I am glad you brought on some very common talking points, I will gladly explain to you what is my (and presumably the community’s) answer to them:
This is true, a one-day zero-to-100% ban on cars is probably not feasible, as many nations have parts of their economies based on people being moved by cars (even though the pandemic and remote working showed us that A LOT of those people actually do a job that requires them to commute waaay less than we thought, but this is another story). This is somewhat of a silly point though: people also used to have slaves, hell, we used to run our entire economies on slaves. That did not stop us from seeing that was not a good thing and change that over time. Total ban of cars tomorrow? Sounds cool but not really achievable. Promoting public transit? Restricting car traffic in area where cars clearly don’t belong? Making it an easier time for who wants to walk or use a bike? Hell yeah.
Public transit is overall massively cheaper than cars, for everyone. Just think about it: the cost of a car society is the cost of car infrastructure (you pay it with your taxes) plus the cost of your car, your insurance, the gas (which is actually “cheap” in the US because it is subsidized with taxes so again, you pay that), the maintenance (these costs are unloaded directly on you). In London, which has one of the most expensive fares around the world, owning a car ends up costing on average double what you would pay to use transit daily. My city has a €250 (~$300)/year transit pass. Everything included, as many rides as you want, to wherever you want. I use it to commute daily and hang out. We happen to have a car in my family, but we have the priviledge of rarely having to use it.
True, in fact we advocate for better public transit in the first place. As you said, there is an insanely vaste amount of places in the world that actually do transit great: most european cities have very good transit, but also a lot of US cities (NY, SF, Chicago, etc)
No, you clearly can’t cross state borders with a tram, because that would probably be called a train. In europe you can take high speed trains that go over 200mph and cross entire countries in way shorter times than taking a car (a lot to improve in the future, especially interoperability, dont get me wrong, its far from perfect). Same goes for Japan, and China (but their trains are also faster, and more interconnected as, obviously, it is one country). Transit allows you to go where lines have been built, and for most places around the world that is basically everywhere you could possibly ever want to go. Cars allow you to go where your state has built a road for you.
It has been long since I’ve taken a service that didn’t have heating/air conditioning. I do listen to my music when I commute, I can actually also read or browse feddit, watch a video or study, while the bus/tram driver drives for me. I will give you the point on occupancy, but hum, unless you hate people I don’t see a problem in that. Edit: In several years of taking metros/buses/trams it only happened more or less 5 times to find an “annoying” person on my same ride. Meanwhile, I assure you that almost EVERY time you drive here you are granted: i) a honk for no reason ii) someone not resoecting the right of way. It is faaar more probable to go this close to a car crash than to find an “annoying” person on transit, at least from my experience.
I also control my transit schedule to the minute. Despite my city’s transit having one of the worst looking apps made by humans, I can actually check live-time where the bus or tram i need is and when it will be at the stop (and when its main lines i dont even need to because there is one every 5-7 minutes). You know what i hate instead? Getting stuck in traffic. That really has to be a pain for those 15 cars clogging the two car lanes (one is actually blocked by illegally parked cars), while me and other 50 homies fly by them on the bus-only lane. Also, on the same commute, I had to always add an additional 30 minutes ahead of leaving to account for traffic, making the gains against a bus virtually nothing. But of course you can only make this point if your city is well-served by transit lines.
I don’t either, I don’t think anyone cares about those few people, this community is really about the other 99,9% of motorists.
I don’t get what you mean with “share”. I have not in my entire life in any country of this world seen a seat for two people. What? You mean to seats next to each other? Because that’s… Two seats. There is not really much sharing in it. Need further explaination.
This community is called fuck cars but is really actually about wanting cities designed for people rather than cars (which is how human settlements have been made for basically thousands of years except the last decades). Well shit i made a wot but thats my take, to put it shortly
I wholeheartedly agree with the purpose of this community and what it advocates for, but I wanted to add some rebuttals to your points.
