Green - An environmentalist community

if you're gonna make bad faith arguments about me wanting to take cars away or whatever, even when i explicitly talked about the inclusion of car based transportation in equitable future transport solutions for non-urban areas, don't bother to respond at all. if you want to continue to insist that cities are yucky and bad, and intimate that not having cities is somehow a more equitable and realistic solution to the problems cities face than actually ameliorating the issues real people have right now, you can do that i guess.

And not in suburbs? I find that difficult to believe.

i looked at the breakdown. suburbs do constitute around half of the population, with urban at 31%. the census includes suburban populations as extensions of densely populated urban cores. so i was wrong about that. it still leaves like a third of all people in urban areas, which are still people who deserve equitable transport.

…says the one who’s advocating for something that would ruin my entire family’s lives.

what the fuck? like, forreal, under what circumstances is improving public transit supposed to impact your life negatively at all? again, never once advocated for the removal of all cars forever in perpetuity. i, and basically everybody else who wants better public transit, wants a larger diversity of transport solutions, to mitigate the energy costs and provide more people with more options for getting around. having strong public transit just by consequence of its utility makes less people need cars. you may genuinely believe public transit is slow, useless, and inferior to cars in some objective way. as somebody who has lived in cities for my whole life, i'm telling you that these sorts of resources are extremely valuable for people, especially people living with disabilities, people who cannot drive, people who are poor, and people who are unhoused. given that you've accused me of ableism for pointing out in passing that food deserts exist, i'll just throw it back at you. what if you can't drive? what if you don't have a car? paratransit is public transit, and allows disabled people to live more full, independent lives. making public transit more accessible to more people can do nothing but improve the standards of living for people who need it or can benefit from it, and will do basically nothing if you decide you're too good for it, as you obviously have.

Why should it be in the hands of Uber, Lyft, Greyhound, Amtrak, and the airlines? At least the car is yours to keep, and doesn’t take you on a sub-optimal route to artificially cost you more money.

public transit isn't those things? like, how am i supposed to take this as a serious argument? i'm not advocating for private services, i'm advocating for public transportation resources. there are actually pilot programs for public services like Uber and Lyft, fleets of cars that can transport people cheaply from place to place if they don't have a vehicle in the city. as for Amtrak or airlines, well, the initial thrust of my whole deal was that commercial airlines are kinda shit, and i agree with the stance of a number of railway unions, which is that railway services should be made public, rather than held by irresponsible, exploitative corporate middlemen.

Public transportation is dangerous. People just don’t think about dangers that don’t immediately and spectacularly kill you like a car crash does.

i've lived in cities all my life. never ever been pickpocketed. legit don't know anybody who's had an experience like that, don't know where you got the idea that that's some sort of common city living experience, other than by watching movies or something? and pandemic notwithstanding (busses kept going during the pandemic because people needed them), cars are just more dangerous overall, and are extra more dangerous when lots of people are driving all at once, and where people walking on the street are common casualties of vehicle accidents. now, you could take that as an argument that everybody should drive everywhere to protect themselves against the constant threat of fast moving metal boxes, but i think its frankly an unacceptable state of affairs. if people want to walk, or cycle, or whatever else, the infrastructure of their community should make that a viable option for them. right now, with the exclusive focus on car-based infrastructure? it isn't.

Then you’d best hurry and invent practical fusion power, because as long as energy remains scarce, so will transportation.

this one's just obtuse. we can take incremental steps towards our ideals. public transportation objectively costs less energy to transport more people than cars do. that's one of the reasons why a lot of climate policy groups advocate for its expansion. scarcity should not stop us from attempting to provide the most resources we can to the most people possible, especially people in disadvantaged circumstances. like, you seem at least vaguely left leaning, why is this a point of contention? are you just quipping or something?

Yes, and depriving people of their cars and houses would make it even worse. Your proposal is an example of crab mentality: you don’t have a car or a house, and instead of demanding those things for yourself so that your life can be as good as those who do have those things, you demand that those things be taken away from others so that their lives will be just as miserable as yours.

full stop, never fucking said that. never said anything about taking people's cars away, and never said anything about taking people's houses away. i even made explicit mentions of car based infrastructure as part of future transport solutions in rural areas (or i guess suburban areas), but our current infrastructure is inefficient for the way that people in cities live. and great job assuming my current living conditions because i find advocacy for transportation rights important.

i can't take the rest of your obvious disdain for urban communities seriously. people live in cities. lots of people. lots of them love it there, and do not want to leave the communities in which they have built their lives. given that there are obvious problems with transportation in these places, problems i think i've enumerated clearly, including a number of ecological consequences which will worsen with climate change (that you basically didn't mention at all in your response, other than to continue dunking on how icky and gross and morally unscrupulous our homes apparently are), your unwillingness to support a pretty important solution to at least some of these problems is disappointing to me. i'm sorry, but when your only response to the problems facing urban communities is "well that's true but urban communities are bad", i really don't know what to say to that. yes? these are problems? better public transportation could fix some of them? we should use the technology we have to improve public transit significantly, as has been successfully implemented in a great number of other countries, and as you have advocated for plane travel? a modern high speed rail system could make interstate travel cheaper than a car or a plane and way faster than a car.

and finally, because this one really pissed me off:

You realize that no tyrannical regime in its right mind is going to just give its own victims an easy and affordable way to leave, right? Hitler did not put the Jews on trains out of Germany; he put them on trains to concentration camps. If you’re in a state where they’re rounding up and executing trans people, and you’re trans, then trying to leave the state on a publicly-owned vehicle is suicide.

I am a Jew. I am also trans. Expulsion was a big part of the Jewish experience in the ramp up to the Holocaust, and over half of all Jews in Germany fled their homes to escape what they saw as escalating rhetoric before the start of the war, and before the Holocaust began in earnest. Many were forced to leave their belongings behind. Eventually, as part of the escalating laws restricting the lives and livelihoods of Jewish people, in September 1941, the remaining Jews inside Germany were prohibited from using Germany's public transportation. That same month, they started putting the Star of David on their clothes. They were forced to live in designated regions of German cities called Judenhäuser. We can talk all we want about the utility and value of public transit, but the Nazis didn't want their victims to have it for whatever reason.