“When I was their age, a car meant freedom. It meant you could take yourself to a place your friends were and your parents weren’t, anytime you wanted. To them, the Internet means freedom, and they don’t really see the point.”
You know what true freedom is? Not requiring a car to get to places by having decently designed neighbourhoods where people can walk or cycle. For longer distances good quality transit could be available. No massive investment or lisence needed to travel.
For real, the amount of freedom I get here without a driver’s license in the Netherlands is insane. I walk to the train station and can get anywhere in the country and even to a lot of other places in Europe.
Then I can just decide on a whim to walk to the grocery store, take a bike ride to visit my parents, go to a movie theater, whatever you can think of.
If there’s one thing I have pride in with my country, it’s the infrastructure we have. I find it very hard to imagine moving out of this country because of it.
I don’t know how old your dad is, but when I was a teenager 25 years ago, I could pick up a car for under $500, and it ran. Now, if it runs and drives it’s automatically $2500. It’s also probably beat to hell.
I can’t really blame kids today for not being interested in that.
~ 12 years ago I got an 04 rodeo for $1k and kept it running for a decade until it died over covid. That same $1k 2004 clunker that’ll still be in the shop for something every couple of months (even more so now 12 years later) is going to be 3-4k.
No thanks 🤷my bus system sucks but it works and I can just grab an Amtrak somewhere if I wanna travel.
I really don’t agree. Young people still like to be able to move around freely and “the internet” is not the same as phisically going to bar, roadtrip, etc. In my opinion, nowadays people mostly don’t buy cars because A) they can’t afford it and B) we’re more nevorinmentally conscious.
Shit I wasn’t even going to spoof a car logo, just make a tiny wheat paste sticker with a penis drawing and the words “small utility vehicle” - but your idea is beautiful as well.
I got slightly taken off track when I was too lazy to draw the tiny penis myself and typed “tiny penis” into my search bar.
If anyone would like an A4 sheet of tiny penises to print and glue on SUVs, let me know I’ll finish it. Shaming these motherfucking SUV-owners out of existence maybe works.
Until people develop a workable alternative, all this narrative does is annoy people who have no choice but to use cars.
When electric buses start making round trips from every main city to every suburb on a set reliable and convenience schedule, then you can start shaming people for having to drive a car.
I have to drive a car because my city is barely traversable otherwise. I hate it. So, I’ve been working with the city council and other committees to start building a modern transit system. It can be done, but it takes motivated people to make it happen.
I’m very curious about this. Did you go into this with some allies or were you able to drum up support by sharing stats and other city/country success stories? Was the council already amenable to the idea? Any resources you could share?
This could be an entire post on its own if you can spare some time to write about it and your experiences.
I’ve used a combination of coalition building, finding allies on the city council, and reaching out to neighborhood leaders.
Much of it has been reaching out to government officials, having conversations, and identifying where decision making is done within the various transit agencies.
So far, most of the resistance to actual progress is just kind of weird noise (complaints & general “I can’t see how having transit would help”) from misc citizens and realtors who don’t want to have changes to their development plans in the city, even if adding in the transit would make regions around it boom. The city council members are surprisingly responsive to even a small number of vocal people. I don’t think they hear from many coherent arguments in any given year. Showing up with data, an even reasonable idea of what can be done, and evidence that you’ve got a coalition of interested groups seems to get traction.
It also helps that we recently voted out a ton of conservative assholes and replaced them with a younger progressive city council. Yes, I worked on campaigns to help make that happen.
We’ve also been getting allies on various transit advisory committees, mostly citizen advisory committees. Then making sure there’s a similar message along with data that supports our goals.
We do also gather up other cities’ long term transit plan documents because they often have some great ideas and examples of what a city can build out given some interest in the public’s success.
I know that I’m also on track to be tapped to help write up materials for federal level proposals in the future. Grant writing isn’t much fun, but it’s how you get the money for a $100 mil project.
