class symbol and a means of engaging in conspicuous consumption.
People who make the most noise about the “freedom” a car affords them are very often people who flout their vehicles a exotic hobbies or luxuries. They are, incidentally, the same folks who denounce bike lanes, bus stops, cross-walks, speed cameras, and parking shortages. Almost as though they don’t value freedom in the abstract at all.
Ain’t that true. As a car mechanic(in asia), i used to not think about it for a long time, but lately the cost of owning a car seems to bug me to no end. Often in busy day, someone will come in with a breakdown which might take a few hours to do because of the workload, and the reply i get from them is “can you do mine first? I’m in a hurry and i need the car, without it i can’t get anywhere”. Or someone came in with a badly maintained car, where they have to delay a lot of simple but crucial repair because they’re short on money. Or ignore an oil leak while topping up oil constantly because they have no time to get it fixed, which sometimes cost even more in total.
I just paid nearly 1/4 of my monthly salary to fix my 20 years old car, and that’s only for the part. Can’t get a used car because i need the cash, can’t get a new car because i don’t wanna have more mortgage. It’s crippling if you’re poor. It’s simply bullshit when people use the poor to justify car-centric development.
I feel you on the high cost of repairs costing a large portion of monthly income - I was quoted $500-700 for a (difficult model) spark plug replacement and plan to just DIY, even if it’s frustrating and hard.
Yeah, sometimes the cost of part isn’t that much but a lot of time it’s just long annoying tedious work. Seems like a lot of car is moving toward that direction and into a proprietary blackbox nightmare just so dealership can charge more.
How does a theoretical case of not having insurance companies make a car non-driveable?
Because auto-insurance is a requirement in some country.
a legal one not a technical one
Kind of a technical one, because if you get pulled over without insurance in my area, they will tow your car and inpound it.
Getting your car impounded is a legal one? There’s no technical issue with your car.
Yet you technically can’t drive it, if it’s impounded.
With road cameras nowadays they don’t even need to catch you on the road
Yes, in my country auto-insurance is legally required in order to pay roadtax for the car, which is mandatory to operate the vehicle on public road. It’s renewed yearly, and cost a lot more than roadtax. It help pay for the damage you caused, while the more expensive plan cover your own vehicle.
UK is probably the same case because we follow a lot of the colonialist law book.
@desktop_user @psx_crab A difference that makes no difference is no difference.
Whether it’s a technical or legal prohibition, having no insurance means you cannot drive. (Or, rather, you can, but it’s a BAD IDEA. Rather like how you can drive without tires but it’s a BAD IDEA.)
Can confirm.
My car has been “on loan” to my parents for a year. I’m lucky to live in an area with decent public trans, but my sense of freedom is definitely vastly diminished.
You have public trans? Can you just like rent them for a while or how does it work?
In my city you can just use your library card. Pretty convenient
Buy a bike, and often that sense of freedom comes back.
Still getting around, still able to use public transit at its best, but also able to fill in the other parts of trips with a form of low-stress exercise.
My Australian town is almost as bad as American ones because it was built after cars became necessary
It has decent bike paths and painted bike lanes on many roads. Riding to local centres is easy, or to any of the five or so nearby schools (which gets a lot of kids onto bikes), but if you work a desk job it is probably in one of the three big centres and you’re likely to live up to an hour by bike away. So few adults get around by bike
Owning or renting a home has the same requirements of dependency on multiple companies. Sure, in a city or large town or even some.small towns we could live without cars if we built the infrastructure.
But there will always be rural areas where cars make sense. Insurance would be a lot cheaper without all the city folk driving…
In Japan they have rail lines that seamlessly integrate with the metro system of large cities.
And even if cars for rural users is necessary, their driving experience will be much smoother if all the other people have good access to transit.
Yes, that would be the best outcome and comparable to early US settlement where most towns had rail to connect each other and most people even in small towns didn’t maintain their own horses. Of course travel back then required a lot more planning, which is why automobiles were able to successfully promote themselves as providing independence because they do. They do provide independence, and I can attest that as a kid when cars were easy to maintain they did provide independence in rural areas and still do!
