Fuck Cars
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.
Rules
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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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No bigotry or hate. Racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, chauvinism, fat-shaming, body-shaming, stigmatization of people experiencing homeless or substance users, etc. are not tolerated. Don't use slurs. You can laugh at someone's fragile masculinity without associating it with their body. The correlation between car-culture and body weight is not an excuse for fat-shaming.
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Stay on-topic. Submissions should be on-topic to the externalities of car culture in urban development and communities globally. Posting about alternatives to cars and car culture is fine. Don't post literal car fucking.
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No traffic violence. Do not post depictions of traffic violence. NSFW or NSFL posts are not allowed. Gawking at crashes is not allowed. Be respectful to people who are a victim of traffic violence or otherwise traumatized by it. News articles about crashes and statistics about traffic violence are allowed. Glorifying traffic violence will get you banned.
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No reposts. Before sharing, check if your post isn't a repost. Reposts that add something new are fine. Reposts that are sharing content from somewhere else are fine too.
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No misinformation. Masks and vaccines save lives during a pandemic, climate change is real and anthropogenic - and denial of these and other established facts will get you banned. False or highly speculative titles will get your post deleted.
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No harassment. Posts that (may) cause harassment, dogpiling or brigading, intentionally or not, will be removed. Please do not post screenshots containing uncensored usernames. Actual harassment, dogpiling or brigading is a bannable offence.
Please report posts and comments that violate our rules.
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Are you seriously suggesting that more advanced propulsion and suspension systems would eliminate the need for traction?
Have you ever ridden a bike on just the rims?
It sucks. And I don't mean just in terms of comfort. There's a reason mountain bikes with the most advanced suspension systems still need soft knobbly tires in addition to their suspension systems to do what they do.
Trains and trams are far more efficient large scale transport options, but cars and smaller personal transport options like scooters and bicycles have their place, too. Despite our current over-reliance on them, they aren't useless. There are use-cases where they are the best option. The same goes for the tire.
The compliant tire is the best option for an off-rails vehicle. No, suspension cannot replace it, not in terms of cost (and I don't mean money, I mean materials and energy) and especially not in terms of functionality.
That's not how wheels work.
You can't just ignore traction and claim you can make an effective vehicle of any kind with materials that don't wear if only sufficiently advanced propulsion and suspension were applied.
Even on skateboards, warehouse vehicles, and similar, the wheel isn't just a solid cylinder of metal or some other non-compliant low-wear material.
It's a hard hub, wrapped in plastic, or rather, polyurethane. A compliant grippy material that serves a very important purpose in improving the performance of the wheel. You can't replace a compliant wheel material with somehow better suspension. You still need it for grip, even on perfectly flat surfaces.
Trains make up for their low traction (and therefore high efficiency) with slow steady acceleration/deceleration and extreme weight. Their design principles cannot be applied to personal vehicles, which do serve their own purposes.