Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
view the rest of the comments
Which is the cause and which is the effect?
If people have no money for cars, they will demand transit. If the government has no tax money for massive infrastructure projects, but people are still demanding something, they will give buses which are cheap. Then the demand and mentality is to upgrade those to trains.
As the engine car was invented in 1886, I would say trains and trams were already there. Way before the car entered the scene. Just later at 1908 with Ford T cars became affordable for the non-rich.
People at that time hadn’t a huge radius of movement. There wasn’t simply not much need.
Yeah that's why I talk about people not being able to afford them after ww2. And government not behind able to afford infrastructure after ww2. I don't know why you insist on looking at the ancient past when post WW2 is the important part here. Heck WW1 too, it cost a shit ton. These were the pivotal events that shaped the modern world.
Okay, I might sound too negative. After WW2 car culture took off in Germany and Japan as well. May be a bit later due to overall wealth.
However, the OT asked how it comes that both countries have different urban planning - not building the city around cars despite having big car manufacturers.
My point is simply that the structure of German and Japanese cities were already shaped when cars were invented. Sure, there were bigger „modernizations“ with big streets cutting some cities in halves. But that’s more a niche.
The US had a population boom after WW2 and so the cities start to spread. Build car-friendly. https://marketsize.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/USPop.jpg
It's a matter of degree. Yes they have cars and car infrastructure in Germany and Japan, but not nearly to the same extent as the US. That was OP's original point and question.
You should do more digging, most cities in the US (the middle part anyway) were also set. But they spent the money to buy out plots, tear it down, and build massive infrastructure. Why? Because of what I said: they could afford it on both govt level and personal level. Europe was devastated because of back to back world wars which cost a shit ton. On the other hand the US profited from that. Even when you have relatively green field construction you still have to buy the land and still have to build, aka it's still expensive. I'm just repeating myself so I think I'm out.