They don’t provide indeoendence in congested cities suffering from urban sprawl and loss of mass transit, which is where the comic is accurate.
@spankmonkey @Little_mouse Here in Wuhan cars do the opposite.
I have two colleagues who live across the river from where I work. One takes public transit: bus to metro to bus. One drives. The one who uses public transit arrives at 8:15 every morning, give or take three minutes, except in the most extreme of circumstances (like city-wide flooding). The one who drives that same rough distance will sometimes be here before 8 and sometimes comes in at 9 because traffic is hellish and random.
Japan is an extremely small and dense country with actually very little rural areas, so I’m not sure if that really answers the other person’s questions.
The main island has a land area of about the 13th largest state, Utah. But Utah has about 35 people/sq mile, compared to Japan with almost 1200 people/sq mile.
America is really rural and rural areas are really far apart from each other. Growing up my nearest neighbor was about a 10 min drive down the road. And I wasn’t even that rural, I went to a normal school with a normal school bus.
Once again, this is a silly argument, which this tautology makes obvious: Most Americans live where most Americans live. A full third of the U.S. land area is USFS or BLM land on which nobody lives, and the sparsely-populated areas of the rest are just that: sparsely-populated. Utah has only 3.3 million inhabitants, which is 0.9% of the national population. But even they’re not rural! Most Utahns live in a handful of metro areas; the Salt Lake City region has areas with population density over 5,000 people per square mile.
The United States is overwhelmingly urban, and the number of people who live in really rural areas is basically a rounding error.
Sure but this comment chain is specifically talking about rural people. And none of that changes that whats considered “rural” in Japan, would barely be considered “suburbs” in the US.
Yes, the US should absolutely be investing in mass transit and inter-city rail. But using Japan or other European countries as “an example of how it should be done!” is just dismissive of the actual size of the US and shows me that you haven’t thought about it any more than just “trains = good; cars = bad”, and is outright disrespectful of the population that you will need to serve.
Something like 10% of the population lives in towns under 10k. That’s not what I would consider “a rounding error”.
@Lv_InSaNe_vL @SwingingTheLamp OK. Compare it to China. Larger landmass. Larger population. And larger proportion rural. Yet China has some of the best rail systems in the entire world, and even the rural people in the back end of nowhere tend not to have cars; they use bus services most times instead.
What’s your point now?
Owning or renting a home has the same requirements of dependency on multiple companies
Are you suggesting people go without homes? And that’s analogous to going without a car?
Maybe you’re really radical and want free public housing like people want free public transit, but that’s far outside the overton window.
I am saying home ownership, the freedom that goes along with it, and the need to rely on multiple companies is the same and both have a different context in rural areas. So does renting and most other things in life.
Plus relying on public transportation means trading companies for government, which in theory should be better but then again government decisions tend to be strongly influenced by those companies which is how we ended up in the car centric urban hellhole that we are in now.
The comic comes across as dismissive of a ton of nuance that apply to large areas of the US to make a point that applies to urban areas.
In rural areas everyone uses either bikes or railways.
I grew up with great public transit, and having access to a bicycle, (NYC.) In my 20s I realized that attempting to own and maintain a car would be so expensive that I would not be able to save money for the future. I ride my bike everywhere. If I want to go somewhere more than 50 miles away, or where transit doesn’t go, I rent a car. I rent a car maybe 2x a year tops. Depending on how long I’m renting the car I probably spend $400 a year on rentals + insurance. My last bike I had for 20 years. Cost me $1400 brand new, spread that cost out over 20 years, owning the bike cost me $70 a year. It was easy to repair myself, and the tools to repair it were inexpensive to purchase. Fuck cars indeed.
This doesn’t make any sense. The only way to move around without depending on other companies is by walking, and there’s no way that can replace cars, trains, buses, bicycles, etc.
Not depending on anyone else is not a sensible goal. We live in a society.
The only way to move around without depending on other companies is by walking, and there’s no way that can replace cars, trains, buses, bicycles, etc.
If you have all of those options available, you can never be stranded when one of those options fails.
But with a car-centric society, all it takes is a single point of failure, and you are no longer free to move about the society.
