Unfortunately in CA you are severly harmed by not having a car.
Comment on California auto insurance costs set to rise by 54%, new report says
hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
It’s always a good day when private cars running costs go up, incentives people to drop it if it’s not absolutely needed
Snowclone@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
Car brained generalization about a huge and diverse state.
Snowclone@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I live two hours into the desert past Battlefield. If I don’t have access to a car, I’m not getting to anything, we don’t even have a hospital that will do live birth less than an hour away, no neurologists, nothing. We have a rural health clinic that mostly directs people to the ER. If someone really has an emergency they might get a helicopter ride if they’re luck. Or they might get to experience a 2hr ambulance ride. Which my wife has done two. Now, I can walk some places in town. But a lot of it isn’t even paved, if you see those bicycles with the huge fat wheels, those are pretty great out here actually, lots of sand to get trapped in, not a lot of paved road.
It’s not a option, I’m not messing with you, when I was a kid you could actually ride a bus out of town, it drove to the Mojave greyhound stop, which is literally just a parking lot, not an actual building of any kind, but that ended by 2002. There’s no options, you car, or walk, or bike, or mad max on a go cart, but the cops WILL pull you over and ticket you, those fuckers have nothing to do and we’re so go at hiring LAPD officers that get fired for gross misconduct that we actually shut down our PD for a good 5 years and just asked CHP to come by every few weeks. Which I really wish we stuck to that, put PD now seems to only harass people with old cars who aren’t white enough.
Mr_Blott@feddit.uk 4 weeks ago
You are severely harmed by not having a car *and being too apathetic and selfish to do anything about it
Sorted that for you
Snowclone@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
And there’s that ignorant privilege. No one is coming out to Kern County to build stop lights, let alone a some how functioning public transit system, our best bet would be high speed rail out here, and you can thank one individual billionaire for fucking that up. What are we supposed to do? Use our voting power of a low population county to address billionaire’s fucking us too hard? I drive my neighbors out of town if they need me to, I do what I can, there’s no options, you get access to a car or you die.
azimir@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
I agree with the cost of private cars in the US are detrimentally low. We have insanely subsidized gas, the car owners don’t pay for the cost of the roads (see federal gas tax being laughably low), and the side effect health hazards (noise, plastics dust, crash deaths) are considered normal despite the sheer suffering they cause.
That said, making cars more painful (cost/time) must be coupled with the work of rebuilding our infrastructure to modern standards. This means normal frequency mass transit (8 minute or less intervals), separated bike roads, and pedestrian safety put over car speed.
It can be done (there’s solutions to all of the superficial emotional jabs people seem to throw online), it just takes work to get our cities back from the clutches of the car only thinking we’ve been doing for 60+ years.
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Wouldn’t be an issue if public transit was made more available first.
T00l_shed@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
And for those who it’s absolutely needed, just fuck them I guess?
Rentlar@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
In a sense that there needs to be a way to show that the status quo of only maintaining/expanding car infrastructure and providing nothing else as viable alternative is a dead one. Ridiculous insurance increases is part of that.
Fixed route and Accessible buses are possible even in smaller cities like Missoula, MT, population 70k, which provides fare-free transit service to its residents. In bigger cities, mass transit, urban and interurban rail needs to be explored and expanded today, else these problems will only get worse with no end in sight.
T00l_shed@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Sure, but that doesn’t mean that those who have no other choice should be punished.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
Nobody is being punished. They’re still not paying the actual cost of car dependency.
hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
Most of them it’s probably still not needed.
Linktank@lemmy.today 4 weeks ago
Maybe you haven’t noticed the infrastructure in America. Try doing that some time.
return2ozma@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I live in the LA area. By car, 45 minutes to work. By bus, 3 buses and 4 hours one way.
the_toast_is_gone@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
In my city, if I want to arrive at my office at 8AM, I need to leave my apartment by car at 7:45. If I want to be within a block or so of my office by that same time, I need to leave my apartment at 6:15 to find a bus stop and ride on three different buses. Getting home by bus after ending my shift at 5:30 (I work 9 hour shifts and get every other Friday off), I would get home about 7:15.
Consider that I’m paid roughly $35 an hour pre-tax. If I do this every day for a month, the time this costs me would be equivalent to more than a two week paycheck.
Why would I take the bus?
T00l_shed@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I couldn’t do public transit like that. My anxiety wouldn’t let me. The amount of sick people crammed into busses and trains like that. It makes me start to panic. Like in Japan where they force you in an over packed train…I get for many people it’s NBD but I couldn’t do it.
grue@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
How is it anybody else’s fault that you chose to live stupidly far from your job?
Saledovil@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
America was bulldozed for the car, and now the bill is coming due.