- cross-posted to:
- fuckcars@lemmy.ca
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Biking counts?
It’s refreshing to know some people are at least trying it. However they will all go back to their car after this week. They should try it for life, for an extra challenge.
Usually when I say that I live without a car, people end up telling me how they couldn’t do it, how they love their car, that it’s nonsense that I don’t have one, and eventually circle around to tell me I should get a car. Even those aware of the difficulties of living without a car end up telling me that because of all this… they cant live without one and because they can’t do it, apparently I also shouldn’t.
I can count on one hand the amount of people that told me that they are trying to reduce their car usage, be more active and use public transit. They are the ones that are getting it and have interesting points of view.
Most people unfortunately just give up and continue to use a car for anything, with their assumptions confirmed.
EDIT: There are very fine examples of this attitude in this thread.
I get irritated when my wife suggests driving to the grocery store I can reach on foot in 13 min. Aside from the occasional big haul, where a car is really handy, I just feel like the car doesn’t really save much time and effort.
Most people can’t even really afford their car. They are reducing their quality of life, home ownership, putting off any hope of retirement, etc for an object that has a shorter lifespan than most pets.
Of course they want you to do the same. They need constant justification for staying on this treadmill. The fact that all that time and money is being wasted, is hard on the ego. Especially for anyone that claims they live a frugal life.
Every week for me is a week without driving.
I honestly miss when that was my life.
They forgot the “Getting the cops called on you” obstacle.
There’s a woman from a town in Québec that had CPS called on her because she is using a cargo bike to carry her kids around.
Story in French: https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/2022-06-20/signalee-a-la-dpj-a-cause-de-son-velo-cargo.php
I loved when I could use public transportation, and the reality is when public transportation is available people use it.
However there are the pressures from the car dealers and auto industry that do not want a good public transportation, and the fact that to get a decent public transportation you must raise up taxes, and uneducated people about public transportation will see only the tax arguments, and nobody want lose an election for that reason.
It is very difficult getting over this stale position, you need a very convinced administration that must find resources without increasing taxes and reduce services, a very difficult challenge.
I knew that was a SEPTA bus… Digging into her blog lightly and yup, Pennsylvania centric. Always neat to see local. Also not wrong about transit here, as I see plenty of people walk the harrowing roads around the suburb here. Pondering getting an e-bike eventually to determine viability, as my commute is relatively short. Would be nice to ditch the car a couple days a week to start.
I’m lucky to have any transit access in my suburban town.
I live in a suburb of a big city, not by choice, and I also live within walking distance of a bus stop… if you don’t mind walking for three hours just to get to the bus stop.
Yeah, I mapped my public transit commute out one time. For starters, it’s complicated because Google/Apple/Waze/etc have the public transit option greyed out. Like it’s not even an option. If I try, Google suggests getting a Lyft. Which is really just saying “lol get a car, scrub.” I wish I were making this shit up:
Here’s a quick visual of my daily drive, versus the public transit route I would have to take:
So my commute starts with me biking 20 minutes away from work, to get to the nearest bus stop. Then I take a 20 minutes bus ride to the nearest rail hub. Then I take a commuter rail south-south-west for an hour, to get to the connecting line. Then I make a connection. The rail times rarely line up, so I’d probably have to wait at the station for ~15 minutes for the connection. Then I take the second rail line 45 minutes northwest.
But here’s where I run into my next problem… My house is serviced by one public transit system, and my job is serviced my another entirely separate transit system. Due to local politicians in the different cities not getting along, the two systems don’t connect. So now I need to bike 20 minutes north, to get from the northernmost station in one transit system, to the southernmost station in the other. Then I take another train 20 minutes north. Finally, I have about a 10 minute bike ride to get from the train station to my job.
All together, that’s ~50 minutes biking, ~20 minutes on a bus, and a little over 120 minutes split across three different trains. Plus the waiting time in between each connection, because the trains I need only run every 15-20 minutes. Bare minimum, I’m looking at around 3.5 hours for public transit… Or I can just take the highway 10 minutes west.
“But wait, you have walking and biking options! You could do those instead! The biking option in your screenshot is only 54 minutes!”
While this may be true on paper, I’d like to refer you to the “I had to go 2 hours out of my way to avoid certain death” panel in the posted comic. That 54 minute bike route is on a 70 MPH two lane highway, with no shoulder or sidewalk. I’d be dead before I was even halfway there.
“So take an alternate route?”
That giant loop I listed earlier is the alternate route. That 10 minute highway route cuts through a nature preserve. There are no other roads or paths parallel to it. You either take the highway, or you go all the way around.
I can’t even legally reach my grocery store without a car. I have to cross that same highway to get to the store, and there is no sidewalk that crosses it. So I’d need to break the law to walk to the grocery store.
This kind of design sounds completely insane. You could walk half way to Cockfosters along the Piccadilly line in that time. Any other city I can think of here you could walk the entire diameter of the city within 3 hours.
I don’t even need public transport because I live in a town, usually quicker to walk and always quicker to cycle compared to waiting for a bus. Not sure if its better to swim than take the ferry, maybe I need an amphibious bike?
This kind of design sounds completely insane.
That’s American city design for you. The cities are designed expecting that everybody has a car, so they’re sprawling, especially in the suburbs. Public transit is simply tacked on later and is very limited in range, and is almost always buses, very few trains. You’d have to be seriously lucky to live near a bus stop in the suburbs.