They are not advocating for society to be less interdependent. They are explaining that a car-centric society has less freedom of movement, because the “independence” of a car is a lie.
Well that’s just nonsense. There are enough downsides to cars without having to make up fringe lunacy like this.
Nonsense and fringe lunacy… like asking for multiple options when it comes to transportation? Recognizing that building redundancies into our infrastructure is actually more efficient than relying on a one-size-fits-all solution?
A car breaking down can completely derail an individual’s day. A truck breaking down on a highway can derail a city’s day. The less the person or city needs cars to function, the less likely they are to be stuck when something goes wrong.
like asking for multiple options when it comes to transportation
No, like trying to say that cars don’t give you independence because they need insurance and servicing. That’s simply not the kind of independence people are talking about.
It’s like saying metro systems aren’t convenient because they are really difficult to build. It’s confusing two different things.
A car breaking down can completely derail an individual’s day.
So? You know what can also derail your day?
That’s simply not the kind of independence people are talking about.
Yes it is. People praise the car as the ultimate freedom because they imagine that they can take that car anywhere. But the moment they have a problem with their car, they literally can’t go anywhere.
Everyone has a story about how their car didn’t start, or about the mechanic that didn’t actually fix the problem, or how they’re still waiting on a part and can’t fix it until tomorrow. Plenty of people are stuck waiting on the roadside for hours waiting for a tow. Plenty of people are stuck waiting for days to hear back from their insurance company on if repairs are covered or who will pay for it or which mechanic is allowed to do the work.
So? You know what can also derail your day?
Do you… think that’s a gotcha? How many times has your train derailed? Is this a common problem in your life? Don’t you hate it when your employee doesn’t show up to work all the time because his train derailed?
It’s so ridiculously uncommon that it may as well be a rounding error compared to car accidents and incidents.
Yes it is. People praise the car as the ultimate freedom because they imagine that they can take that car anywhere.
They can!
But the moment they have a problem with their car, they literally can’t go anywhere.
Nobody is under the illusion that cars never break! Come on dude. Trains and buses are hardly infallible either!
Everyone has a story about how their car didn’t start, or about the mechanic that didn’t actually fix the problem, or how they’re still waiting on a part and can’t fix it until tomorrow.
Everyone has 10 stories about trains being cancelled or buses not showing up. That’s life. Completely irrelevant to the fact that cars give you independence.
How many times has your train derailed? Is this a common problem in your life?
Obviously I was not talking about actually derailment. That was obvious to anyone not being deliberately stupid. Trains are delayed or cancelled all the time. Much more frequently than cars break down.
It’s becoming clear that you live somewhere where there are no trains or buses so you have no actual experience of them and imagine them to be perfect.
Everyone has 10 stories about trains being cancelled or buses not showing up. That’s life. Completely irrelevant to the fact that cars give you independence.
So… again… if you have access to a train, a bus, and a car, then one single failure won’t stop you. If you only have access to a car, a single failure will stop you. I don’t know how to make that any more clear. It’s not about a train being better than a car, it’s about only having a car.
But, yes, trains and buses in a functioning mass transit system are insanely more reliable than cars. That’s not just personal experience, though it’s quite an assumption to make! That’s just statistics.
true but America hates public transportation
That’s only because America makes terrible public transit
It’s because they purposely make sure it can’t get anywhere because they don’t want “poor” people to go nice places. Anytime it does they move the nice shit away.
With a car, you can fix it yourself if you are determined enough. However, if you’re using public transport, the same arguments apply + now things are enirely out of your control. There’s no way in hell the public transport company will let you tinker with their broken stuff. The insurance company can pull out of them at any time for any reason. The company can go bankrupt, etc.
i feel like independance and not having to rely on someone would work better as an argument for the car.
Consider a bicycle. Very low maintenance, simple to fix, no need for fuel, unlimited range. Complete independence, with the sole exception of winter maintenance of paths, but that’s also a problem for cars and public transport.
bikes absolutely do not have unlimited range, at some point the human will die of exhaustion or starvation without food or dehydration without water. cars needs far less winter path clearing than all but the best fat tire bikes. cars suck in cities the majority of the earth is not a city.
