I don't think terrorizing random working people is a productive way to promote public transit.
Yeah, the average person isn't going to be like "Guess I'll take the bus/train/bike" they're going to be pissed
Seems somewhat counterintuitive
In the aggregate, rather than the acute example of a hypothetical person doing it as a visible political protest, I think it does push people away from cars (or towards white flight 2.0 depending on the persons background) but you're right, its ofc not actually a productive strategy, just a byproduct of poverty that impacts those who least deserve it the hardest.
Nobody sells their car in reaction to a catalytic converter theft. They just get more reactionary politics when it comes to crime, and become more likely to shoot a stranger that wanders into their yard.
As someone who has in the past relied on a public bus to commute, I'll say that 30 minutes is a dream and my commute temporarily went from 15 minutes to over 60 because when my car broke down and I couldn't afford to fix it, I had to go in the opposite direction of work and then come back towards work from there due to no direct bus route, and my time to myself at home shrunk even more because the last bus to arrive at work arrived well before my shift started while the first bus to leave after it left a while after it (I don't remember exactly how far off, this was like 8-9 years ago, but I remember having minimal time to myself or to spend with my partner).
Frankly I could have easily lost my job and possibly ended up homeless, and if someone has destroyed my car on purpose instead of it being bad luck, I'd have been on the verge of over it.
Unless you're in one of the like 3 places in the US with good public transit I think this is kinda shitty, and if you do it to a cheap car/poor person's car, you're actively a bad person.
realistically yeah petty shit is only going to hurt the people that least deserve it as usual. That was the unserious part for sure. Not that I would do any vandalism but if I were going to it wouldn't be to random shitboxes, and I haven't exactly appreciated when it's happened to me.
I'm definitely happy to see parking treated as the scarce resource that it is though, we have pretty good and rapidly expanding transit service here and I'm sick of people acting like we live in nebraska and they have zero options. If the post said "I work in 2nd/3rd ring suburb and can't take transit" it'd be different, but this was so egregious
No. Nobody seriously decides not to get a car, shaving time off their commute, because it might get damaged. The cost of a new cat, even if it was guaranteed to be stolen eventually, is marginal compared to the guaranteed up-front cost of a car and continuous maintenance costs which they're already willing to pay. What is necessary is better transit so that spending money on a car doesn't get you anything worth buying.
gonna go with no.
stealing and destroying personal property is not praxis
If there are transit alternatives, I guess.
I've thought about this in the context of car alarms. There was a discussion about banning car alarms in densely populated areas and somebody said that that would enable car theft and I was like [where is the two cakes emote?].
AFAIK, you can drive without a cat... it just hurts everyone around you. So its not even that much of an inconvenience. Like, it would take something like expecting to have your car towed once a month due to damages while you were away to make people thing "I don't want to deal with the headache of having a care". Bike theft certainly is cited by many as the reason they won't commute by bike. Probably not because cheap bikes are expensive to replace (even replacing one for $200 every single week would be cheaper than what many people spend on cars in the US each year), but because not knowing if you will have a ride home from work each day probably sucks. If driving was like that, people would certainly reconsider driving.
This is true. My catalytic converter was stolen a few years back and I drove on it 2-3 times (when I realized it was gone and when I took it to a friend's garage to repair. In the intervening 6 months I just bused/biked.)
You are more likely to be harassed by the police for your loud exhaust (they don't give a shit about the cat in most of the US) but in most places they don't seem to care even about the noise unless its an excuse to
I still harbor some affection for the idea of a mass campaign of deflating SUV tires but honestly its lib shit and wouldn't work
I still harbor some affection for the idea of a mass campaign of deflating SUV tires but honestly its lib shit and wouldn’t work
Deflating just means people spend $50 on a tool to conveniently air up their tires if it became super wide spread. Probably better to use that energy to do tactical urbanism to make the environment more friendly towards alternatives and less friendly towards oversized vehicles.
you can physically remove the valve core as well, or slash the tire, neither of which are going to be as easily solved, but yeah.
I'd love to see some practical examples of tactical urbanism that aren't just cutesy BS that does nothing (not accusing it of all being like that I just wish it were posted about more!)
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