By the way, I can walk to the nearest grocery store in less than 15 minutes, so I feel good about that, at least. It’s very rare for the suburbs to be in walking distance of a grocery store.
Crossing the road is another pain
Carry a brick and make eye contact with anyone in a car. Crossing the road gets much easier.
From tomorrow😁
If it’s a US road it’s also much much too wide and much too fast. The country is designed to kill people who aren’t in cars.
I live like 20 miles from my school, there’s no shot I’m walking and using public transit to get to school and work for a week
Haha loved it
I can’t drive, and I live in New Jersey, a good place to live if you need mass transit. Even still, I have to rely on Lyft and Uber to get anywhere in a reasonable or reliable timeframe. Taking the train or the bus means I have to tack on an extra half hour, if I’m lucky. Going grocery shopping with mass transit is a nightmare, because of size and weight limits (I have to be ready to walk with that stuff for over a mile). Plus, I hurt my foot pretty badly about a month ago (walking between bus stops in an area that has no right to be as hazardous as it is), so any kind of transit is actively painful currently. Heck, even if I could drive, I couldn’t, because it was my right foot that was hurt.
I don’t see how it could be made better without having to do billions or trillions of taxpayer-funded upgrades to every road (and a lot of eminent domain to build sidewalks - very expensive and just as unpopular). I also don’t see how it can get better with the labor costs where they are, unless our taxes go up even higher.
The fact that the system exists is a positive, but improving it is such an expensive endeavor for so little impact that it would be mostly pointless. No one is going to willingly choose to take an hour to get somewhere that a car can reach in ten minutes. No one is going to willingly choose to stand out on a random corner in the snow, rain, cold, or extreme heat just to wait for a bus that might already be delayed, and whose environmental systems might be malfunctioning. I don’t see a way to incentivize people to even begin considering public transit with the time differences. I pay fees to Lyft or Uber that are an order of magnitude higher than what I’d pay NJTransit - and I’m not discouraged, because I just have to look at the difference in time.
Do you understand how much roads actually cost? Do you understand how bad the ROI on road expansions is?
Besides, I will 100% take a little extra time to not drive. Google Maps will give you a door-to-door driving time which doesn’t include finding parking and walking from said parking and for the metro it gives the longest time so you can pman for waiting for the train+transfers but you can regularly go much quicker than that. I own car, I own a sportscar, and I only drive it when I absolutely need to which often means driving it just so it doesn’t sit still for too long and gather rust. Plus, a monthly metro/bus pass costs less than my insurance on a car which they know I only drive around 5,000km/year and then there’s gas, tires and oil, and any maintenance(which I do myself to save money).
Public transit is awesome and it works. We know this because we can see it working even in rural Europe, places very similar in many ways to North America. The US and Canada spread their cities out in incredibly ineffective ways and they aggressively shoot down public transit expansion. Montréal and New York are cities in North America that prove that there is no magical anti-transit field on the continent. Shit works, and it’s awesome.
TL;DR the only reason that your public transit is bad is because all levels of your governments actively resist the tried-and-true methods that make it work while burning billions of dollars on car-centric projects which are shown to never have any lasting effect on traffic(we’re talking a year or less) due to induced demand.
No one is going to willingly choose to take an hour to get somewhere that a car can reach in ten minutes. No one is going to willingly choose to stand out on a random corner in the snow, rain, cold, or extreme heat just to wait for a bus that might already be delayed, and whose environmental systems might be malfunctioning.
That’s the point of improving things, then it wouldn’t be like that. But the previous sentence you said it was a pointless endeavour so I’m not sure what your point is.
If you have bad public transport you can’t argue against making it good based on the fact that it’s bad now since if it was good then it would no longer be bad. I really don’t know what else to say.
They argued you cant make it better cause the improvements impact does not scale with costs. As an example they mentioned, implementing sidewalks would make walking safer, but cost ridiculous amounts of money that tax payers would have to fork over. Something they likely won’t do because costs will likely outweight the benefits for a lot of people
But the person is assuming the result would still be poor public transport. In a sense they’re right, spending a lot of money to still take “an hour to get somewhere that a car will reach in ten minutes” would not be worth it because that would be a failure, but assuming failure isn’t a reason to argue against it when lots of places do it well and benefit greatly from it. Reaching for an analogy, it’s a bit like saying we shouldn’t make an omelette because it’ll be raw if we don’t cook it and that would be a waste of money.
eminent domain to build sidewalks
Probably not. The land to either side of roads is typically owned by the road-owning entity already, in case they need to make improvements.
Even in my urban environment, the city owns the verge, the sidewalk, and something like eight inches past the sidewalk, six inches past everyone’s front fence.
I live in NJ (where this guy is coming from) and I’d say the bigger problem isn’t eminent domain. It’s homeowners who don’t want sidewalks in their neighborhood. The idea is that walking is for the poors, and we are clearly too classy for such things as basic public safety.
The wealthier the town (around here) the less likely a residential area is to have a sidewalk. They advertise and brag about “walkable” downtowns like it’s a cute novelty not a given that should apply to every street.
To be fair though, a lot of these quiet suburban streets are very safe to walk along. Pedestrian accidents on quiet suburban streets here are mostly unheard of.
Fuck that, give me my NJ sidewalks. The sidewalk fucking ENDS and it’s a crime. A crime. Let me walk to fucking wawa without dying!!