Yeah, I’m sure there’s plenty of material for a whole posting in its own right! This isn’t a simple problem to solve. It’s a combination of government systems, managing individual’s needs, reaching out to lots of groups, and a real vision to get people dedicated to. You’ve got to have something people really want to have the buy in for years of work to make it happen.
I mean antagonistic shaming can be awful, obviously. But getting people to care is important, and meeting people where they are sometimes requires making sure they know they should care.
Caring doesn’t mean feeling bad and guilty though. This is part of the toxicity that personal responsibility has created. Not everyone can be equally responsible for their individual contributions. But we can all be much more equal in how much we care about issues.
Something like the bus you describe won’t just appear out of no where. People have to want it, commit to it, consult in its design and then use it.
When electric buses start making round trips from every main city to every suburb on a set reliable and convenience schedule,
How fucked up is your city that this doesn’t already exist? That’s not a pipe dream, it’s the bare minimum. Your local government has failed, please go riot in the streets.
The alternative will not appear out of thin air. More people need to have a sense of the long-reaching consequences of car-dependent urban planning and that’s what propels them to vote for better planning in their cities.
Nothing is going to change without a shift in political leanings, and that’s what this sort of advocacy is doing.
Yeah, I get it. Private vehicles everywhere on the side of the street are an eyesore and take a ton of valuable public space. If at least e-scooters were as small as a car it wouldn’t be such a big deal to see them parked everywhere.
My biggest issue with scooters is that the sidewalks on most streets in North America are way too narrow to safely use them while others are walking, and we’re seriously lacking in dedicated bike lanes. Both of which are issues with the prioritization of car infrastructure over all else as opposed to problems with scooters themselves. Since scooters cannot safely run on the road but is still too fast for exclusively pedestrian paths. Where there are dedicated bike lanes in my city, scooters share them with bikes perfectly fine.
I feel like most roads where you’d ride a scooter the cars would be less of a problem if they followed the speed limit. Scooters should be able to go down 45mph roads just fine but there’s always some massive truck going 60.
Yeah, unfortunately speed limits don’t mean anything and studies show that drivers pretty much always drive as fast as they think they can regardless. The issue is that North America has stroads which are highly conducive to driving fast, damn near highway speeds. If we had the narrow, potentially tile or even cobblestone local streets that European and Asian cities have it would be less of a problem because those conditions directly promote lower speeds and more attentive driving.
I’ve heart NotJustBikes say similar things. I normally don’t favor control over everything but at this point I would be ok with cars having electronically controlled speed limiters to not exceed the speed limit of whatever road they’re on.
It’s really just created such an entitled, careless, and demanding mindset where bikes need to have speed limiters on them for safety but Fred can buy a 1200hp 3 ton weapon with no limiter.
It’s also not unheard of either. IIRC Japan had speed governors on their cars for a time, which limited them to their national highway speed of 100 km/h (which is still very fast to be fair).
I’m perfectly fine with there being interstates that go 85mph I just don’t want people driving so fast in dense areas with mixed traffic. If I could have people just not be assholes that would be great but I feel like driving the speed limit now is just reason for someone to get angry with you and want to drive you off the road.
I’d love to ride a bike everywhere I can but every road I would be riding would have traffic going over 45mph with massive vehicles who have drivers so impatient they’d rather run you off the road than share the road.
I want public transport more than anything, but where I live there’s little to none, I can’t do anything about that other than voting for parties that apparently have little chance to win. What I can do is buy an electric car, sue me.
I feel the most consequent stance is to demand all the things. Not to reject all the things except for the one pure solution.
As long as ICE vehicles are still sold, even make up the most of the sales, supporting EVs is moving in the right direction. At the same time, even better solutions can be demanded and supported.
The point is that electric cars are shit, have never been a solution to anything, and that they shouldn’t be presented as one, doubly so when as a technology, public transport exists.
We will get public transportation from one million people city to the next in billionaire tubes. And exploited drive-app drivers will drive people around inside them, because public transportation isn’t flashy or profitable enough without the vacuum and the time savings.
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