You mention you have the privilege of not using your car. In car centric parts of the world, which is anything that isn’t a big city, this is a privilege. My family that lives in a town of 50,000 people in Germany still need to use their cars every day! There is only a bus system to get them around. Each working age adult uses their car every day! Including the one who lives in Köln and literally walks across the street to his office because car transportation is far more time efficient than transit.
See anecdote above. I live in Boston, which is supposedly extremely transit friendly and the T and commuter rail, while remarkably extensive, are abysmal. I rode it for two months until I finally gave up and got a car. I live in a house 0.5 miles from the commuter rail station and it’s the cheapest around at $750k, I should be able to have reliable transport to MIT/Kendall.
Your issues with driving, being honked at, being annoyed with lack of right of way, all seem to come from inexperience driving in the city. On roads with speed limits of 30 mph, there is no right of way, it’s just about whoever goes first. After some time, you learn what to expect from locals and adapt to their style. But I understand if driving in a big city makes people uncomfortable. There is a lot going on, and a lot to pay attention to.
Schedule. My god is our transit schedule awful. Commuter rail only once every hour. It’s either 5 minutes early or 20 minutes late regularly. So it’s completely unreliable. The Red line is now slow as fuck. Crawling at 10 mph in most areas now. It’s faster to ride your bike between stations, and get stopped by every traffic light than it is to ride the train. And now the red line only has service every 20-30 minutes!
I loved visiting London. We even got a rental to see things like Stonehenge or Brighton, but I never felt the need to use the car much within the city. While I thoroughly enjoyed driving through parts of London like tiny bridges that had inches of clearance on either side of the vehicle, or massive roundabouts near Victoria station, I never needed to do that for local journeys.
It takes 30 minutes for me to drive to work, but 50-90 minutes to go by public transit and I literally live in a massive transit corridor with service from my house directly to work. It’s absolutely absurd. Essentially, transit only broadly works in US if you live in NYC. It’s too sparse in SF to be used widely. Too sparse in DC. Chicago is 10 times worse with it’s urban sprawl. And unreliable as fuck in Boston. Boston doesn’t even have a reasonable train to the goddamned airport (yes I know about the blue line, but it’s still a 15 min bus from the blue line station, and you can only transfer to the blue line from the green line).
This is why people drive. Because for the vast majority off us, even those in Europe, there is no better alternative. If transit was so much cheaper, then why doesn’t every village of 10,000 people in Europe have a tram? There are simply too many places people want to go, and only extreme density can make transit cost effective.
Yes, but please join me in finding ironic the fact that nowadays not having to own a car has become a privilege. It is a “privilege” that has been artificially built into our societies. Taking the US for example, car companies in the 50’s bought and demolished streetcar lines to force more people to use their cars, created entire propaganda campaigns to remove the streets from public transport and pedestrians, and literally indoctrinate children with their agenda. This is a video I always recommend watching, as it goes through all these points from a US-perspective. This absolutely did not just happen in the US, this a map of the tram lines in my city in 1929, this is it nowadays.
About smaller settlements, again, while I DO think that a good public transport is possible even there (I think Switzerland is a good example of how that can be done, maybe the Netherlands? Someone in the comments will sure tell me better examples, thank you commenter), I feel like the prime scope of this community is on cities, aka where the big stuff goes on, where people live, work, shop and hang out (very good article about that).
3+5. I agree, infrequent or unreliable public transit is like no public transit at all (okay not really, but it sure is bad). There are two ways to make good transit: you either make it so frequent you literally don’t care about the schedules because you know the next ride is going to be at the station in 10 minutes or less at the most (hello, japan?) or you strictly schedule stops so that users can reliably know at what times the service will be there (I am obviously more of a fan of the first option, but the second probably applies better if you have a very small budget like a 5,000 people town). I suppose the reason you gave up on using transit despite living on a transit corridor that goes to your workplace is the lack of both, correct me if I am wrong.
