this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
520 points (86.0% liked)
Fuck Cars
9607 readers
500 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Cars will be around for our entire lifetimes. I do think that having a modern rail system in place would be great, to complement cars. In cities it's easier and makes more sense, but there will never be a train that comes to my house, and if there is, I'm moving, because I sure as shit don't want to live next to a train. I'd love to be able to jump on a cross Continental, high speed rail to go on affordable trips, but that isn't possible and won't be. As long as I can pay roughly the same for a flight to my destination, and get there significantly faster, I will probably never opt for a slower option, and I'm definitely not in the minority by saying that.
With that said, assuming we spend the next 50 years eliminating cars and moving to rails, it still won't touch emissions, because cars are not the leader and are continuing to get better and more efficient. So starting now would be convenient and not a bad idea, but it won't change anything substantial from an emissions standpoint.
In 2021, transportation accounted for 28% of U.S. CO2 emissions, the largest source by economic sector. Absolutely, we need to address cars to reduce emissions; they're not getting that much better. Getting rid of them won't fix the problem, but conversely, fixing the problem requires getting rid of most of them. But why does it have to be rails? What if it was a café near your house? A doctor's practice? A bookstore? It's not foreordained that everything has to be so far apart that you need motorized transport (car or train) to get to it. The large majority of car trips Americans take are short distances, not cross-country journeys for which we need high-speed rail or airliners. Do away with single-use zoning, put the places people go every day close to where they live, and we eliminate the need for a huge number of daily car trips. No rails through your front yard needed.
Because unless the Rockies are gonna move to the Midwest, they won't be within walking distance of me. Having some places closer would be great, but I very deliberately chose to not live in a bustling neighborhood. If a bunch of businesses opened up on my block, I'd sell and move out. If I had to choose between a 10 minute round trip car ride to the store vs walking for 5 minutes, I will drive everytime. There's a golf course literally a block and a half from my house, and the three times I've been, I've driven. I don't have to be in the elements whether that's hot, cold, snowy, or rainy and I start and finish in my garage.
That's your choice, and as long as we stop subsidizing it, and make drivers pay the full cost (direct and indirect), I'm fine with that.