A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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.
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:
my area doesnt even have sidewalks
Because to them, 'car' and 'vehicle' mean the same thing.
This video explains really well exactly why transit is better than cars: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=j4s9WDDRE2A
This one too: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=WiI1AcsJlYU
I also like to point to this graphic: 
Cars are just an insanely inefficient way to move people around in cities.
I take issue with this graphic. It is disingenuous to imply that foot traffic isn't the highest density form of transit. You can't load a train with other trains. People have to walk.
You forgot to account speed. Trains go something between 20-40+ times (or far more if you account carriage) faster than average person walking. This increases the throughput of the lane massively.
For me it's because I want an electric car and don't really care about other modes of transit. I don't want to be in a dense city, and a car is far more practical outside of one.
Bicycles are one of the most energy-efficient ways to travel, and electric ones even more so. But absolutely no one refers to them as "vehicles"...
Just an add here ... Pedestrian fatalities are up, largely due to huge vehicles in general. But EVs tend to be very heavy because of the batteries. So collisions tend to be very unpleasant.
Larger physical body - that has a higher impact point on a human - has a much greater chance to kill someone, than if it was a lower impact point.
Not to mention the reduction in visibility.
Sauce: https://twitter.com/FreckleEars/status/1624137853872574475/photo/1
The line of sight numbers are telling. Thank you for providing this information.
Can confirm. Rode a 1000w electric bike to work every day and couldn't wait to get a car after all the near-misses I had. It's even more dangerous than a pedal bike cause no one expects a bicycle to be going almost 30 MPH. Almost got hit at least 3-4 time from people turning right cause they didn't expect me to be inside the intersection so soon.
They're a lot of fun for recreation but not as a daily driver, unless you have a suicide wish.
It's almost as of going 50kph with a bicycle isnt a good idea to begin with
Plus I heard there have been a lot of battery fires.
I feel like the EV business got ahead of itself, cars, bikes, trucks. Some of these companies that went public are heading for bankruptcy.
Then there's the usual disrespect for bike riders. I ride mostly off-road. But I've been nearly run over by both cars and horses.
Sodium Ion batteries can possibly solve all of our major issues with EVs and even solar / wind power storage. They are starting to be commercially available already.
The advantages of Sodium Ion batteries are that they don't require the rare earth minerals like lithium and cobalt that LiPO / LiFePO batteries do, AND they are non-flammable. They have slightly less energy density than lithium type batteries, so they need to be a bit larger for the same capacity, but not as much larger as old-school lead batteries would be for the equivalent capacity.
Wait, what about autonomous bicycles?
What is the advantage of autonomous trains over regular? It seems to me that when driving a train is your job, the autonomy just takes it away.
I find these discussions seem to be dominated by young urbanites. People who don't need a car to get around as opposed to the huge number of people who live in areas that require a car to function. They are also physically able to bike many miles every day in any weather.
I took public transportation when I lived in a big city and was glad to have it but anytime I needed to go beyond a limited area in the city I needed a car. Now I live in an area with very limited public transportation and very very little is in walking distance and biking for my needs is not an alternative. Frequently using 100% public transportation routes would increase your travel time by a large amount, time you may not have or want to sacrifice. If you live in country like France it seems like the transit unions have a stranglehold on the nation as they can shut down everyone at will, if you have a car you at least have an alternative. There are also breakdown issues, maintenance shutdowns, etc. You also run into the last mile issue a lot. Where you need to go is frequently not a reasonable distance from the stop. I usually needed a car to get to the train stations for instance.
huge number of people who live in areas that require a car to function
That is exactly the problem. Areas that require a car to function shouldn't exist. That's what those "young urbanites" are arguing for.
And there are a lot of great point there about mixed zoning, but nuance is important. Should small towns with nearly nothing available locally, where you have to travel outside of town for most things just not exist? Even if they do have train connections (as they often do where I live, in Europe), you usually only have one train every 1-2 hours unless there's some specific significance to your town.
Improving things is a nice goal, but it often feels like here that people just want to eliminate anything that doesn't conform to their ideals of how the world should be like.
I would have to drive about 45 minutes to get to any form of public transport that isn't a school bus.
yeah I think its aimed to help fix the high traffic areas, for me when I was able to take the train from near my home to near my work it was amazing, it went pretty much parallel to the highways so you could drive and maybe get there a little faster but riding the train made it so you had time to play game boy or read a book instead of staring at the bumper in front of you in traffic. more trains and public transportation for commuting and cars for leisure like going on a road trip to go camping
All we honestly need is a few community shared self driving cars in each neighborhood to fix the last mile issue with mass transit, but the fuck cars absolutists often would rather have trains built to every houses doorstep than admit cars could still hold a purpose.