Fuck Cars

It's absolutely insane how many people die every single day because we thought it was a good idea to let everyone operate multi-ton pieces of heavy machinery at hundreds of km per hour on the reg.

How the fuck is there more regular testing and training for people driving forklifts than Dodge Rams?

Last time I was in Houston I was driving in bumper-to-bumper traffic that was going 95 mph. I looked over to my right and saw a group of five cars pass me going at least 10 to 20 mph faster. This would not have been remarkable except that I was in the right lane and these cars were passing me on the shoulder.

This being Houston, though, that's still probably not remarkable.

I live in a medium-sized city and I learned years ago that if you want to get anywhere on time, stay off the freeway. It's not nearly as wide, but it has on ramps at shit intervals and the on ramps mostly give you no room to accelerate to highway speeds, so it's always congested. I'm actually about to go a couple towns south as I write this and looking at GPS the freeway route which is the most direct will take 20 minutes longer than simply going through back country roads that add an addition 10 miles to the trip.

Looks a bit jammed on the photo though. I'm sure one more lane will fix that. /s

Also, this one. Insane traffic in Los Angeles, 1993.

Future ppl are truly going to consider this time a dystopia.

The Federal Highway Administration has a multi-billion dollar budget, and doesn't include the multi-billion dollar budget each state allocates to their state highway departments, or the multi-million dollar budget most large cities allocate to their streets and highways departments, and many cities unconditionally grant valuable street real estate to individuals to park for free.

It's not an anarchocapitalist conspiracy, it's a massive subsidy for motor vehicle owners.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisladd/2017/03/13/unspeakable-realities-block-universal-health-coverage-in-the-us/

Oil and automotive companies literally tore most of public transport out in US way back when.
They would invest into the local tram companies, buy them out, then close and tear out the lines.

It's insanely bad. Hell, Canada has shown that public transit is viable with the North American development model, but the US simply refuses to invest money into public works.

Vancouver SkyTrain and Montreal REM/Metro are both fast, highly efficient subway systems that are able to navigate single-family housing development. Why can't the US?

In the US, public transportation is pretty much unusable in bigger cities except for NYC.

America has this weird, masochistic relationship with cars that just gridlocks everyone. But "FreEdoM."

Not many U.S. cities have a subway. I think the only substantial subway system is in NYC. The city I live in has a very short commuter rail line that doesn't go to/from anywhere people want to go. Buses are gridlocked in traffic like everyone else, and have to make frequent stops, so it can take something like 2 hours to travel 10 miles. The low-wage workers I know without vehicles just spend $40/day on Uber to commute to work and back (which is a significant percentage of their pay).

Broken clock, etc

It's extremely hard to nuance any conversation on any forum when multiple people interact. People almost always assume you're pro or anti something. It's also easier mentally to reject what doesn't match your views.

Debating on the internet is useless most times to convince the other party, but I'm sure some people reading it who haven't made up their mind on the subject can appreciate a well put out idea and maybe consider it before making up their mind.

This seems like a straw-man criticism. I have never seen the anti-car communities attack people in rural areas for needing cars.

Changing to a different form of transportation, unless it involves teleportation, is just moving the problem somewhere else. It might be all electric, and it might get you there twice as fast, but you're still just leveraging a tactic that moves the goalpost and delays the inevitable.

Ultimately, there is no right answer to this. The greater the population, the greater the problem. If everyone who could work remotely started doing so, and the rest were afforded decentralized centers for the onsite labor they must do, this would be a more manageable problem. But eventually, we'd be back where we started - it'd just be a higher concentration of onsite workers generating all the traffic, and they might have less distance to travel.

Coruscant's traffic problems, or maybe 5th Element's, are what we're destined for.

We used to have public street cars where I live that took people up and down the hill, but they sold out to a car company. I believe it lasted 2 years before the car company shut it down all together. Wild stuff!

That's just an average suburban neighborhood street in Texas.

Seriously, though, that's the Katy freeway in Houston Texas, which is often claimed to be the widest freeway in the world.