Fuckcars is just a cult anyway, they go REEEE at any suggestion that cars are a necessity for many people, and that no busses nor bikes will ever compensate for it.
Weird how it’s literally impossible to ever live without something no one had 100 years ago
Are you going to be first in line to give up your computer? Your phone? Antibiotics? Vaccines? Electricity?
Innovation is real, even if you don’t personally like it. Motor vehicles are a legitimately good invention, arguably only becoming problematic due to increasing population and urbanization.
Some of them are raging right now at the idea that not everyone who hates cars wants to live in an apartment.
Its like liberals screaming when they findout you can be a liberal and a gun owner.
Or conservatives when you express socialistic rights while also limiting government.
As a European, its funny watching these guys talk about “Europe” as this pure implementation of their motorphobic utopia.
A lot of us still drive daily yanks!
Still. I live near Mannheim, out of the 8 people in my circle of close friends, 4 either outright do not own a car or share a car with their spouses, because their households can make do with one or less cars. They can absolutely make do with walking, bikes, tram, bus and train for everything in their daily lives. In many american cities of the same size, that would simply not be an option.
I’ve followed the FuckCars community for a while (started on reddit). Being one of them car fuckers myself I would disagree. There certainly are people there whose thought process doesn’t go much further than car = bad, but boiling the whole community down to that does a disservice to their more important points. I think most people there aren’t so much advocating for less cars as much as they are advocating for policy and societal change toward a world where we aren’t so reliant on cars. Obviously for a massive chunk of the world population (especially in North America) cars are a necessity like you said, but do they need to be? Wouldn’t we all be better off if the world was less car dependent? We aren’t saying that there should be no more cars, just that we shouldn’t continue to design our cities in such a way that you need a car to live.
If you are interested in more about where the fuckcars comunity is coming from I would recommend checking out the youtube channel Not Just Bikes. All of his videos are great but I think this one is a good intro to the channel. I also like this one because it outlines a lot of the specific “first step” type things that could be much better (most applicable to north america). Also, his Strong Towns Video Series is really good if you have the time.
(here are a couple more because I can’t help myself: Why it sucks to grow up in car-centric cities, How American cities are ponzie schemes, and His video about Stroads)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=uxykI30fS54
https://piped.video/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k
https://piped.video/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa
https://piped.video/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw
https://piped.video/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0
https://piped.video/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I don’t think they live in the same reality I do, or maybe they’ve never seen Texas? Even if my local area was designed for foot traffic, the amount of space between literally everything here would make it impossible not to rely on a car.
In DFW you can sum about any trip to somewhere you want to be to a 30 minute drive. Favorite restaurant that isn’t literally right next to you? 30 minutes or an hour without tolls. Work? That’s another 30 minutes. Wanna go to a store nicer than a Walmart? You guessed it. 30 minutes.
Get home from work around 4:30? We’ll now you have a cool 5 hours of time until bed time. Subtract an hour of the gym, an hour of cooking and maybe you’ve got 3 hours of time to do anything else. Waiting for public transportation or wasting time walking would just cut down even more of the hours in your day. Maybe I want more out of life than sacrificing my time to public transportation and walking.
Even if my local area was designed for foot traffic, the amount of space between literally everything here would make it impossible not to rely on a car.
If your local area was designed for foot traffic, then things wouldn’t be so spread out. One of the many reasons this is so bad in america (and this is the case in DFW) are the awful parking minimum laws that have ruined so many cities. Since the 1950’s new business developments have been required to have a minimum amount of parking so that even at max capacity there would be enough spots. In a less car-centric city almost any place you would need to visit regularly -be it a grocery store, a department store, or whatever else- would certainly be within walking distance of (or a short public transit hop away from) your home and work. But the parking minimum laws spread everything so far apart that to walk or bike anywhere is unimaginable, and it also isn’t feasible to build up good public transit because you would need stops at every major street corner (rather than in a reasonable city where you would be taking transit hops between dense clusters of businesses and other destinations).
In DFW you can sum about any trip to somewhere you want to be to a 30 minute drive. Favorite restaurant that isn’t literally right next to you? 30 minutes or an hour without tolls. Work? That’s another 30 minutes. Wanna go to a store nicer than a Walmart? You guessed it. 30 minutes. Get home from work around 4:30? We’ll now you have a cool 5 hours of time until bed time. Subtract an hour of the gym, an hour of cooking and maybe you’ve got 3 hours of time to do anything else. Waiting for public transportation or wasting time walking would just cut down even more of the hours in your day. Maybe I want more out of life than sacrificing my time to public transportation and walking.
You said “I don’t think they live in the same reality I do,” but not only is this pretty much exactly the case in the city I live in, but I have given very similar rants when complaining about living in such a car dependent area. Honestly I was confused for a moment because you have some great points on why living in a city designed for cars sucks so much. The reason I consider myself a member of the fuckcars community isn’t that I think people should walk/bike more or that I don’t like cars. It’s that I want our city designs to change. Walking, biking, and even public transit simply doesn’t make sense in most North American cities but it doesn’t have to be that way. With policy change and redesign projects over time our cities could be so much better.
This seems very unhealthy. Maybe go take a stroll around the block?
