Death to the car, every car. It will kill is if we don’t employ radical solutions and just replacing every gas car with an electric ain’t magically saving the world.
Hell it might just make things worse, those rare minerals have to come from somewhere and have to go somewhere when we are done with them. I have little hope for any of this in a capitalist world.
I’m not unsympathetic to the fuckcars movement, but I have to ask about the road salt. When it snows and the roads are icy, what’s supposed to happen? What’s the plan for getting around, for getting to work, for getting to school? We can be using beet juice and other less impactful de-icing brines, but you still need the cars to get people where they need to go. Is the argument that people should stay home? Are we suggesting that colder climates just shouldn’t be populated? Busses need the road salt, too. Trains and trolleys de-ice their tracks. Even urban areas where you can walk everywhere need to salt the sidewalks.
This incidentally is why used school buses from Colorado are highly desirable in the skoolie community (a skoolie is a used school bus converted to a motorhome). In addition to the generally high-quality transmissions and retarders (essentially for handling mountainous terrain), the “sand” you use doesn’t promote rusting-out of the bus bodies like road salt does. In a sense, though, this is still bad for the environment: the extended lifespan of these vehicles keeps them on the road spitting out carbon dioxide longer then they otherwise would.
Where I live it’s common to spread gravel on the snow to increase grip. And then, of course, it is expected that everyone has the appropriate shoes and bike tires to not slip.
And even when salt is used, cars need a lot more salt per person than other modes of transport does.
If it’s cold enough to freeze the ground, I’m not riding my bike. First, having the right tires is one thing, but black ice and surprise potholes will eat your snow tires. Second, it’s going to be too cold to be out in the cold air for the several hours you need to bike to school or work.
Busses require the same amount of roads as cars. So you’re going to need the same amount of salt for busses. You might need less for sidewalks, but that’s only because people cannot walk as far as they can drive.
If everyone who normally takes the car would switch to taking the bus, all of a sudden you’d only need one lane in places where you previously needed two or three, because cars are very space-inefficient, so that makes a big difference.
Also, it’s not quite true that they’d require the same amount of roads. I don’t know about where you’re from, but where I live buses use about a quarter of the roads and you can still easily get anywhere by bus.
Additionally, salt isn’t used for rail vehicles at all.
I think public transit is important, good for the environment, and should be a much larger budget item everywhere.
But your math simply isn’t true everywhere. You can’t take 20 cars off the road and put them all on a bus, because those 20 cars aren’t going to the same place at the same time. Urban areas that already have busses blanketing the city and running constantly, the math works and you just need additional busses to up capacity. But for where I live, on the edge of suburban and rural areas, you’d need a thousand more busses on the road to cover every route and destination. And these are places where most roads are only one lane in each direction. The major highways would still need several lanes because of the additional busses to fill demand for additional routes, and smaller roads would need to be widened in many places to allow for the larger turning radius of a bus.
So you need the same amount of salt to cover the same amount of road. Maybe some areas could recapture a lane or two for bike lanes and pedestrians, but you still need to salt those, and they won’t have the benefit of being driven upon, which crushes ice and moves it out of the way. One or two slip and fall lawsuits later, and municipalities are just going to close them any time there’s a little snow.
Once again, I’ll say that the argument against cars is compelling. We should work to provide more public transit, because it is better for society to have reliable public transit. We should protect bike lanes, because it is better for our health and the environment, and encouraged freedom and development for adolescents. We should make more residential areas walkable because it is better for communities to be walkable. It fosters relationships among neighbors, encourages the support of local businesses, and improves the health and wellbeing of everyone who lives there.
Those are the arguments that get you there. Talk about the good it does, not the bad it doesn’t. People who don’t already agree with you will pick the one thing that doesn’t ring true and key in to ignore and dismiss the rest.
And even when salt is used, cars need a lot more salt per person than other modes of transport does.
Can I get a source on this? I’m not even sure what you mean by it, because salt clears active roadways as much as it does backroads, so how is this being measured “per person”?
Where I live it’s common to spread gravel on the snow to increase grip. And then, of course, it is expected that everyone has the appropriate shoes and bike tires to not slip.
You’re talking about pedestrians, but what about non-pedestrian traffic? The roads are more than just avenues to get to the grocery store, they’re also how the grocery store gets stocked with goods for rising out storms. It how the ambulance gets to you.
And what about the disabled or elderly? Can you get a wheelchair across the gravel?