I have to disappoint you on this, but I took my license driving here. I passed my driving test with no errors and I have never gotten into a crash; I always drive at the speed limit. What happens to be the reason one gets mostly honked at here, is actually following the rules: going at the speed limit rather than 50% more than that, or giving the right of way to a car in front of you which has it by law. There is no “local driving style” here, there is just anarchy resulting from decades of total lack of traffic rules enforcement, which goes hand in hand with having one of the bloodiest amount of deadly/injuring crashes in europe every year. Driving doesn’t make people just uncomfortable, it makes them stress. For an intelligent and curious species like humans, doing an extremely boring and repetitive task to which they are supposed to give their full attention the entire time, is stressful; road rage is very common, to the point it has become “normality” here, crashes are as well.
I am glad you brought on some very common talking points, I will gladly explain to you what is my (and presumably the community’s) answer to them:
This is true, a one-day zero-to-100% ban on cars is probably not feasible, as many nations have parts of their economies based on people being moved by cars (even though the pandemic and remote working showed us that A LOT of those people actually do a job that requires them to commute waaay less than we thought, but this is another story). This is somewhat of a silly point though: people also used to have slaves, hell, we used to run our entire economies on slaves. That did not stop us from seeing that was not a good thing and change that over time. Total ban of cars tomorrow? Sounds cool but not really achievable. Promoting public transit? Restricting car traffic in area where cars clearly don’t belong? Making it an easier time for who wants to walk or use a bike? Hell yeah.
Public transit is overall massively cheaper than cars, for everyone. Just think about it: the cost of a car society is the cost of car infrastructure (you pay it with your taxes) plus the cost of your car, your insurance, the gas (which is actually “cheap” in the US because it is subsidized with taxes so again, you pay that), the maintenance (these costs are unloaded directly on you). In London, which has one of the most expensive fares around the world, owning a car ends up costing on average double what you would pay to use transit daily. My city has a €250 (~$300)/year transit pass. Everything included, as many rides as you want, to wherever you want. I use it to commute daily and hang out. We happen to have a car in my family, but we have the priviledge of rarely having to use it.
True, in fact we advocate for better public transit in the first place. As you said, there is an insanely vaste amount of places in the world that actually do transit great: most european cities have very good transit, but also a lot of US cities (NY, SF, Chicago, etc)
No, you clearly can’t cross state borders with a tram, because that would probably be called a train. In europe you can take high speed trains that go over 200mph and cross entire countries in way shorter times than taking a car (a lot to improve in the future, especially interoperability, dont get me wrong, its far from perfect). Same goes for Japan, and China (but their trains are also faster, and more interconnected as, obviously, it is one country). Transit allows you to go where lines have been built, and for most places around the world that is basically everywhere you could possibly ever want to go. Cars allow you to go where your state has built a road for you.
It has been long since I’ve taken a service that didn’t have heating/air conditioning. I do listen to my music when I commute, I can actually also read or browse feddit, watch a video or study, while the bus/tram driver drives for me. I will give you the point on occupancy, but hum, unless you hate people I don’t see a problem in that. Edit: In several years of taking metros/buses/trams it only happened more or less 5 times to find an “annoying” person on my same ride. Meanwhile, I assure you that almost EVERY time you drive here you are granted: i) a honk for no reason ii) someone not resoecting the right of way. It is faaar more probable to go this close to a car crash than to find an “annoying” person on transit, at least from my experience.
I also control my transit schedule to the minute. Despite my city’s transit having one of the worst looking apps made by humans, I can actually check live-time where the bus or tram i need is and when it will be at the stop (and when its main lines i dont even need to because there is one every 5-7 minutes). You know what i hate instead? Getting stuck in traffic. That really has to be a pain for those 15 cars clogging the two car lanes (one is actually blocked by illegally parked cars), while me and other 50 homies fly by them on the bus-only lane. Also, on the same commute, I had to always add an additional 30 minutes ahead of leaving to account for traffic, making the gains against a bus virtually nothing. But of course you can only make this point if your city is well-served by transit lines.
