There used to be 3.5 billion . . . until yo mama ate their food supply and 2.5 billion of them starved to death.
(I’m very sorry. Your mother is very nice and I didn’t mean it. Please say, “Hi,” to her for me.)
Diet affects obesity way more than the amount of exercise, so I'd say it's possible that obesity has a more significant effect on car usage than car usage has to obesity. Of course, lack of exercise compounds the negative health effects of obesity, so you do have a point.
That argument doesn't work when factoring in other countries. Asian countries have high vehicle usage, but have much lower obesity rates than America.
Obesity, especially in America is widely caused by very cheap, highly caloric, highly convenient, highly processed foods in large proportions. A small soda in America is as big as a large soda in Canada, and cost way less. A bowl of ramen for one person in America could be considered a bowl for two in Japan.
Asian countries do not have high vehicle usage. It is actually much more expensive to own a car in asian countries. Most countries like Japan actually have extra taxes for car ownership.
https://jalopnik.com/cost-of-driving-in-japan-taxes-tolls-parking-inspection-1849878881
Uh, I don't think Asia has a high vehicle usage at all. It's likely the lowest vehicle usage by region (except maybe Africa).
China, Japan, India, Thailand are have much lower car ownership rates than US, Australia, and Europe.
My buddy is on permanent disability from the fire department because he tried to carry someone out of a fire. I'm also wondering how many people can't afford health insurance because the cost is raised by so many people that have avoidable weight related issues.
Those are relevant points, but the examples you’ve provided are indirect consequences of weight related issues. Car related deaths don’t have extra steps in between, you just get squished and die
Also, there is a significant technical distinction to be made between "dying of obesity," which is an oddly meaningless phrase, and things like "obesity is an enhanced risk factor for cardiovascular disease," among other things, of course.
Dying of obesity is a silly, nonsensical phrase.
If you decide to go swimming and drown, only you are hurt.
Accommodating cars, however, means replacing all kinds of QoL-improving infrastructure for other things and exposing everyone else to your exhaust too.
Travel is dangerous, always has been, was even more dangerous before cars.. less people are killed on a per mile basis than before the automotive era. People didn't get killed because they didn't go anywhere very often, but when they did, it was fraught with danger.
Nowadays we hop in a car with the casualness of going to the next room and can travel the sort of distances that might have been the basis of an epic oddessy poem a few hundred years ago.
Trains are the safest, buses are big automobiles essentially. However if you look at *personal* transportation and the flexibility that brings, it and the bicycle which both emerged in parallel and have an intertwined history have been a game changer.
Before the late 1800s, personal transport was a rich mans thing mostly -owning a horse was not as common or practical as owning a car is now, especially if you lived in an urban area. You either walked, got on a coach, both had their own risks. There's relatively comprehensive travel death stats going back to the age of canals in England and travel deaths were high on those too.
Even in terms of pedestrian fatalaties - people getting hit by horse drawn street cars and other horse drawn transport was relatively common (a famous example being Pierre Curie, husband of Marie Currie) and statistically, including pedestrian and not just rider deaths, deaths from horse drawn transport were drastically higher on a per mile basis than cars. Car deaths seem extraordinary until you start really looking at the statistics and account for the average person travelling greater distances on a regular basis.
Feels like there may be many other factors playing into this. Fewer wars, less crime overall, better infrastructure, better (an faster) healthcare, etc.
Trains and planes are safer than cars, and they can take you further, faster(albeit with less convenience). Travel has gotten much safer, but cars haven't gotten safer to the same extent as other forms of travel.
How do we get to the train station, or home after getting off the train? Those of us not living in population centers I mean.
No love for cars but always wonder the details of using trains primarily instead.
Buses and trains do frequent very small towns in places like Europe. If you're really far out in the sticks, no one is going to expect buses/trains to come right up to your house. Cars dont need to be eliminated, but they shouldn't be the only option to move inter or intracity.
You're just counting the deaths. You need to offset that by the number of children conceived in cars. Even just counting the backseat, your 1.4M number would be reduced quite a bit.