For pedestrians and bikers, you need a lot less surface to deice, plus the lower speeds means it is not quite as vital to see all the snow gone directly. And yes, you will need roads for different purposes, but you would need a lot fewer of them, and with fewer lanes, if everyone wouldn’t take the car. Also, for supplying stores, a lot of the things trucks do can easily be done by trains.
Here in Canada there are definitely de-icing/ snow removal machines used on the tracks. Large propane heaters keep switches clear of ice so they can operate. Hi-rail trucks will go ahead of trains through the mountain passes to ensure the way is clear. During particularly bad snow storms they can use machines like this to clear the snow.
The trains will also release gravel on the rail to improve braking times.
When it snows and the roads are icy, what’s supposed to happen? What’s the plan for getting around, for getting to work, for getting to school? […] Are we suggesting that colder climates just shouldn’t be populated?
This line of questioning is really important, and it’s why I think there’s no addressing our devastation of the environment without digging deep into the assumptions of our society.
Society, as we understand it today, requires all of us going to work and school every day, no matter the weather, otherwise it doesn’t work. We can’t live like that. It just doesn’t work. We exist in the world, and our attempts to pretend like we are somehow apart or above it, that our daily lives shouldn’t be impacted by it, are destructive. We just can’t be in such a hurry all the time.
So yes, when the weather is bad, we need to slow down, focusing our efforts on our highest priority infrastructure, like ambulances, with everyone else taking a beat, or even pitching in. To do that, we need to rethink our society, because as things stand now, I agree with you, that’s not really possible.
This is why I think degrowth and socialism are the only human way through the climate crisis. Capitalism is a death cult of infinite growth that forces each of us to contribute to our own destruction every day because we have to get to work to live every single day.
Yeah, I think the argument is that you shouldn’t need the cars to get people where they need to go. This can be addressed two ways: either we don’t use cars or we don’t need to go (as far).
People should be able to travel with other modes that require less salt to deice, and cities could be built to not require cars for most trips. Salting sidewalks and bus lanes is better than salting those things plus roads and highways.
It’s also worth considering that yes, people should be able to just stay home. People shouldn’t be at risk of losing their job/home because they couldn’t safely make it into work. Parents shouldn’t have to rely on school as daycare.
I’d be curious to see if urban heat Island affects salt use. Maybe if we build dense enough, we don’t even really need salt to cover 99% of the population.
So…the issue isn’t cars, it’s capitalism? All we need to do to get rid of cars and all their negative effects is rearrange our country on a socioeconomic level?
Yes, capitalism is the root problem. Some people argue that you cannot overcome climate change under capitalism (and neoliberalism, specifically).
But I think it’s unlikely we’ll be able to change the underlying system without society collapsing in some way. Or a revolution.
However, I don’t think you have to get rid of capitalism to reduce cars and make a positive impact. Climate change is a scale: the more we do now, the less bad it will be in the future. So doing something is still better than nothing, even if it doesn’t solve the problem entirely.
Reducing cars (and therefore emissions) can be helped by improving public transport and increasing the number of options for transport. In many places, cars are the only way to get anywhere, especially in countries that focus on car infrastructure. Having the options to bus, train, bike, walk, or drive will reduce the number of drivers. In the case of bike lanes, at least in my country, there is evidence that adding bike lanes increases the number of cyclists (and therefore decreases the number of cars on the road). “Build it and they will come,” if you will.
I have a car, but I most often bike or take the bus. We can’t get rid of cars entirely; there are reasons people need them (tradies needing vans with their equipment, certain disabilities needing customized transport options, courier parcel delivery, etc.). But reducing the number on the road at any time is helpful.
Nevermind the fact it doesn’t snow enough for that to be a problem in most of earth. There are more methods of transportation other than those two and not every place needs to have the same transportation matrix.
Sure they can. I’ve been doing that for quite a few years until climate change warmed my city up so much that snow and ice don’t really happen anymore.
But are all sides of the car in the optimal angle towards the sun?
No, but neither are solar panels on houses. For the car, it’s ideal to park facing North/South. For stationary solar panels, it’s ideal to have solar panels mounted on a pan/tilt platform so they can always face the sun, which is rare.
No trees or buildings near your parking spot that could shade your car?
It’s pretty clear at my house, I have a designated outdoor parking space. Not perfect but definitely sufficient for my commute. At my work there aren’t any obstructions.
If these panels didn’t go into a car, someone else would mount them to a roof instead.
No, they developed and patented their own tech for curved solar panels.