Edit: I’m referring to OP or whoever it was that made this image
Omg, who fucking cares?
I’m the blocked out poster in this.
You keep assuming that the living space is ~1500sq/ft for some reason; the houses I am talking about that are like this are not even half that size, but have 2 or even 3 car garages attached to them. Most of these are living quarters for field workers on the dairies and not even built to code.
Imagine a single 10x10 bedroom that has a kitchenette in it, and a room big enough to fit a shower, toilet and sink, attached to a 2 or sometimes even 3 car garage bay. That’s what I see around here.
I mean, I’m not going to ask you to doxx yourself, but I’m extremely curious to know where you’re seeing these homes that are, as you describe them, like 150 SqFt of livable area (10x10 studio + 5x8 bathroom) with an attached 3 car garage.
Edit: And to clarify, the 1500 was pulled out of an anecdotal average. My observations while shopping for homes here in the US have been; 2 bed / 1 bath, could be as small as 800 SqFt, but it’s cramped. Whereas in middle-class suburbia, it’s not uncommon to see 2500+ SqFt homes.
I’m in a somewhat rural part of the central valley in California. Lotta dairy farms out here, and they have their own living spaces for the workers that are just absolute shitholes.
This has the issue of always assuming a household will always live in the most space efficient way possible (2 adults in 1 bedroom with no children or others).
Assume you need 2 bedrooms (2 adults and 1 child): A 800-1,000 sq ft home in the USA is somewhere close to the 10th percentile in terms of size, so going down to ≤750 sq ft puts you near the absolute smallest 2 bedroom houses available.
The first house I lived in after college was 950 sqft. Three bedrooms. No garage. It was also built in the 50’s. It worked for three (and then later four) people splitting rent.
Today developers wouldn’t dare put such a house on the type of lot it was on because it couldn’t be profitable.
Fuck /fuckcars
They actually want to bulldoze so much, just so we can cram more people in closer together. And no, no one wants to be walking around when its 90+ degrees out, or literally freezing.
Yeah, they’re pretty much ACAB now but cars instead of cops.
EDIT: Before anyone even says it. Bad cops suck. Cars do not suck. Big lifted trucks are ass. I wish I could make a 4 wheeler street legal.
I make a living out of my car, so in my case, I’ll just have to disagree.
They throw out all nuance and have absolutely no empathy or consideration that others need to live differently than them. Or hell, need to live differently than them in order to support their own lifestyle. I swear 90% of them have never lived outside the city they were born in.
OK so the majority of people has to cut back on so much, especially a safe environment to get places, just so a few people with a car fetish can keep buying bigger and bigger cars. Got it.
We’re very quickly moving to a place where the QUANTITY of people is so high, the QUALITY of their lifestyles have to be sacrificed to cut down on human impact. The impoverished/developing world has very low impact, at huge cost to their quality of life. Who wants to volunteer to live like sub-saharan Africans, or Indians in abject poverty to cut down on human impact? I’m certain they don’t want that life - and why should they? I’m sure they would like to travel on a jet to a beach vacation like those in more affluent countries do.
I’m calling this eco-austerity. Instead of publicizing overpopulation and promoting low birth rates, we’re expected to belt tighten and give up on quality of life. It’s bullshit. We should have <1B people living like kings, not 10B people living like peasants.
This is exactly the point I’ve been making to them. I think it’s a bunch of people who have never lived outside of a major city, or grew up in new-construction actual suburban hell like Phoenix, DFW, Vegas, most of FL etc. Try old Midwest small city suburbs by comparison. Maybe parts of the northeast.
They probably couldn’t afford a car after used car prices spiked sometime between 2000-2010, and never experienced the freedom and autonomy. They can’t imagine not being into a downtown club scene - it hasn’t dawned on them that they will probably grow up and hate living in a congested apartment world and might want to stretch out in a bigger house in a quiet neighborhood. It’s never occurred to them that not everyone works from home and their spouse may need to take a job 20 miles in the opposite direction.
Do you sell your house because your job changed? Get divorced because your partner’s job changed? You can’t have ALL of the employment in easy reach by public transit from your home. This ideal-city with perfect transit and no commute is a handwave. UNLESS you live in a sufficiently small town that has everything but hasn’t blown up yet - and those aren’t dense enough for transit, and require personal vehicles.
Public transit is also more inconvenient than convenient even if you give it a maximum advantage in density and stipulate that the trains will run 24/7 and frequently (NYC).
It’s just inexperience with life or being an urban loving weirdo who can’t imagine that other perspectives exist. I want to spend all of my free time in places you couldn’t service with transit. They can’t even imagine it.
Ive never seen any calls to bulldoze anything. We do a lot of complaining about how much was bulldozed to fill landscapes with stroads and parking lots. And dont act like we’re not calling for buses and trains as well. Have you stopped and thought about why it’s too hot to walk around now?
Ill give you the benefit of the doubt that you mean even if it was pre-global warming cooler it’d be too hot to walk. It’s still extended those periods where it’s too hot and cold to walk. Plus, again, we also call for buses and trains and trams for your air conditioned travel needs.
And no, no one wants to be walking around when its 90+ degrees out
That’s why they want shade, goober.
