Fuck Cars
This community exists as a sister community/copycat community to the r/fuckcars subreddit.
This community exists for the following reasons:
- to raise awareness around the dangers, inefficiencies and injustice that can come from car dependence.
- to allow a place to discuss and promote more healthy transport methods and ways of living.
You can find the Matrix chat room for this community here.
Rules
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Be nice to each other. Being aggressive or inflammatory towards other users will get you banned. Name calling or obvious trolling falls under that. Hate cars, hate the system, but not people. While some drivers definitely deserve some hate, most of them didn't choose car-centric life out of free will.
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No bigotry or hate. Racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, chauvinism, fat-shaming, body-shaming, stigmatization of people experiencing homeless or substance users, etc. are not tolerated. Don't use slurs. You can laugh at someone's fragile masculinity without associating it with their body. The correlation between car-culture and body weight is not an excuse for fat-shaming.
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Stay on-topic. Submissions should be on-topic to the externalities of car culture in urban development and communities globally. Posting about alternatives to cars and car culture is fine. Don't post literal car fucking.
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No traffic violence. Do not post depictions of traffic violence. NSFW or NSFL posts are not allowed. Gawking at crashes is not allowed. Be respectful to people who are a victim of traffic violence or otherwise traumatized by it. News articles about crashes and statistics about traffic violence are allowed. Glorifying traffic violence will get you banned.
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No reposts. Before sharing, check if your post isn't a repost. Reposts that add something new are fine. Reposts that are sharing content from somewhere else are fine too.
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No misinformation. Masks and vaccines save lives during a pandemic, climate change is real and anthropogenic - and denial of these and other established facts will get you banned. False or highly speculative titles will get your post deleted.
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No harassment. Posts that (may) cause harassment, dogpiling or brigading, intentionally or not, will be removed. Please do not post screenshots containing uncensored usernames. Actual harassment, dogpiling or brigading is a bannable offence.
Please report posts and comments that violate our rules.
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There are 4.4 million software engineers in North America. That's excluding accountants, marketing people, designers, writers and possibly hundreds of jobs more. But oh no, let's not get 4 million cars out of the road. Since everyone does not have the privilege to work from home, nothing else matters. This kind of bigoted thinking is why the world does not get better. And what you said word to word is how Elon Musk said when banning remote work, work that was done 100% remotely.
And there are 7 million software developers in China, 5 million in India, 1 million in Germany. All of them perfectly capable of working from home. But oh no, why bother taking millions of cars off the road per day, if it isn't everyone in the world? Spoken like a true micromanager or an office building owner downtown.
I think the main issue here is that the very simplified rhetoric of ending use of personal cars in favor of public transportation. I don't think that their issue is about it being better to get as many cars out of use. When the idea of ditching personal cars for a much better system of public transport is brought up it is presented as if everyone is in urban or a large suburb. Which are the areas that such public transportation is a great and needed goal. But the same words that are used never present that people in rural areas aren't to be considered assholes for still needing personal transportation. Which also allows for right-wing outlets and politicians to spread the constant feeling of rural folks and their live are being attacked by libs. Those same right-wing folks will of course always find stuff to make this argument. However the lack of any mention of farmers or other rural folks as being an exception until we can make usable alternatives is a simple thing to sort out for the movement towards public transportation.
It just needs to be mentioned at all and can bring in better solidarity in reducing the vast majority of unnecessary personal ownership and use of cars. As someone that does live in a rural area and is very much in agreement about getting enough public transportation to get rid of so many cars. As it stands it just sounds like just another thing needed for daily work and life being "taken" from folks that don't have the chance at other options. It would be good to not turn having a car into being a "rebel". So many other efforts in protecting the environment have shown a similar divide between urban/suburban vs rural. Shit like "rolling coal" is an active effort to say "fuck you!" by people that really do feel like they are being attacked. It is a very stupid and stereotype re-enforcing thing to do in addition to being an asshole to others and the planet. But it is a divide that needs to be closed as much and and fast as possible if we want to be able to have any chance at un-fucking the global disaster. There is a difference between having a big truck with four wheel drive and actually needing it for farm work or other jobs that need that kind of thing. Vs the urban/suburban folks that get them and will never need to use it any different than they would a basic small two wheel drive car.
Also doesn't help when rural folks constantly hear about all the stuff cities and suburbs get for infrastructure (especially stuff like telecommunication/real high-speed internet access), but they get left behind and charged even higher rates for the bad options that are there. The whole closing down of schools and offices for COVID meant that so many people literally just couldn't do those things. It is much easier to deal with needing to suck it up and just stay home if you aren't constantly fighting a shitty and laggy connection. Dial-up is still a real thing and unless the communications companies are forced to get shit for real out to these folks, then they will always just leave them out because profits.
And this one particular example of the massive divide is something that could be used in addition to the push for rolling out more rail options. The cities and suburban areas could benefit from taxes being used for public mass transit and rural areas could get massive modernization of internet access. Get more fiber laid while building the high-speed rail and other lines while the construction teams are already digging things up to get the tracks installed. I don't know, but it would build a better feeling of connection instead of the current division of "city slickers and country hicks".
That is what you said. The overwhelming majority of people do not have that capability. I'm not saying that no one should work from home, and that it's not a great goal to have people that can doing so, but your phrasing implies that everyone has that capability.