Big hydrocarbon plants are more effective than the little ones inside cars. There’s still other factors to consider like mining of minerals that contribute to make EVs not good, but they’re a little less bad for the environment than the combustion kind even if your energy comes from bad sources
I always have felt like blaming cars, of all things, misses the bigger picture. 1 crude oil shipping vessel produces more pollution than the entirety of cars in America will for a year. Cars are one of the things that actually empowers individuals to live their individualized lives. Hell, some people live in their cars/rv/campers and it allows people to escape the rigors of daily life.
I agree we should take aim at making them more environmentally friendly, and take a harder focus on replacing plastic components with metal and/or other recyclable alternatives. If we could sequester carbon into them somehow that would be even better; but things like carbon fiber require nasty epoxies that are difficult to break down again once they need to be recycled.
The position of most people in this community is usually “Cars should cease to be the primary means of transportation for North Americans as soon as possible”. There are cases where cars and trucks are the only logical option, like rural communities, but in cities we should be aggressively against cars as a primary means of transportation. Nothing solves the the problems cars cause like replacing them with a train or bus or cycling
Even living in a European city with good bike and public transit options, I run into cases where a car is the only logical option.
Which is why I rent them a few times and year which basically comes down to sharing a handful of cars between a few hundred neighbours. Every single person having one or multiple cars is insanity, especially when you consider traffic conditions.
Part of the issue here is that if you own a car, it’s often cheaper to take the car than public transport, because most of the car expenses are paid independent of the immediate usage.
Car value deprecation, taxes, maintainance, all of that cost you money no matter whether you drive into town today or use some other means of transport.
I think it would be much better to put all taxes onto the fuel price. If you pay €5 for a litre of fuel, instead of the ~€1.5/l that we are currently paying, it would make more sense to take public transport some times.
I think this is the huge balancing point at which cars rely on. You saw a lot more small cars and less of these huge monster trucks roaming around North America back when gas had hit $5/gallon. Now gas is $3 but accounting for inflation, it’s probably at one of the cheapest points it’s ever been.
Even though I argue many times for cars in these posts, I long for a day when gas is $10/gallon so that these 3-5 ton behemoths aren’t on the road carrying a single person. I’m fine with this causing an artificial limitation on people to pick and choose when they use their personal transportation. Granted, we’ve also seen that this results in the economy slowing down overall as people choose to go fewer places and thus spend less money overall.
i feel like you probably didn’t realize what community you are posting in. this is the anti-car community. not the better car community, the anti-car community.
No I realized damn well what community I was posting in. That’s the great thing about intellectual discourse, is the ability to argue a cause based on its merits in order to refine an opinion or idea to its ultimate ends. Without dissenting opinions being allowed, all you do is isolate yourself into an echo chamber where your opinions are never challenged and get ever-more extreme to the point of comedic proportions. You need your ideas challenged so that you can make an educated and refined argument. Additionally, my arguments allow me to be open to correction and I can update my own opinions based on arguments made against my statements as well. I know the internet has taught many people that argument = bad, but true discourse invites other opinions that may not necessarily agree. I, in my propensity to wish for the best in humanity, am of the hopes that I can achieve that here on a platform where I assume that people are slightly more intelligent because they had the foresight to leave the previous platform which has been overrun with anti-intellectualism.
But this argument basically implies that we should gut the majority of people’s benefit because of a minority’s inconvenience. Certainly we should accommodate the minority who can’t, especially if it means living a fulfilling life, but not at the expense of everyone else.
Making life easier for those who can’t or doesn’t want to drive detracts nothing from those who can. In fact it is beneficial for those who want to drive to have denser cities, and better public transport. It means safer streets, less traffic and lower insurance premiums. Yours is a false dichotomy.
You lack reading comprehension. I did not give you a false dichotomy, because a false dichotomy requires that I present to you two options, with the stipulation that you can only choose one or the other. Nowhere in my previous post did I do any such thing.
I merely reiterated what I understood your stance to be, and offered an alternative; which would be not unduly hampering other people’s experience because of a minority.
You’re so focused on being “right”, that you’ve lost sight of the actual discussion in an effort to portray my argument as some sort of argumentative fallacy. Which ironically enough, is in itself, another fallacy – called the fallacy fallacy.
You’re not arguing with the original poster. Someone definitely lacks reading comprehension skills and is irrationally fixated on proving themselves right at all times, but it ain’t me. You created a straw men and presented it at “either this or that”, false dichotomy. Again, supporting those who don’t want or can’t drive doesn’t infringe upon the rights of car owners and those who do want to drive. This is not an oppressor-oprressed dynamic. That’s classic victimization. We can help and accommodate to the needs of minorities without having to disregard the needs of the majority. At least learn your moral arguments right.