The range of the bicycle is constrained only by the rider. Assuming that the rider eats, drinks and sleeps (as most of us tend to do anyways for the sake of staying alive), the range is unlimited. You can’t drive a car either if you starve to death.
I’m not disagreeing with you on the rest, I was just talking about dependencies, which the bicycle has the least (apart from walking or skiing for example).
You need less energy per km to cycle at a relaxed pace compared to walking.
cars needs far less winter path clearing than all but the best fat tire bikes
I drive a regular city bike, nothing fancy, just studded tires. I’m talking about Norway here, so studded tires are the norm in winter for almost any vehicle. I prefer biking especially in winter because of the amount of cars stuck on the roads. With the bike I’m flexible, I can drive around obstacles or impasses, worst case lift it over a ditch to make my way somewhere else. On an average day I’m at least twice as fast biking than I would be driving.
You live in an urban area right? If you’re in the North of Norway and you still think like this you must be superhuman (I’ve only visited the North of Sweden once in February and I wouldn’t want to cycle anywhere further than 5-10 km in those conditions).
You live in an urban area right?
Yes, like about 80-85% of Norwegians inhabitants do. https://www.ssb.no/en/befolkning/folketall/statistikk/tettsteders-befolkning-og-areal.
Of course, if you live in the woods in the middle of nowhere a bike won’t get you far in winter, but neither gets you a car until the snowplow has come through and dug you out. Skis are much more useful in these conditions.
I’ve lived in the North and commuted by bike except for days with extreme weather conditions. And again, you shouldn’t be driving then either. Now that I’m a bit older I’d go for an electric bike though, I think.
@desktop_user @Deme The majority of humans, however, are in cities.
You conflate area with population.
This would 100% fix the comic for me
Most public transit in Europe is government backed, they’re not just going bankrupt or lose their insurence, and I don’t know why I’d tinker with a broken bus, the company has people for that.
Exactly. Also, public transport is a system. Even if the vehicle you are currently traveling in breaks down, there’s usually replacements and alternatives to get to the same destination.
@wintermute @MBech I had a bus break down here while I was riding it.
(OK, it was a bit more dramatic. It caught fire.)
The replacement bus was there in under two minutes. It’s almost like people design systems with fallbacks and failsafes.
Almost.
In the past 25 years I’ve used public transport, I think the bus broke down once while I was aboard, and I think it ended up in the newspaper. I think it’s a good thing public transport folks spend a lot of time maintaining the vehicles and especially on regular preventive maintenance.
I can barely fix my bicycle, so I don’t want to tinker with the bus company’s broken stuff. I trust that stuff to the certified mechanics they employ. Doubly so for trains, that’s for some serious mechanics only.
No matter how determined I was to work on my car, it didn’t matter. That shit sucks, is hard to do, especially if you don’t have previous experience.
Also, cars today aren’t roomy 1990’s (or before) engines. They pack it so tight in there, with the need to specialized tools and knowledge.
Cars have become increasingly hard to work on oneself. Especially as computers and mechanical engines have been fused together.
I’d rather have my bike with a lane, or a sidewalk, lined with trees, than have stroads with rubber dust, smog, and noise, uninhabitable to pedestrians.
I guess you’re right. Personally, I’ve done some maintainance on my car as well as some basic repair, but I can understand that it’s not for everyone.
And yeah, as the other commentor pointed out bikes seem like a better symbol.
@Rin @grue It’s hilarious watching people like you tout the “inevitability” of public transit failure as if **THE MAJORITY OF THE PLANET DOESN’T USE IT WITHOUT ANY OF THESE “INEVITABLE” FAILURES COMING TO FRUITION!**
It’s almost as if you’re spouting bullshit from a position of abject ignorance and a deep-seated aversion of analysis and/or introspection.
Almost.
My brother in christ, you missed the point.
@Rin Yep. Position of abject ignorance.
Buh-bye.
Ironic
Thank you for wording it so eloquently.
I learned quickly the car took away my freedom. I needed a car to get a job.
I was suddenly forced to have a job to pay an auto loan. By the time I paid the loan I needed a new car as the first broke down.
