this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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Fuck Cars
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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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People prefer to jerk themselves off instead of having genuine and difficult discussion. Actual improvements require compromise and accepting your position doesn't work as an absolute. And who wants to do that when you can just demonize the other side instead to feel good about yourself?
While this is true, what is the point of having genuine and difficult discussion on Lemmy / Reddit / social media (especially about societal issues) anyway?
Are lawmakers going to look through Lemmy threads to get legislative ideas? Probably not, right?
Fair enough, but it's still possible to discuss something without devolving into an ideologically pure circlejerk. I'd like to say it doesn't matter, but this is how we ended up with so much fake news in the US. Bubbles can be really bad when they start to change your perception of reality.
We ended up with a lot of fake news in the US for a lot of reasons, but I don't think Fuck Cars is likely to turn into a launchpad for the country's first left-wing authoritarian.
In other words, I think people are getting all jazzercized up about something that's essentially meaningless. But that's life too I guess. 🤷
EDIT: This country is very strange. People do nothing about right-wingers going on shooting sprees, but someone posting a slightly annoying image about how big trucks have gotten and everyone forms a line to decry it for "balance" reasons.
Oh I completely agree this is fairly inconsequential, but it's the sort of thing we should practice regularly anyway. The consolidation of an ideology is the first step in the death of the ideology.
To be clear, it's not as if think the kind of dipshit who wants an F650 pickup truck (or any kind of "mall crawler" in general) constitutes any kind of legitimate "other side" to be demonized in the first place. "Having genuine and difficult discussion" is for situations in which multiple valid points of view exist, but people trying to defend these monstrosities are just plain wrong in the same way that a moron trying to argue 2+2=5 is wrong, and that's the end of it.
It's so beyond-the-pale absurd it's not even worth circle-jerking over, and I'm sick and tired of this community's attention being wasted on it.
Personally I'm ok with fuck cars being mainly a place for people to express their frustrations with how things are - I think that serves an important role.
I would also like to see places for more nuanced discussions about urbanism for those who are interested. I used to go to r/NotJustBikes for that, but haven't seen any similar communities emerge on Lemmy.
The problem comes when it's an echo chamber. I can get on board with reducing car dependence, that America is oversaturated with SUVs and trucks that are unnecessarily large, and that bike infrastructure should be improved. FuckCars, however, then devolves into purity cycles where perfectly reasonable things are hated. This is especially true for people who have no experience at all with how people use their trucks for work. That then spills over into all other communities in the vicinity, and then you get dumb flamewars as people call out their bullshit rather than swallowing it whole.
Well said. Circlejerks just create an echo chamber where people become more and more radical.
Expressing frustration is fine. The thing I really have a problem with is how misplaced it is in this case. Even if every big pickup truck (and big SUV; why not?) somehow magically transformed into a compact sedan tomorrow, we'd still have the same shitty car-dependency problem we have now. We'd still have the same number of cars demanding the same wide roads and huge parking lots, destroying walkability, making our cities insolvent, fucking up our health*, etc. Nothing would've actually improved in any meaningful way what-so-fucking-ever!
The arrogance of space of all cars is the thing we need to be frustrated about, and the inherent pretense of these anti-truck posts -- that of redirecting criticism of all cars to one particular type of car -- is at best a useless unintentional distraction, or at worst, deliberate disinformation designed to sap attention from efforts towards things like road diets and parking reform.
TL;DR: If you're bitching about specifically big trucks, you're not bitching about cars in general -- and we should be bitching about cars in general!
(* That one's a trifecta, BTW: lung disease from pollution, obesity from being sedentary, and poor mental health from road rage and loss of "third places" due to Euclidean zoning!)
"These monstrosities" will exist in anything short of a significantly de-growthed society. OP's picture is not typical of an F650. They are usually converted to flat bed towing, refrigerated box trucks, utility cranes, ambulances, and dump trailers. If you don't believe me, well, here's a listing of used ones. Notice how many have anything like the original bed.
In Europe, Volvo and Mercedes make trucks just like it for the same kind of market. All Ford did here was take the cab of an F250 and put it on a beefier frame and drive train.
These are work vehicles, bought by people who do work. Unless you're suggesting an immediate de-growth to the point that we no longer haul anything heavier than a cubic meter of gravel in a single trip, they will be necessary.
The amount of pavement princesses out there says otherwise.
If we were talking about the F150 and trucks like it, sure. The F250 and up are a completely different matter. They don't share much except the name similarity.
OP was aimed at the completely wrong target.