I find the language you use interesting. Those who take their living room with them to save a few minutes “benefit”, whereas those who have to breathe in the fumes and be victims of traffic violence are “inconvenienced”.
The thing is that the 1 container ship transports a hell of lot more actual cargo from one place to the other than personal cars, which are mostly used for commuting lazy buttchecks back to where they came from in the morning.
I always have felt like blaming cars, of all things, misses the bigger picture.
On the contrary, doing anything other than blaming cars misses the bigger picture that car-dependent development is what drives, directly or indirectly, almost all the pollution except for industry and agriculture:
The emissions of the cars themselves, of course.
The emissions associated with producing all the extra concrete you need to build places to store the cars, as well as wider roads to fit all the traffic. (EDIT: and longer roads, for that matter, because inserting all the space for car storage forces your destinations to be further apart!)
The emissions associated with restrictive low-density zoning codes forcing 90% of the population to live in single-family homes exposed to the environment on all six sides, instead of giving them the freedom to choose to live in denser housing where shared walls increase thermal efficiency.
When you talk about “pollution” (compared to a shipping vessel) you are only talking about greenhouse gas emissions. This is the exact fallacy that the comic is addressing.
Localised particulate matter pollution will have a much more severe and direct impact on human health. Whether widespread individual car ownership is worth the cancer and microplastic pollution in our bodies is certainly still open for debate. However, this “environmentally friendly car” that you are imagining is a pipe dream.
Humans living fulfilling, individualised lives has been happening for more than just the last century.
Cargo ships also emit a shit ton of particulate, NOx, and SO2 since they aren’t required to have the same emissions controls as on road vehicles. It’s a serious problem for both climate change and immediate health impacts.
But those cargo ships exist whether we’re also driving a bunch of cars or not. It’s just totally orthogonal.
If anything, switching to heavy EVs will increase the amount of pollution caused by cargo ships. Bringing up cargo ships makes no sense as a defense of EVs
Plus, short of putting nuclear reactors on every ship, they can only really function on oil based fuels. Nothing compares in terms of energy density. If you somehow managed to put god knows how many battery packs on a ship without it sinking, it would probably take months to charge and suck tens of megawatts from the grid whilst doing it.
The greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions — including carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O), expressed in CO2e — of total shipping (international, domestic and fishing) have increased from 977 million tonnes in 2012 to 1,076 million tonnes in 2018 (9.6% increase).
Whereas in a pdf from the EPA at the bottom of this page says passenger cars and light-duty trucks produced 1,046 million metric tons of CO2 in 2021.
So to recap, all maritime shipping in the world produced only slightly more CO2 than the passenger cars and light trucks only in the United States.
Damn, thanks for the rebuttal – Do you have any other sources that are closer to 2022? Covid REALLY did a fucking number on everything from shipping to travel, both reducing travel and increasing shipping - so I’m concerned that those numbers may be a little different in a post-covid world. Still, very enlightening facts!
I do not. The previous study of its kind from the IMO was from 2014 and looked at the years 2007-2012, so it seems to take a few years for them to be able to put all the information together.
Cars are one of the things that actually empowers individuals to live their individualized lives.
So if I’m forced to live in my car or forced to use it because I would otherwise most likely be run over if I was riding a bike or the distance is too far for walking and I can’t catch public transit to my destination, am I empowered? Having a choice of how I want to get to places is empowering, not “oh I’ll guess I’ll go in my car”. I can see the argument for living in a car, but I also know that people sometimes make that choice because it is literally cheaper to buy and re-do a car so they can live in it rather than renting in some areas.
Cars are, and honestly should be treated as, a luxury good. It’s fun to drive around some routes form time-to-time, but I’d much rather bike or ride public transit to places rather than drive.
If a significant amount of people live in their cars, it means that the housing market and the wages are seriously out of whack, and the government has not been doing their job for the last decades.
This is one of the main cores behind the anti car and fifteen minutes city concepts. I’m currently facing the choice. Should I buy a car? Because, though I currently move and live without, using a car for commute would be a net personal gain. Biking is not an option, there is no infrastructure nor protections for moving on a bicycle in my city. I have to commute 50km each way, my job is not possible to be done from home, moving closer to work is financially prohibitive. Any new job would be near the same exact geographic area. A car would reclaim almost 3 hours of my day and multiply my options for leisure 10 fold for relatively cheaper. I hate to have to face that dilemma.
