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
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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!)