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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Fuck Cars
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You've got legs, and if you can afford a few hundred dollars you've got wheels. By all rights, anywhere you need to go ought to be walking distance from a train station. The reason it's not anymore, is that Americans demolished their cities to build parking, and now everything's too far away.
European here. This is so ridiculously wrong and dismissive.
For one, no, even a country with far higher population density than the US doesn't cover everything with rail. That's a highly privileged city-dweller take (and I do live in cities and feel kinda uncomfortable in rural towns because it feels like there's nothing to do). Because yes, in a large city you do have a ton of options within easy walking distance from subways and light rails, but that's not even close to the case for everything else. Once you leave the big city everything is also too far away in Europe, for more mainstream things you're stuck with lower quality local establishments (or you luck out and have one of the best ones nearby in your proverbial backyard, but it doesn't apply for everyone) and for more niche things, everything is just prohibitively far away.
For two, "anywhere you need to go"? How do you decide that? Like do you not have friends or relatives who live a little further away, or in a logistically hard to reach place? Do you not have hobbies for which the locations are just hella hard to reach by public transport? Hell, with the design those networks can get sometimes even nearby places can be super far away -- for example, here in Budapest lines for getting into the inner city and out are very well built out (although, minor nitpick, they're often buses, not trams or trains), but moving laterally along the outskirts of the city is next to impossible. There's a pretty good supermarket near me with many different options that I'd need about 1.5 hours to get to, one way. It's about 15 minutes by car.
And speaking of, for three, you fail to account for time constraints. Scheduling is a major issue, I have literally never faced a situation where going by car wouldn't have been nearly twice as fast as it is with public transport. I'm lucky enough to only be a single train ride away from my workplace, no transfers necessary, but my commute is still an hour one way, while it could be 30 minutes by car. That's an hour every office day (thankfully we're hybrid) that I'm never gonna get back. Similarly, while yes, you can get nearly everywhere by some form of public transport (very unlikely that you get literally everything covered by rail though, unless you live in a large city), there are a lot of places that take a ridiculously long time to get to, and the further out you live from the city center the more you're exposed to that effect.
Trains are awesome, but they're not a one size fits all solution.
The logical conclusion for all the problems you've listed is: build better public transport infrastructure. All those are arguments against car culture, not for it.
Yeah, we sway toward cars way too much, and the US is even worse in that regard. My points were just that
We can have multiple solutions working in parallel to address these issues. In fact, that's the only way we'll see any result, since the problematic systems weren't built one by one either. And we also need to be on the lookout for people pitting us against each other: it's one of the oil lobby's favorite pastimes to push people toward solutions with less and less real-world viability in a reasonable term, and convince them that the actually short-term viable solutions are dangerous because they only half solve the problem and society is going to get stuck with the half-solution.
We need better public transport, and we need electric cars, and we need both yesterday. You can be against car culture while accepting that car culture won't disappear overnight so having it fuck up the earth less over its remaining lifetime would still be a benefit.
Exactly, that's the whole point I'm making. Just because cars can't be displaced entirely doesn't mean they can't be displaced where possible. And it's possible in many more situations than current car culture would lead you to believe.