Well, you certainly can be poor andneed gas money to go to work in a remote factory because you live in a farm in a rural area and there’s no transport, and the most cost effective way is a car.
Yeah, never going to happen. Most of us don’t like to live like sardines in a tin can, sharing 4 walls with other inconsiderate assholes.
Fuck city living. Fuck the city. Fuck densely packed consumer culture bullshit. Fuck public transportation. Put up as many roads as you can, give me 4 wheels and a place to visit.
City living just exacerbates the problem with corporations owning everybodies housing, and the expectation of everyone coming into the office every day. Move education, work, etc online and be done with the need to travel into a city at all.
All it would take is a couple thousand city-dwellers to move out into rural America and America’s republicans would be eradicated, moving us towards actually electing politicians that believe in sound scientific policy, etc.
But instead, all the uneducated slack jawed yokels are out living in nature, meanwhile people who don’t even SEE trees or wildlife are on the internet proclaiming how much they love the earth and how we need to save it. Fucking come out here you cowards!
I live in the middle of nowhere and drive race cars on the weekend, I think we agree on a lot of things. I love having plenty of space, not a fan of close neighbors, apartment living or any of that shit.
I still want cheap trains and micromobility though. Every once in awhile I need to go into the city and taking my ebike in on the train is so much better than driving. Also even if you still drive like normal, it would go so much smoother if all the city folks stuck to the train and got off the roads.
Not saying cars should be more expensive, and definitely not saying city living is the way, but having better options for city folks only helps the situation for the rest of us.
No one is forcing you to live in the city, but at our current population plus the current growth, it makesmore sense to have to majority of people live in cities and use public transportation. We cannot all live rurally, it’s just not doable. And isolating ourselves to everything online is not good for most people’s mental health- through we should all have a choice in that.
And if you want to continue having a “place to visit” everyone needs to take a more environmentally friendly approach to travel. Fewer roads and smaller private vehicles alongside increased public transit to wherever isn’t too remote to service.
By the time those thing will have taken over, something else will be in their place. For certain values of ‘trains’, ‘urban’ and ‘micro mobility’, your claim will likely be true, but ithat is too vague to talk someone out of if that’s simply your stance.
Sitting in my car right now. AC on. Had to drive my Mom to the doctor which is ~8 town blocks from home, but the road is only safe for cars. No busses in my town or county. We saw two elderly women crossing the huge parking lot on foot with grocery bags, clearly to walk home with them, and noted that they are smart.
I hate cities because of motor vehicles and all the space that is reserved for them. If all motor traffic was moved to underground, that would make the city pleasant to exist in. I would be happy if every car space was converted to greenery.
That’s my dream too, and why I’m actually sort of onboard with Musk’s vision for car metros. The issue is that I’m 100% sure they’d also want to expand surface level car infrastructure to facilitate that network.
My centrist compromise that I hope will take off in European cities over the next decade is that most two lane city streets will become one lane one way systems with protected bike lanes, pavements and trees taking the space that’s been freed up.
The only way to do it is to have everything in walking distance. Places where things are already too spread out make this very hard to do. People get used to driving everywhere and don’t want to pay to change things.
Public transit, busses, light rail, etc. Are great. No need for everything to be in walking distance.
It’s not too hard. It just takes time. A city can change hugely in 50 years.
And people don’t want anything to change. Until they get used to the new way. Then they don’t want it to change again. But everything always changes. That’s the only thing that doesn’t change.
When it comes to public transportation, they rarely pull a profit on their own. What they do is drive the economy in the places they go, make a city more accessible to everyone (further driving the economy), and cut costs for the city in other places. They’re a loss leader to save money and improve quality of life in a multitude of other areas by huge margins.
Everything is profitable if you raise prices. In a way you’re just offsetting a certain segment of the populations transportation costs to everyone else under that system. Maybe you could privatize the roads too and use the tolls to fund more buses which operate at a profit. Its fun think of insane libertarian free marker solutions to such problems :) Cars might be less appealing if people had to pay the associated infrastructure costs on a per km basis.
The US government subsidizes farmers by a huge amount because for every dollar they spend they get a dollar and some change back in value. This happens all across different sectors and is beneficial for everyone involved. The farmers get a new pond for free and everyone else in the US gets a reliable, cheap supply of food. It’s a win/win.
Public transport is the same way. It needs to be cheap so everyone can afford it, otherwise you leave huge swaths of the population without access to their basic needs, or you cut their already short supply of money even shorter. There’s a reason progressive tax rates are ubiquitous across the world. By supporting public transport, you send people to places they produce value or spend money, increasing taxes earned across the board, while simultaneously reducing the cost of maintaining the roads because there’s significantly less wear and tear. It’s also CHEAPER to use public teansport. Cars are goddamn expensive! Repairs, insurance, the cost of it in the first place! A ride on the bus is like $2. You’d have to TRY to ride it enough to make it more expensive.
I digress. The point is that you indirectly get more out of it than you pay into it.
We’re at a point (and have been for a few decades) that just taxing cars isn’t going to fix the problem. We’ve demolished cities to replace them with vehicle infrastructure. If you tax cars without fixing the walkability, all you’ve done is make people pay more in taxes. You have to have the infrastructure before you can incentivize using it.
The reasons for farm subsidies are… Debatable. If you keep food cheap people don’t notice currency debasement as much. Personally I think it might make more sense for prices to rise to a point where farmers are profitable without subsidies. Those subsidies are value extracted from the tax payer anyway… You’re paying for it.
You’re right too in that buses and trains are a lot cheaper and should always out compete cars. How much do you think fares would have to rise to make public transport self sufficient ? Make it so it funds its own expansion and service improvement.
The Toronto Transport Commission is my local example. From what I can napkin math they get about 1 billion dollars in subsidies per year from the city (maybe some provincial and fed money too… I rounded up generously). They collect a little over 700k fares a day. Wouldn’t take much of an increase with like almost 250 million fares a year to close that gap.
Privatize the roads and have cars users pay their share of that infrastructure cost and get the burden off of working people and I bet a small share increase would be pretty affordable.
Ideally taxes are progressive, whereas food price increases are always regressive. That is to say that taxes affect the rich more, and food prices affect the poor more.
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