The entire infrastructure was changed towards cars within living memory. What makes you think the reverse isn’t possible or even likely in the next hundred years?
Comment on [deleted]
FenderStratocaster@lemmy.world 1 week agoYou aren’t in the fuck cars community, and the rest of us live in the real world where cars exist. Especially in the US. This isn’t some fantasy land where we can go back in time and change our entire infrastructure. We CAN however condense more, rely on trains in metro areas, and use electric vehicles. But you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.
taladar@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Where are you referring to? In North America, much of the infrastructure wasn’t changed, it was created for the first time to accommodate cars.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
The “Fuck Cars” crowd basically just regurgitate what they hear a ridiculously rich youtuber who lives in one of the higher cost of living cities on the planet say. So take anything they say with a grain of salt.
What they ACTUALLY are saying is that the average person did not need a personal vehicle (whether it is a horse or a car) until (guesstimating) the 1950s/60s. Not because public transit was so much better but instead because people basically never left the couple mile radius of where they were born. Catching a bus To The City was a big deal and people who actually moved long distances away from family were 'strange".
Then, for whatever reason, people learned there was a big wide world and the cost of cars dropped drastically. So it became much more common to want to make that dream trip to The City a monthly or even weekly trip and people increasingly would move tens or even hundreds of miles away from where they grew up… in part to be able to buy a house and have their own family.
But it isn’t that infrastructure was “changed” so much as use cases were. And people stopped being willing to spend an entire day traveling to go visit their sibling one state over.
The aspect which HAS changed in “living memory” is the decline in “walkable cities”. The idea that you would have a corner grocery store every couple miles and would never even need a car. And… anyone who is even slightly aware of logistics and shipping can understand why that is also not really feasible. Because having pantry staples and “the basics” at Fred’s Grocery down the street? That is… depending on where you live that is feasible.
But… there is a reason fricking kei cars exist. Because you are not going to have a butcher or a giant produce stand or whatever on every street corner. You can’t. There will be MASSIVE food waste if you did. So people still tend to have to travel a bit even just a few times a month. Some people do that by public transit and are the people with five bags of groceries on the subway. Many people rapidly get that car for the weekend grocery trips and so forth.
At which point… if people are already going to drive to get groceries… why would they go to the corner store anyway?
Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE a walkable city and I was probably the happiest for the five or so years I lived in The City and would hit up a medium sized grocery store while walking back to my apartment from the subway station. And getting GOOD meat was 30 minutes away by train. But I am also not privileged enough to ignore the existence of small towns or the tendency for the people who WORK in those grocery stores to live in said small town where it is an hour commute and having to stay late for 30 minutes adds another two hours to their day.
Which is why I REALLY dislike the “Fuck Cars” “movement”. Because, at best, it is a bunch of privileged people saying “fuck the poors”. And… the idea of never needing to travel more than 5 miles from where you live feels like some backdoor rightwing bullshit to isolate people and Make Xenophobia Great Again.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
I mean… even in Japan (basically the mecca of public transit), you need a car for a lot of “last mile” transit to smaller towns. And you want a car for many (most?) towns because there might only be two or three buses per day.
Makoto Shinkai’s movies LOVE to focus on this as a way to build tension. Have one of the characters spend two or three days taking a long chain of trains and buses to reach the one that they love only to have to spend the night at a motel in a nowhere town where they can then have a heartfelt talk about what they are actually looking for.