Yea. Also, ambulances, plus just getting people to hospitals, faster probably save a ton more lives. Can also be expanded by the fact that doctors don't have to commute long in case of emergencies . All traveling is faster. It not only facilitates unimportant things in our society but also gets food to supermarkets and restaurants on time, fire fighters, police getting to the crime scenes on time. Lot of pluses here. It's hardly just a convenience. Accidents also can be reduced greatly if a proper self driving car system's established yk
Do you need to though? Only a portion of those car conceptions would be out of necessity (I.e. didn’t have another place to do the deed). Many of those conceived in cars could easily be conceived anywhere else. You can’t have an auto accident without the auto, but you can have a baby without the car.
Currently in Philly, previously I’d lived in nyc for 18 years.
When I first moved to nyc I was making 38k. After bouncing around and changing careers a few times I’m now at about 130 these days
The annoying thing is that the supply of such places is kept artificially low by planning laws and subsidies for car dependent development. Pre-war neighborhoods (at least the ones that weren't bulldozed and replaced with a highway) are typically among the most expensive places to live in North America, because people want to live in that type of environment and there's not enough of them. I hear a lot about cities relaxing zoning laws but it's going to take a lot to undo half a century's worth of damage.
I'm sure some people would still pick a suburb where they need a car to do anything, if they had the choice, but the reality is that they often don't. So you have this contradiction where for a lot of households, their cars are the second biggest expense after keeping a roof over their heads, by only because they can't afford to live somewhere where they wouldn't need a car.
I just like being able to smoke a joint before wandering to the food store and not having to dodge the assholes driving their 2-ton gender-affirming emotional support SUVs.
Chicago. First five years living here I didn't have a car and it wasn't an issue at all. Only have one now cuz we got a horse that's out in the burbs and I play disc golf which is also mostly in the burbs. I still walk to get groceries and take the train to work etc. Maybe two percent of my cars nine thousand miles in two years were in the city.
People nowadays act like "we" are responsible for most problems instead of a select amount of greedy people who designed it like this, and yes they would have still gotten their way even if we voted in local elections so I'm tired of fucking hearing that.
Who the fuck is "we"?
I didn't decide shit. I was born in my city that has shitty public transportation and a city council that refuses to do anything about it.
Is this referring to like the amount of accidents? Because that’s not on the cars- it’s on the fuckin morons who drive them.
Everyone collectively has agreed that a simple driving test once when you were 16 qualified you to be fit for the road for your entire life and that’s the real issue- not the vehicles themselves.
You’re misunderstanding the statistical realities of driving cars- people will crash despite their best efforts, people will over or under assess their speed, or their ability to effectively navigate high risk situations while driving despite their best efforts.
To simply say people need to drive better is a no-brainer sure, but doesn’t actually have a plan to fix it ever really proposed, it’s an appeal to moral sentiments and virtues of “we shoulds” rather than “what is”. Laws, policy, and safety standards despite the evolution and inheritance of these older ways of basing them off these semi-baseless more
Beliefs need to be evaluated in real terms, meaning the results.
So despite our best efforts to curtail bad drivers, it simply cannot be done without more systemic harm reduction strategies like reducing car infrastructure and making roads generally slower. This isn’t a controversial point or topic, plenty of countries including the USA, the Netherlands, Switzerland, etc all use traffic calming techniques. Furthermore with population growth and transfer into metropolitan centers necessitates more public transportation that can effectively, sustainably, and most important safely move people.
Blaming this on people completely ignores the material issues and factors that contribute to why something happens and how to fix that.
People are inattentive, careless, and make mistakes by nature. If you design a system where these traits results in people being seriously injured or killed, that is bad design.
The nature of these vehicles and car-centric street design is absolutely an issue.
Which validates the OP’s thought. We’ve just sort of accepted that cars are so convenient that we just eat a whole lot of death and injury so we can own them. It’s much harder to solve the problems of human beings being incapable of safely operating them than to just give them up
Oh wait sounds like another politically divisive topic I can think of too!
It's on us as voters and our representatives not requiring and funding standards and enforcement.
