A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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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:
Highway spending increased by 90% in 2021. This is one of many reasons why car traffic is growing faster than population growth.
Yeah that does sound frustrating. I mean, traffic generally is. I also hate the idea of toll roads.
My issues, I guess at the end of the day, is that I:
Currently need my car. Short of living off the land or mooching off of others, I need it to survive.
I don't see a clear path forward, which doesn't mean we shouldn't be looking for one but if Texas is any example it seems like the whole fuck cars movement is just people yelling into the void.
2.a. That path forward cannot exclude rural peoples or presume that everyone can or should move to a city. Nor should the opposite be the default. 2.b. People need to be able to have productive conversations without name calling (thank you for that by the way I'm learning a lot from you). The fuck cars side of this seems to paint a picture in which the solution is cut and dry and so obvious and anyone who doesn't see it or disagrees is an idiot or intentionally dense. But it's a superfuckingcomplex issue with many nuances and variables ranging from local zoning to county, state, and federal law.
I don't yet know what the path forward is but anytime I try to say what it isn't or speak against obvious propaganda people try to paint me as a liar, shill, idiot, redneck etc. (obv I'm not talking about this one thread lol). And its like, I'm not here because I want something different than the fuck cars crowd. I just disagree with how people seem to think a car-less world (which I dont personally want) or vastly altered infrastructure (I do want and this certainly includes less cars, jiet not none) would/cloud actually work.
Anyway if ive been difficult I apologize. I'm autistic and already have someone in another comment calling me an imbicile because I apparently took someone's argument too literally lol.
I haven't read all the links you sent yet but I'm sure ill be bored tomorrow and I'll check them out.
It's a captive society. People aren't simply yelling into the void, they're yelling into a wall of money. Money owned by a cartel of people who won't let people out of their cars.
These suburban landscapes aren't natural. They aren't sustainable. People can't just live 20 miles from one another and expect infrastructure to just exist in the gaps indefinitely.
The costs are simply too immense.
The rural communities are drying up because of these huge gulfs. People are being forced into the cities by economic necessity. And the only way to reverse this trend is to rebuild the old small town centers. It's can't just be Amazon warehouses shuttling cardboard boxes to people in the ass end of Idaho because that's where land is cheapest.
Cheers to that. Although that's going to be a harder one than the infrastructure bit.
It echoes a certain amount of car industry propaganda. There's plenty of truth in it, but that doesn't matter when the words are used to divert billions of infrastructure dollars to an extra four lanes on a ten lane highway.
Nobody in rural West Texas is going to see their lives improve once we're done wiggling the stretch of I-45 that runs through Houston.
No problem. You came around and this has been a good conversation to have. Glad to speak with you.
I acknowledge that for the continental us suburbs exist and can be solved, however is there a better method for hostile areas like Alaska, where planes and roads are the current methods of transit. I would imagine that more rail service between Fairbanks and ancorage would help, however there are tens of thousands of people spread across thousands of square miles.
Whittier, Alaska relies primarily on elevators.