Trains are great but people want their own personal bubble and don't want to stand around outside waiting for a train especially since the timetable is out of their control
What people want and what is sustainable may be two different things and some people will just have to deal with that. Leave earlier and dress for the weather 🤷♀️
We don't need to ban cars, we just need to stop structuring literally everything around accommodating them. Also a difficult task, but far easier than banning cars.
This has been my sticking point with trains. In theory, it sounds fantastic and I’m all for it. The problem is is that Having a vehicle is so much nicer. Air conditioned and private transportation, whenever you want. Listen to what you want, go where you want.
Maybe if the train was much more convenient? I like the idea for travel more.
Public transit can solve these problems with more frequency and routes. Sometimes public transit goes places private transport can’t!
Or, hell, just get one of those foldable ebikes that are all the rage these days. Technology is coming for cars just as it came for horses and nobody even realizes it.
If you look at old maps of streetcar networks in cities (before they ripped up the tracks to replace them with cars), one thing that stands out is just how dense the networks were. For instance, here’s the old Montreal streetcar map:
And Montreal has some of the best modern-day urbanism in North America, mind you; most cities are far worse. But it really makes you imagine what our cities could be like if we made many/most streets car-free and just had ultra-dense networks of trams again. Maybe even cargo trams to deliver goods to stores as well. Trains would be ubiquitous and ultra-convenient.
This is key. Urban planners and environment folks focus so much on their respective fields and don’t consider dignity enough. Of course we’d all like cheap, fast, sustainable transportation, but not if that means being packed into bench seating, plagued with delays, and sometimes even risk our safety due to other passengers. Trains don’t have to be bad, but the penny-pinching planners often ruin the experience.
I drove through Atlanta at rush hour once. I’ll never go there again, if I can help it. That was kind of the opposite of what I think of when I think of “dignity.”
Quite frankly as an American, I think it’s very American to even consider the timetable as out of your control. For a lot of places, the trains come so fast that you’re not even waiting for a few minutes - like most drivers take longer to get settled into their car seat before driving. The sorry state of American transit is absolutely not the pinnacle of transit.
Renting a utility car will always be available until another futuristic thing happens. Having a utility truck fo everyday transport for the occasional moving is very wasteful.
And I know that there’s people that live on farms, have a shed where they store stuff and need those kinds of cars to move around to do work. Sure, those will exist, and they shouldn’t need to be punished for using their trucks for that, but using it for everyday stuff is wrong.
What kind of argument is this? Mostly pedestrian, public transport and bicycle based cities still have utility trucks and vans which you can use when you really need to. It’s a pain to navigate the city and the parking fees are high, but it’s something you would totally accept to for moving homes.
You can try googling “How to move homes in Amsterdam” and see whether people there manage to move homes.
TLDR: It’s not black and white, nobody wants to prohibit EVERY SINGLE MOTORIZED VEHICLE FOR EVERY SINGLE USECASE.
I’m being somewhat flippant, but cars aren’t vans.
By that, a van has a primary practical utility of being used to transport a lot of goods.
Cars’ primary utility is to transport people.
Yes sometimes people use their car to move a lot of stuff (I’ve done this myself more times than I can remember) but the vast majority of the time it’s just moving you.
I know this, but someone that just happens upon the community is most likely not gonna do enough poking around other posts to see that. Especially with the “deathtrap murderweapon vehicle users” mentality some people here have.
This is why there are different communities. This discussion was had a lot over at the other place, “fuck cars” is not exactly intended as the first contact people have with the thought that ‘maybe car centric infrastructure isn’t so great?’.
But it does seem to be the most popular, so it tends to be what most people will see first as far as I can tell.
It is what it is. I was just pointing out that no amount of telling people what is obvious to long timers is going to stop more outsiders from having the same reaction, so hopefully the community won’t run out of patience for it.
A lot of people have a very odd idea about Amsterdam but car use is actually pretty common there, especially outside of the tiny little central area.
I think mass transit systems are absolutely going to keep growing but we’re heading towards an integrated transport network made up of trains, planes, cars and boats rather than any one technology defeating the others.
I agree. I just wanted to say that I really hope this meme completely replaces the original one, so we won’t have to look at Steven Crowder’s face as much going forward.
Memes are so much better without the backstory. This was the first time I’ve seen it mentioned so I looked it up, and holy shit. Had no idea that was him, I’ve seen the name but not the face.
I agree. There just won’t be trains running for a very long time if ever again, is all. Maybe a couple centuries minimum while humanity recovers from whatever toppled it.
But even if its star trek type, it’s still good, just need to convince people to use it, climate crisis is averted! Who cares if they are the same person after teleportation, as long as my teleporters sell and I make a profit! 😈 insert evil CEO laugh
(I wont use star trek type teleporter btw, I mean unless I wanna die)
As a thought experiment, do you know if going to sleep kills you?
You wake up in the morning with all the memories of life before sleeping, but do you really know if that was you living that life? What if your consciousness dies each night when you fall asleep, and a new consciousness is formed in the morning who thinks it’s you?
It’s not even overnight. Neurologically speaking, consciousness ‘drops out’ briefly roughly every 90 seconds (IIRC), as the brain attends to other tasks. It’s spooky to see people who have impaired working memory; it’s like they completely ‘reset’ after a short period. Here’s an example. It’s a new consciousness formed from your memories that thinks it’s you, every minute and a half.
Thinking of which, I’d image it’d be used for military use way before commercial. Militarized teleporters sound pretty terrifying. Move someone’s torso over one foot, or put micro bombs inside people or vehicles.
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