The F150 is still a dual cab monstrosity. It's foot print is still close to the OPs pic.
Sure. So post about that, not trucks people actually need to get work done.
Which would likely be a transit, not a jacked up 4 wheel drive beast.
Uhh, yes. What do you think you need to haul 26,000 lbs? Trucks like that need long travel suspensions. The fact that a bunch of posers are taking that look and applying it for dick-waving purposes does not change the physics of how suspensions work.
Who fucking hauls around 26,000lbs daily that doesn't need a CDL?
It does need a CDL. People with CDLs also own trucks.
I wrote "F650 pickup truck." I also, pointedly, did not write "F650 chassis-cab commercial vehicle" or anything similar. I generally choose my words pretty carefully when writing these comments.
Maybe you should make sure you read what a person actually wrote before falling over yourself to post a dishonest strawman argument.
Communicating poorly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness. Since these barely even exist as pickup trucks, who's making the strawman, here?
Well, at least you admit that you misunderstood instead of doubling-down on the claim that I was talking about commercial vehicles. That's, frankly, better than I would've expected had we been discussing this back on Reddit, so thank you.
The person who posted the thread, of course. That's part of [or at least adjacent to] what I was complaining about to begin with!
Like you're doing, right now?
No.
What an incredibly detailed, logical counterargument. This has completely changed my mind
Because all the ways to improve things I see are crap ideas that boil down to
When all the ideas are crap you might as well crackwise since the world is burning
That one is hilarious to me...they DID move to areas of poverty over the last 30 years. Now those places are so fucking expensive the poor people had to move.
Stay where you: you should move to where the jobs are!
Move to where the jobs are: gentrification!
Move away from where the jobs are: white flight!
No action or inaction is moral. Leaving people with the choice of not caring at all or caring but unable to do anything about it since existence itself is wrong.
Welp, this is awkward. I support most of those (disregarding the uncharitable way you spun the descriptions, anyway). I'm interested to hear why you think they're "crap."
"Let’s make driving harder not mass transit easier" -- The problem with doing it the other way around is that the act of accommodating cars makes transit non-viable, both by (a) sucking up funding in an (ultimately futile) effort to build our way out of congestion by widening roads, and (b) physically forcing trip origins and destinations further apart by shoehorning parking lots in between them, lowering density and therefore the maximum potential transit ridership along a given route. People are going to use the transportation mode they think is best for them (quickest, cheapest, etc.), and to continue bending over backwards accommodating cars is to put a thumb (if not your entire body weight) on that scale.
"Traffic circles!" -- meh, I'm not going to argue this one 'cause I agree they're overrated. They often perform better than traffic lights in terms of their level of service (LOS) moving cars, but they take up lots more space and aren't necessarily great for cyclists and pedestrians. Besides LOS often isn't the right thing to measure to begin with.
"Tax on poor people who have to be work at a certain time" -- By this you mean anything that increases the costs of driving, I assume? The problem with that kind of thinking is that it uses a current symptom of the problem as an excuse not to solve the problem. In other words, increasing the costs of driving wouldn't be a problem for poor commuters if, in so doing, we also solved their need to drive to commute.
"More zoning laws can fix the problems zoning laws created" -- I, for one, argue for straight-up repealing things like minimum parking requirements and restrictions on density. That sort of idea often gets [mis]represented as "abolishing single-family zoning," but in reality it's not about prohibiting property owners from building single-family houses; it's about ending the mandate to build single-family houses and giving them the freedom to build higher-density things instead if they want. Frankly, this common criticism is usually just flat-out backwards.
"Force upper middle class people to move to areas with poverty" -- I have almost no idea what you're talking about here. However, I suspect that, like the previous bullet point, it's another backwards argument confusing an option for a mandate.
In that case every proposed solution needs to solve the need to drive for a commute on Day 1 of implementation. If you don't want to disproportionately hurt poor people and the working class, that is.
That's the issue. It is like saying we could get rid of fire departments if we installed fire suppression systems in every home, then we get rid of fire departments.
We need to make mass transit better, once that happens people will stop driving as much by choice.
Exactly. Fixing the underlying issues to a problem takes time to propagate. It's only about 2 years after a president takes office that their policies have affected the national economy and such.
Great analogy by the way. We need the fire department until those systems are installed. In this case, it probably means avoiding congestion taxes and the like until there's viable public transit for commuting. Otherwise we're just squeezing the working class.
This is why technologies to reduce emissions on cars and electrify them are so important. We need to minimize their impact since they're going to stick around.