Then I needed my job to pay for the 2nd car. If I lived closer to the city with public transport I likely would have never gotten a car in the first place.
Cars are basically a life tax
in what world is a roadside assistance company required? Friends with oversized vehicles can perform a similar function and actually get use out of their stupid truck.
Imagine having friend with oversized vehicles.
I just wanted to poke fun of how they chose to remove one of the two least needed parts of the pillar instead of parking, gas, or roads.
Idk, i read it as an example, doesn’t have to be just that.
Isn’t anyone else disturbed by the concept of independence being a problem for this person?
I’d like more public transportation in America, but I’m not really interested in anything else they have to say.
The concept of independence can be a problem because it tends to manifest in a “I’m a lone ranger that doesn’t need anyone” mentality.
If you’re someone who generally just wants to live alone off-grid in a cabin in the woods and interact with people once a year that’s fine.
If you’re massively dependent on your neighbors and international trade and are in a self-destructive anger spiral about it because the realities of living in society damage your sense of self-worth, which has been tied to the fiction that everyone is an island, it’s an issue.
So if you value independence over community and you’re an asshole, then that’s a problem.
On the other hand, if you value community over independence and you’re an asshole: also a problem.
We can extrapolate further and say that if you drink water and are an asshole: also not good. I don’t think drinking water is the problem in that case.
I want you to realize for a moment that you are arguing with one sentence in a comic that said of itself “I will not explain what this means right now.”
No, because your premise is incorrect. This person is completely in support of the concept of independence, but simply rejects the notion that car-dependency provides it. Real independence is achieved by removing the dependency on cars.
You didn’t read the second line?
“Now the whole idea of independence is a messy social construct with a bunch of issues that I won’t get into right now.”
I don’t see how anyone could interpret that as anything other than a blanket statement about independence.
I searched up the artist to find more evidence and saw that I wasn’t the only one who thought that, because they posted a follow-up attempting to clarify that specific line. The clarification just reiterates the point of the original comic and doesn’t try to explain why that phrasing was used or what it could have meant.
So maybe they just phrased it poorly, but I’m not the only one who took issue with it.
Acknowledging that a concept is complicated is different from being opposed to it. You deciding to interpret the statement the latter way instead of the former is your own problem, not theirs.
They literally say:
“Now the whole idea of independence is a messy social construct with a bunch of issues that I won’t get into right now.”
(Emphasis mine). They are not just saying, “it’s complicated.” They literally use the word “issues.”
Yeah. And “issues” means “issues,” which is not the same as “bad.”
“Issues” in this context means “problems”, and problems are bad.
Yeah, and check this out!
That’s the type of independence I want to strive for.
They want to “strive” for “issues”? We know what they think independence is. Why do they want to destroy society??
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How is claiming that independence is a complicated, nuanced concept problematic?
It sounds like you are interpreting it as if they are saying it doesn’t exist or something similar which is not at all what they said.
@moakley @grue Unless you’re living in a forest that’s nowhere near another human being, hunting and gathering all of your own food, moving around entirely on foot (or on animals you personally captured and trained), wearing clothing you made from materials you personally gathered from the environment around you, YOU ARE NOT INDEPENDENT. Even the smallest rural settlement has interdependence as a fundamental requirement.
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@moakley @grue Car drivers depend on a whole bunch of things, as noted above. But farmers do too. They rely on people making tools, and in the case of motorized ones, supplying fuel and maintenance for them. They rely on markets to sell the products of their efforts to permit them to exchange with other people for other necessities like clothing or food other than the food they themselves produce. Etc. etc. etc. Everybody depends on everybody else in a society.
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Also, people younger than the legal age for driving are unable to get around safely and independently if they live somewhere car-dependent. I know this from personal experience (although where I live car dependency is not the only problem of course)
@callyral @grue don’t forget disabled people. Cars are always touted as the solution for disability but there are *many* disabilities which completely remove driving as a possibility (blindness, epilepsy, many learning disabilities, many physical disabilities … And generally being elderly, if we’re honest) and car dependence leaves you entirely reliant on a chauffeur of some kind for any and every time you want to leave the house.