I don’t either, I don’t think anyone cares about those few people, this community is really about the other 99,9% of motorists.
I don’t get what you mean with “share”. I have not in my entire life in any country of this world seen a seat for two people. What? You mean to seats next to each other? Because that’s… Two seats. There is not really much sharing in it. Need further explaination.
This community is called fuck cars but is really actually about wanting cities designed for people rather than cars (which is how human settlements have been made for basically thousands of years except the last decades). Well shit i made a wot but thats my take, to put it shortly
I wholeheartedly agree with the purpose of this community and what it advocates for, but I wanted to add some rebuttals to your points.
You mention you have the privilege of not using your car. In car centric parts of the world, which is anything that isn’t a big city, this is a privilege. My family that lives in a town of 50,000 people in Germany still need to use their cars every day! There is only a bus system to get them around. Each working age adult uses their car every day! Including the one who lives in Köln and literally walks across the street to his office because car transportation is far more time efficient than transit.
See anecdote above. I live in Boston, which is supposedly extremely transit friendly and the T and commuter rail, while remarkably extensive, are abysmal. I rode it for two months until I finally gave up and got a car. I live in a house 0.5 miles from the commuter rail station and it’s the cheapest around at $750k, I should be able to have reliable transport to MIT/Kendall.
Your issues with driving, being honked at, being annoyed with lack of right of way, all seem to come from inexperience driving in the city. On roads with speed limits of 30 mph, there is no right of way, it’s just about whoever goes first. After some time, you learn what to expect from locals and adapt to their style. But I understand if driving in a big city makes people uncomfortable. There is a lot going on, and a lot to pay attention to.
Schedule. My god is our transit schedule awful. Commuter rail only once every hour. It’s either 5 minutes early or 20 minutes late regularly. So it’s completely unreliable. The Red line is now slow as fuck. Crawling at 10 mph in most areas now. It’s faster to ride your bike between stations, and get stopped by every traffic light than it is to ride the train. And now the red line only has service every 20-30 minutes!
I loved visiting London. We even got a rental to see things like Stonehenge or Brighton, but I never felt the need to use the car much within the city. While I thoroughly enjoyed driving through parts of London like tiny bridges that had inches of clearance on either side of the vehicle, or massive roundabouts near Victoria station, I never needed to do that for local journeys.
It takes 30 minutes for me to drive to work, but 50-90 minutes to go by public transit and I literally live in a massive transit corridor with service from my house directly to work. It’s absolutely absurd. Essentially, transit only broadly works in US if you live in NYC. It’s too sparse in SF to be used widely. Too sparse in DC. Chicago is 10 times worse with it’s urban sprawl. And unreliable as fuck in Boston. Boston doesn’t even have a reasonable train to the goddamned airport (yes I know about the blue line, but it’s still a 15 min bus from the blue line station, and you can only transfer to the blue line from the green line).
This is why people drive. Because for the vast majority off us, even those in Europe, there is no better alternative. If transit was so much cheaper, then why doesn’t every village of 10,000 people in Europe have a tram? There are simply too many places people want to go, and only extreme density can make transit cost effective.
About smaller settlements, again, while I DO think that a good public transport is possible even there (I think Switzerland is a good example of how that can be done, maybe the Netherlands? Someone in the comments will sure tell me better examples, thank you commenter), I feel like the prime scope of this community is on cities, aka where the big stuff goes on, where people live, work, shop and hang out (very good article about that).
3+5. I agree, infrequent or unreliable public transit is like no public transit at all (okay not really, but it sure is bad). There are two ways to make good transit: you either make it so frequent you literally don’t care about the schedules because you know the next ride is going to be at the station in 10 minutes or less at the most (hello, japan?) or you strictly schedule stops so that users can reliably know at what times the service will be there (I am obviously more of a fan of the first option, but the second probably applies better if you have a very small budget like a 5,000 people town). I suppose the reason you gave up on using transit despite living on a transit corridor that goes to your workplace is the lack of both, correct me if I am wrong.