I really hate driving but it takes me 30 min to drive somewhere where public transportation takes me 2 hours. Driving saves me 3 hours a day.
If public transportation was good, I wouldn’t drive.
That is exactly the point of this meme. The resource allocation for building car infrastructure has been massive since the '60s while transit has been left behind as it is way less of a oppurtunity for car manufacturers and oil companies to profit from it and yeah, they do have a saying bigger than yours when it comes to deciding your country’s politics. (See corruptionlobbying)
But it means rebuilding cities. We should absolutely do it, but entirely reworking how everyone gets around is gonna take a while even best case scenario. But that’s why we should get started now!
We already bulldozed and rebuilt our cities for the car, so there’s certainly no reason we can’t do it again. It should be easier this time, though, as the main things we have to demolish are parking lots and stroads, not entire city blocks of dense housing. See Cincinnati below:
From my interpretation, this meme suggests we should just stop building cars. The fact we are buying so many cars is just a testament on how bad public transportation is. Even with traffic I still manage to get 1 hour and half faster than public transportation by train + subway.
I wish the solution was as simples as a resource redirection, but unfortunately it would require some city planning and possibly rebuilding around public transportation. Not gonna happen, I guess.
In an alternate world you’d complain cars can never work because there isn’t enough space for them on roads, and there’s never any parking when you arrive. (Oh, and accidents)
It’s a dead-simple concept that can be applied to everything: public money should only be used for public services. If the private sector is viable, it shouldn’t need public money to prop it up.
Public money should fund public transit. No public money for private transport infrastructure.
Public money should fund public schools. No public subsidies for charter and private schools.
Public money should fund public health care. No public funding should be wasted on propping up a wasteful private healthcare industry. ACA wastes so much money buying insurance for people when we could just build public hospitals and public clinics.
It’s not that private industry shouldn’t exist. It’s just that private industry, conceptually, shouldn’t need to be propped up by social funding. But currently it is. And it’s a tremendous waste of money. Public money should only fund public programs. So simple.
As long as you can use it to walk/reduced mobility on, no. That allows everyone to use it.
Please define “private transport infrastructure”…
Like, do you mean roads and lanes on private property, where the property owner can legally post a “No Trespassing” sign?
Because if that’s not what you mean, then pretty much every transportation path is public transportation.
I work for an auto company. I can tell you they don’t want mass transit because it hurts profits. They would much rather jack up the cost of vehicles, offer deals on leases, and keep people locked into getting a new vehicle every few years. Just keep the machine running and fuck anything except their profits. You will see how shady the auto industry is once the strike happens next week
I like the concept of 15 minute cities/suburbs. You can get anywhere you need within 15 minutes, whether by public transport, bike, walking or car.
Isn’t the point of a 15 minute city that you can get anywhere within 15 minutes without a car?
(By the way, from a European standpoint it sounds really funny that 15 minute cities are not a reality for you. Like, why would you ever build a city differently in the first place?)
It’s pretty disingenuous to claim that your city founded in 1300 has tight streets and isn’t car-friendly because people in 1300 were really big on public transport.
And the answer is that cities grow descriptively rather than prescriptively. They generally add what is in demand/what they need piecemeal, and most US cities really grew in the 20th century.
That’s why NYC, for example, has significantly better public transport than most of the nation - it’s one of the oldest cities
This is also why moving to mass transit is a hard sell. It’s expensive and there is less demonstrated need and more forethought behind the switchover.
There’s an few distinctions about American culture as it relates to car culture.
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America had/has a lot of land
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Much of this is/was vastly underdeveloped right outside of urban hubs, unlike Europe/related which benefits from a tighter interconnected network of cities that more immediately benefit from mass transit systems
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In the US post-WWII middle class and privileged were often sold an idea of peaceful suburban lifestyles away from urbanized areas
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Car manufacturers marketed this successfully as a way to encourage families away from city life and thus build a more solid reliance on their vehicles
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City planning was therefore often built around a suburban-city sprawl rather than a cohesive urban community designed around efficiency
Like, why would you ever build a city differently in the first place?
Exactly. Unfortunately, in Australia, we tend to borrow stupid ideas from the US to make money and have sprawling suburbs with zero amenity.
For instance, we had a new suburbian development within 20km from the CBD with the promise of schools, community centres etc. in the early 2000s. When all the houses were bought and built, suddenly there’s no money for amenities so they just sold the land to developers who then put more houses in. Now the only way to get anything you need is by car because there’s no train or buses because it was supposed to be accessible by bike/walking but now isn’t. And not to mention gridlock of vehicles looking to get out of the suburbs for food etc. out of the one intersection provided.
I would love 15min cities without cars for my country but the attitude to cars here is similar to the attitude about guns in the US.
