Comment on Our children are victims of road violence. We need to talk about the deadly norms of car use
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 11 months ago
“We could reduce the speed limits for cars to be closer to the average speeds of walking (6 kilometres per hour”
Geezus christ. I’m guessing the author has no idea what it’s like to be a parent.
Here’s a hint: kids need to go places. Public transport cannot get you to those places. Also, parents need to work (both of them) or else the kids don’t eat. As a parent I’m flat out busy from sunrise to midnight, and they want me to take the 1 hour I spend commuting each day and expand it to five hours. That doesn’t work.
Four hours is how much commuting I do when I take public transport (which is very rare, because five hours).
Zagorath@aussie.zone 11 months ago
[deleted]tslnox@reddthat.com 11 months ago
Wait, what? They are absolutely right.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 11 months ago
No they’re not. They are arguing against a straw man so ridiculous it’s more of a small sad-looking pile of straw. And they know it, too; they’re a regular car-brained troll in this community, and they’ve had it pointed out to them why their arguments are nonsense many times before.
Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
carbrains are real but this user isn’t one
it’s obvious that the real problem is that Melbourne’s buses and roads are shit, not that people are driving at normal car speeds.
lowering speed limits are a good thing but really low speeds like 6km/h only belong in carparks and high pedestrian areas.
20km/h should be the norm for areas like shopping streets.
Anyway the real problem is that we have designed our car moving roads to be right in the centre or population centres, and that our buses are really fucking horribly scheduled and operated. Even our 90x “smartbus” high frequency lines have really shit 20m or worse frequency sometimes, and off peak frequency is generally shit on any route, even rail.
It would be nice if 2 people waiting at a crosswalk got priority over 1 person in a car, but that’s not going to happen with the primitive “heavy moving box strong” logic in our brains, get real
jimbo@lemmy.world 11 months ago
They are arguing against a straw man so ridiculous it’s more of a small sad-looking pile of straw.
What is the “straw man” in their argument? Be specific.
arran4@aussie.zone 11 months ago
Would you support public transport improvements?
Zagorath@aussie.zone 11 months ago
The user here is a known car-brained troll. They have a long history of opposing better urban planning.
unionagainstdhmo@aussie.zone 11 months ago
I had a scroll through their history and couldn’t really find any evidence of trolling - but I might not have gone back far enough. Have you got any examples of them trolling you could point us at?
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Yeah they’re being ridiculous. For the record, I generally only drive a car when I have my kid with me. And even then, if I can take the bicycle I will (my kid and I spent an hour travelling by bicycle today).
Zagorath@aussie.zone 11 months ago
So, it turns out it’s from a different user account, but with the same username, on a different instance. I would be shocked if it’s not the same human being behind it.
But here’s one thread where they’ve done it before. They deliberately insert themselves into conversations choosing to throw ridiculous straw men around in an attempt to pretend that car-brain is normal and good urban planning practices are absurd. Troll tactics, through and through.
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Of course I’d support better public transport.
But I’m not really sure what form that would take? The bus from my house to the childcare centre obviously drops us off there when the bus is scheduled to do so, which means I will always face the longest possible wait for the next bus to come by.
And it’s pretty normal for public transport to go from the outskirts to the CBD, and if you’re not going to the CBD then you’ll need to go there on the way then take another bus out of the inner city.
I could live in the CBD… then the busses would be great - but I can’t afford that.
Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
how we can upgrade PT:
- higher bus frequency
- bus route reform (some current routes really suck)
- more bus lanes on congested routes
- more bike infrastructure so you don’t have to ride a bus/car/train to get anywhere
Longmactoppedup@aussie.zone 11 months ago
Your list of barriers to not using a car are all a result of poor urban planning which is rife in the majority of our cities. If we had stopped the sprawl 30 years ago then car dependence could have been mitigated.
Guess I’m one of the lucky ones in that I can walk kids to school and daycare (less than 1km) then cycle to work easily (less than 10km).
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Yeah our local daycare centre isn’t well run and unfortunately my partner and I don’t work close to each other so… we live about half way between. Which is about a 70 minute ride on a bicycle (I do it, when I have time, but that’s not often… normally it’s a motorbike).