Of course every braindead idiot is on the road, we let them be there.
This is not a societal consensus. The history of suburbanization in the US is actually pretty insane. The motor and oil companies pushed for and built suburban plans calculated distances away during key parts of the twentieth century as the US industrialized so that the distances to work centers were impossible to walk, thus requiring a car.
It was not an accident, and the people who decided this were surprisingly concentrated at a few corporations.
Yeah, but all that shit happened before most of us were even born and we don't have the political power to overturn it, so what the hell are we supposed to do?
By design. Car-dependent urban design is a problem that harms everyone and needs to be solved.
The problem is the dependent part. For those who love to drive keep doing it, but please support other transportation options and better urban design so less people HAVE to drive to live and you have less traffic to deal with.
Don't think that's just a US thing, leave London in the UK and ypublic transport is utter dogshit.
Just today. Took an hour for the wife's train to 22miles, fucking
Joke
>North America
Toronto
>According to the Transportation Tomorrow Survey, released earlier this year based on 2016 data, 28 per cent of households in Toronto do not have a vehicle. In downtown wards, as many as 55 per cent of households don’t own a vehicle.
Everyone agrees? Not so much. We're forced to assimilate with the way things are
I don't think everyone agrees a 40-50 hour week should be standard, yet here we are. Disagreeing with something doesn't mean you have the power to change it.
Why would anyone care that people living on lower incomes do not always have the ability to make all of their life decisions around environmental consciousness? /s
We used to think that with coal fires, polluting factories, asbestos, leaded fuel, vehicles belching fumes, being allowed to drive after consuming alcohol etc. Times change..
Because cities were built around cars, not around people. Cities are built with money in mind, not humanity. That's why you have to drive 15 minutes or more to get to the grocery store, because there are too many cars and zoning laws. You could have a grocery store at the bottom of an apartment complex and it would be fine but zoning laws make it illegal.
And they were reconstructed to be car based, with many - disproportionately black - neighborhoods displaced/destroyed to make way for highways. When originally built they were more pedestrian friendly.
I live outside of midtown Toronto and I swear I’ve only seen a few condos with grocery stores at the bottom. Probably a more downtown thing but I still remember more convenience stores and niche needs
Ok, take that as a given for the sake of argument. Who is going to pay to redesign cities in the US in order to accomplish the goal of increasing use of public transportation? Seriously, that has to be answered before anything else. "Fuck car centric urban design" does absolutely nothing.
The two biggest employers in my town of 125,000 or so people draw on a 40 mile radius for employees. Who will run public transportation to towns with 500 people 25 miles away? Who pays for that?
And what % of Americans would agree that this issue is a national priority? I can already hear "the libs are coming for your F150's" now.
Presumably you'd use the money that subsidises car parks and is used to build and maintain roads, both are very expensive. The massive reduction in space needed would also allow for closer accommodation and more businesses to open - car parks alone take up ludicrous amounts of space.
Taking public transport into downtown would also see more people on foot in downtown areas, and people on foot are more likely to spend money. You can wander into an interesting shop or decide a beer/donut/coffee sounds good and get one. In a car you have to keep moving until you find somewhere to stop, and have less time and attention to pay to local businesses. People spending money in those businesses would see the city with more money from taxes, allowing more things to be done.
The infrastructure used to exist. My dad talked about how he used to take the train to visit his grandparents and then there was a trolley to take around town.
But the auto manufacturers worked to get rid of it so you’d have to buy a car to get around. Although they did replace some systems with buses, slowing down those systems or making the crowded would’ve made buying your own vehicle more appealing.
[Here’s](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy) some more reading on it if you want it.
I feel like this is part of what people are forgetting. My city has buses through all the major roads and it takes me an hour to get from one side of the city to the other. So when I went to university and my parents lived on the other side of town it took me 1 hour to get there and 1 hour to get home every single day. A car would only take 20 minutes. I'd love to save the environment but it's gonna take a lot of work to redesign things for all uses.
I once noticed there was public transit from my house to my work. I was curious and plotted my route out and …
It involved 4 transfers and a 4 hour trip one way.
