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fuck cars, rural edition
(lemmy.basedcount.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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Fuck Cars
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This community exists as a sister community/copycat community to the r/fuckcars subreddit.
This community exists for the following reasons:
- to raise awareness around the dangers, inefficiencies and injustice that can come from car dependence.
- to allow a place to discuss and promote more healthy transport methods and ways of living.
You can find the Matrix chat room for this community here.
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Be nice to each other. Being aggressive or inflammatory towards other users will get you banned. Name calling or obvious trolling falls under that. Hate cars, hate the system, but not people. While some drivers definitely deserve some hate, most of them didn't choose car-centric life out of free will.
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There are a number of things that amaze me in this group. Like you all take it for granted that everyone is capable to ride a bike from here to sunset, and that the same bike is sufficient to haul whatever it is to be hauled. This is the narrowminded worldview of young, single city-dwellers that can reach all necessary places easily by public transport or bike or even foot within a few minutes.
I've lived in the country where there was (and probably still is) "the morning bus" and "the evening bus", and the next city was 30+km away. And you are really telling those people not to use cars?
Of course there are always scenarios where a person needs a car. If you have to live 30 km away from the next city and public transportation isn't an option (maybe a dial-a-bus kinda system) you probably have to take a car.
If you live 'rural' like me, 4 km away from the next city, there is barely anything you have to take the car for. And if you need to haul something you could rent a car in the city (if you don't have a own car). Still nearly all my neighbours own one car per person, at least two per household.
People like you amaze me. You take it for granted that everyone is able to afford and maintain a safe car and is able to park it wherever they want to. This is the narrowminded worldview of old, saggy village-dwellers.
Don't take it too personal, but your and many other peoples inability to understand that there can be a systematic problem with too much car dependency without attacking your individual way of living is quite annoying.
Does it matter if I am Canadian or not? The problem is the same all over the world. But yes, the USA and Canada seem especially fucked.
Feels like you are repeating what i wrote. Maybe I wasn't clear enough. We need to reduce car dependency everywhere. In some places it will be harder/nearly impossible, in other places it will be easier.
And I also like what someone else wrote in this thread: we are discussing if we should keep the most terrible consequences of car dependencies. I vote we do not.
I definitely should have been more specific. I wouldn't think of 4km from groceries as being rural at all-- like you said, I think that car problem can be solved with normal urban solutions.
Renting a car to haul is just... not even close to viable. That would approximately double my annual expenses. Besides, I can't rent a car with no credit history and no way to get to the city to rent a car.
Hauling really does seem to be the sticking point. If you have to haul you're kind of stuck with a car.
While I agree cars/trucks make sense in rural areas, your great grandparents likely lived in rural extremely rural conditions without a car. It has been done for the majority of human existence, and the Amish still do it today.
They had feed mills in carting distance, and they had hundreds of acres to grow their own food. With more people on earth, we usually have dozens of acres, at best, and one feed mill in the county, at best.
I actually want to know more about this. It sounds like you know what you're talking about. If you've got any good YouTube videos or links (or feel compelled to talk about it yourself); I grew up in rural areas and simple farms, but I don't know the first think about feed mills and industrial agriculture.
A while ago I explored a rabbit hole about farming without ammonium nitrate and I was shocked how basically the whole world (minus the island of Java) depends on ammonium nitrate for food.
We (or at least I) are not telling those people to not drive in conditions like you described, we say that there should be more busses so not driving as often would even be possible, and that if they drive that they don't demand that they have a right to park right in front of everywhere they go in the city and get there by freeways that are built for rush hour traffic and sit mostly empty during the rest of the day (and scarring the city the whole time, while they can escape to their quaint countryside).
Maybe it's my Canadian showing, but 30 km away from a city is a suburb.
Not a single person here has said or even implied this. Everyone here has suggested several different kinds of transport, including but not limited to bicycles. Not only that, but nearly every comment has acknowledged that some car use in the countryside is probably necessary. I recommend actually reading the comments here rather than assuming you know what they say and getting angry about it.
Yeah, I was surprised how many responses didn't consider hauling at all. I really don't need to commute anywhere at all. I'm happy just staying home. But I do have to haul hay bales, feed sacks, and 50lb sacks of groceries.
Cars make sense if you have to haul a lot of stuff. Craftsmen in the city, firetrucks, ambulances, police, farmers,... The right car for the right job is not the problem of our car dependency and doesn't need a solution.
Fair enough, I guess. I was just hoping for a way out of my personal car dependency.
Bro. It's a community for people that wish they could drive.
More like a community of people who wish they didn't have to drive
What makes you think that the majority of people noticing the enormous car dependency can't drive? I bet the opposite is true, people driving a lot will notice the lunacy earlier. If they aren't completely stupid and blind.