I like my electric car, but the fact that I have to own a car, maintain it, and pay insurance on it is such bullshit when I'm only 4 miles from my job, and bus service doesn't run until 9AM. Fuck all this stroad BS bring back trolleys.
What annoys me about lacking public transit is that the problems caused by a lack of use and a lack of funding are always what the naysayers against public transportation point to as examples why it sucks.
It sucks because you dumbasses don't put money into it to make it not suck! (The "you" being a generalization of the people against public transportation)
people just shouldn't need to personally own a car unless they live in the middle of nowhere, anywhere vaguely densely populated you should have usable public transport and carshare systems so you can just book a car when you actually want to use it, and those times should be pretty few and far between (even going on a leisure ride every other day is way way way way less usage than we see right now)
Sad part is my area had a robust trolley network
no 'one thing' will 'save' us. not even transit.
better to have vehicle options that don't spew carbon monoxide
Electric cars burn less than ICE cars and ICE cars aren't too different from electric cars regarding material footprint.
The glory of public transport lies in its transformative function on urban and interurban lives. Cars build suburbanism or spatially crammed cities. That difference is where our propaganda should rely on, not this weak EV-bad.
The glory of public transport lies in its transformative function on urban and interurban lives. Cars build suburbanism or spatially crammed cities. That difference is where our propaganda should rely on, not this weak EV-bad.
well put
Cars and personal transportation will never go away as long as our society is stable. It's better to have electric cars than fossil fuelled cars. Electric cars and good public transport can coexist.
Cars will probably destroy US society before they go away, but either way there's a clear end point. I'd say fight like hell to get rid of cars so it ends on the best possible terms, but you do you.
Realities on the ground outside of the USA say otherwise. Here, for example, after a huge push toward ownership of individual vehicles, an ever-increasing proportion of those vehicles are permanently parked. Outside my window, for example, there's a square that is filled with cars parked bumper to bumper that haven't moved in the past year or two. Technically they're owned and would certainly be counted in ownership statistics, but it is physically impossible for any but the four cars at the end of the square to even be taken out of the lot.
Why?
Because the advantage of private ownership has been whittled away slowly but steadily over the past 20 years.
There was a time that a private vehicle was the only practical means to cross the two rivers (Han and Yangtze) that divide the city. Buses of the time were hideously uncomfortable, highly unreliable, and painfully slow. Going from my home to the then-largest park in the city (Zhongshan park) was a good 2.5-3 hour trip by bus. By car, even through traffic jams (which buses had to go through as well, obviously), it was 1-1.5 hours instead.
Today that same trip is slightly lower by car (cut off about fifteen minutes because of the Yangtze tunnel) but by metro it's about 25 minutes. And you don't have to hunt around for increasingly rare parking, then pay for that parking on top of it. And then repeat that when you get back home. More and more people aren't bothering to drive at all, leaving their cars in long-term parking "just in case" and that case never comes.
Personally I haven't owned an automobile since the second line of the Wuhan Metro opened, and the bus service got upgraded to serve it. There's no point. The rare times I need to use a personal vehicle in specific, taxi services are more than sufficient. For the price of a car I could use, after all, a taxi to go from one end of the city to the other and back every day. For two years. That very infrequent case of needing a taxi is a trivial expense compared to just the purchase price of a car (not including insurance, maintenance, fuel/electricity, etc. etc. etc.).
So "never" is a really long time that's ending as I watch.
Today that same trip is slightly lower by car (cut off about fifteen minutes because of the Yangtze tunnel) but by metro it’s about 25 minutes. And you don’t have to hunt around for increasingly rare parking, then pay for that parking on top of it. And then repeat that when you get back home. More and more people aren’t bothering to drive at all, leaving their cars in long-term parking “just in case” and that case never comes.
so you're successfully navigating the transition, that's great, to finally see the light at the other end.
the vast majority aren't anywhere NEAR this point, can't even see the dot at the end; much less daylight - so if we're going to have vehicles all over, wouldn't it be grand if they didn't spew pollution everywhere?
or is it: I got mine, FUCK YOU?
because you got yours, congrats, now the rest need to catch up, but having your smug ass looking down on people having functional transportation is kinda goofy.
