58
Traffic updates every half an hour on the radio
(feddit.nl)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
58 points (91.4% liked)
Fuck Cars
9580 readers
604 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Honestly, you're overthinking it. Radio traffic updates are just a holdover/tradition from 10 years back and earlier when we didn't all have realtime traffic info in our pocket.
I live in the Chicago area and listen to public radio on my way to work, and the traffic update is just a list of the same half dozen freeways and stating there is a delay of either 20, 30, or 40 minutes between the same reference points. This takes 20 seconds tops, is useful to nobody, and they rattle through it with the same efficiency and flair of a DJ reading a spot for the local car wash. But they have probably been reading the same script at the same time for 40 years like station IDs and other familiar hooks.
Fuck car culture and all, but relax and take a breath... not everything is some weird insidious plot.
No, I'm not over thinking it. I'm just thinking about it. Neither do I think it's a plot. I work in environmental research, so I think about systemic issues like this quite a bit.
The reality is that my country has set out to reduce carbon emissions by 51% by 2030, which is an incredibly ambitious target. In order to reach that goal, we need to adopt a Dutch transport model that reduces car dependency significantly. That means that people who drive everywhere need to be told to use active and public transport as an alternative to driving all the time.
Using state funded media to get that message across every half an hour during traffic reports seems a fairly obvious way of doing so.
I will heartily agree there in principle, but if the public transport is not a time savings over driving--as is very commonly the case--it would be self defeating.
Why does public transport need to be exactly as quick as driving? I leave myself an extra few minutes to walk to the bus in the morning with no negative consequences compared to driving whatsoever. It's not the end of the world if getting from A to B takes a little longer. This is exactly the type of dogshit logic that makes it next to impossible to get anyone to do anything differently.
Lmao you proposed using public radio to remind people to use public transport alongside traffic reports. If the radio says "there's a 45 minute backup from O'Hare to downtown, but the CTA is running 1:15" it doesn't exactly make the case for public transit, and tacking on "but spending that extra 30 minutes on the train will help support a better system eventually" will change exactly zero minds.
Look, the topic of this post was how traffic reports are reinforcing that driving is the only viable way to get around. Traffic reports are at best a symptom, not a cause, more realistically they are a relic of the time before we all had smart phones. Railing against anything that reminds you of cars is not the path to systematic change.
I'm not interested in changing people's minds. I'm in favour of literally telling people to stop driving because the fucking planet is on fire. If that adds 30 minutes to your commute, so be it.
Meanwhile I live in a city with good public transport, such that it only takes 15 minutes longer to get around, but 95% of people still drive. That absolutely justifies regularly reminding people that acceptable alternatives are available every time they listen to the radio.
Yes it is. That's why this community exists: to discuss alternatives to car dependency.