I wouldn’t doubt people driving EVs may even have less sustainable lifestyles in general because of their absolved guilt from driving the EV. Not that the average driver matters much when considering cargo and air traffic.
Regenerative braking is basically turning the motors into a generator to recharge the battery. If you brake regeneratively, you’re not using your brake pads at all.
Many EVs can have their settings adjusted to where 90+% of braking can be just regenerative.
Although lightweight EVs emit an estimated 11-13% less PM2.5 than ICEV equivalents, heavier weight EVs emit an estimated 3-8% more PM2.5 than ICEVs. In the absence of targeted policies to reduce non-exhaust emissions, consumer preferences for greater autonomy and larger vehicle size could therefore drive an increase in PM2.5 emissions in future years with the uptake of heavier EVs.
lol - I love when this gets (re-) posted periodically. The first time I read it I was thinking “out in the desert” when it said it was outside Phoenix. It’s not. It’s a single block (1 street x 1 ave) of space *in the middle of Tempe Arizona * with a 4 lane highway on one side. This is not a “no car utopia,” it’s a more-profit apartment complex that is using the “walkable city” greenwashing to cover the entire parcel with dense apartments (and limited, doomed retail) and not have to set aside mandatory parking to cut into profits. Last I looked, a 3BR rental was something like $35k-40k a year in rent.
Don’t get me wrong - the concept is nice, with good massing around the alleys and public spaces. This took planning. And it’s ~1/2 or 3/4 mile walk to a pretty major shopping area (across said 4 lane highway and a massive parking area at the mall). And that last part is good because there aren’t enough units in this development to support more than 1-2 restaurants and a bodega…it’s only about 1/4 to 1/3 the population needed to support a standard grocery store. And - as advertised- there’s no parking and Tempe isn’t walkable so you’re not getting any substantial outside customer traffic.
This is also in my city which during summer feels like an actual hellscape. It's a great idea overall but damn if it's the last city I'd pick for walking about 40% of the time.
The development’s buildings… are clustered together intimately to create inviting courtyards for social gatherings and paved – not asphalt – “paseos”, a word used in Spanish-speaking parts of the US south-west to denote plazas or walkways for strolling.
Importantly, such an arrangement provides relieving shade from the scorching sun – temperatures in these walkways have been measured at 90F (32C) on days when the pavement outside Culdesac is 120F (48C)
Living in a city with many bicycle lanes along major streets, the toxicity of exhaust gases worries me and doesn’t come as a surprise. Sucks that most people don’t know or care about that
it’s under an hour long so I can watch more than one like this during my lunch break. It’s the long form content over an hour long that I have to avoid because it’s usually just vods which severely bore me.
I’m glad to see this discussion starting gathering attention. In general, I think we should start looking more and more at car sharing over car owning: nobody needs an SUV every day, but you might enjoy a longer trip driving one. So short term rental should be incentivized to decrease the overall number of cars on the road and parking lots.
Attacking SUV drivers is precisely the wrong way to go about reversing the surrender of the public realm to the automobile and it is exactly the right way to start another immature culture war , alienating a lot of potential allies in the fight to reclaim out streets .
Exactly this. There are some clear use cases for cars and even for SUVs (possibly only if you literally live or work on a large farm). There’s no case for driving an SUV in a city. It’s antisocial behaviour at best and actively threatening at worst!
It makes the roads safer and that saves lives. It reduces pollution, saving more lives. It also saves space. That doesn’t save lives, granted, but it’s still a good thing.
If we accept any use cases for cars (and I do, personally), even if it’s primarily in the short to medium term while we build better urban infrastructure, then we should also advocate for those cars to be as small, as safe and as clean as possible.
A street filled with VW Golfs instead of Land rovers, still afforded the vast majority of space in town, still given priority at every turn and still transporting one or two people at a time, doesn’t move us much further forwards .
As is covered in the article, explaining the environmental impact of SUVs to SUV owners does not change their mind or encourage them to get a different car; it is effectively ignored.
So that is where ideas like the deflators come in, you make it more inconvenient, maybe that will work where polite discussion did not.
To be honest, I’m sick of trying to politely persuade people to stop killing other people with their idiotic cars. All cars are bad, yes. SUVs are the worst. It’s perfectly reasonable to try to solve a wicked problem by going for the worst offenders first.
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