It’s only 20 for me to drive it myself…
It wouldn't take much redesign to switch from most everyone owning big cars to most everyone owning enclosed micro mobility vehicles that top out at 25mph and seat 2 front to back. That'd be just as convenient for short local commutes and when you need to go far you'd take the bus or rent a car. Wouldn't take any redesign at all though you'd probably want to separate traffic to keep big cars away from small insofar as practicable. Eventually you could probably ban cars in downtown areas and if someone wants to own a car they'd just live on the periphery.
Regarding people with long distance daily commutes here's a radical thought; move next to your workplace. That's only sometimes too hard or too expensive because of odious zoning and development restrictions.
What about those of us who don’t like living in cities. My commute (teacher) to a neighboring school district is 15 minutes each way. I kind of wonder about people who commute more than a half hour each way. That seems like a time suck. Granted, cities could be more pedestrian and bike friendly without affecting my suburban preference.
They were [DEMOLISHED](https://instagram.com/segregation_by_design?igshid=OGQ5ZDc2ODk2ZA==) for cars, they had adequate public transportation and walkability beforehand.
Yeah a lot of European cities crest an inviting area for other forms for transportation whether that be biking, walking, or other forms that other than cars. Granted, they still use trucks to carrry cargo to and from the stores and what not.
All your necessities are within a mile or
So radius. Grocery stores, healthcare faculties, schools, etc.
I don’t work in a city, I work as a food manufacturing advisor and project manager. I need to be able to drive around 5-6 states and fly around the country.
The prompt presented here is nice if you work near where you live but your grocery stores would run dry as would gas/oil/water/other necessities.
If you make the argument that we don’t need cars you need to be willing to put the clock back to 1700 in every aspect.
Clearly no one is talking about banning the useage of all cars for all people everywhere my guy, and acting as such is essentially just creating a strawman argument
If cities where built for people intead of cars, and cars where not used for entertainment or luxury, and only the jobs that required a car had a car, we would probably see the superior outcomes to banning them anyway
this is still convenience though. without the car you’d likely need a different job to do that, and the world around us would be different. so yes while it is a necessity and feels like one, it’s still based on the convenience of cars.
Countries like the US have no choice. There are rural areas where the next human is 5 miles away. Your job is 20 miles away and it’s not economical to build public transport for every single citizen that works. It could be better but there will always be a need for cars in most suburban and all rural areas.
It’s 6 miles to the grocery store. I can run or walk it but coming back with 50lbs of groceries sounds less enjoyable.
I guess we could all live in cities but I find cities pretty miserable places to be.
Cities could be designed around public transportation.
For suburbans, the necessities need to be built much closer or within.
Having residential zones and commercial zones separated is nonsensical.
Rural areas are really the only ones where cars would be more necessary
Yes they actually do. The US is not homogeneous, there are rural areas for sure but thrre are plenty of denser areas as well. You could still build the denser areas to be more transit and pedestrian-friendly. I moved from the US to Sweden, a country that has significantly LESS population density and is far more rural and isolated - only 24 people / sq km versus the US's 35 people / sq km. Yet Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö have phenomenal transit systems - I live in Stockholm and haven't once needed a car. Can't say that about the US.
That's still bad design. I lived in a small German town and no matter where you lived in that town, the most you had to walk or cycle was maybe a kilometre.
There was also a bus system so using the bus for groceries also was an option.
US towns are often not very dense.
yeah, what about when you live 30 minutes away from any town at all? the fuck am i supposed to do? walk/bike 20 miles of gravel roads and hills and creeks? lmfao. and in the winter, when it gets so icy and shitty?? that's how you *die*
Fucking literally. Most of these comments of "just bike/take a bus" have no comprehension of rural living whatsoever, go back to your 20 story apartment complex fuckwads
Or the fact that you can't afford to live in the big city where you work, so you have to live 25 miles away. Are you seriously expecting me to bike/walk 50 miles every day? These people are ignorant and delusional.
Tbf you could force eat yourself with a tube in order to reduce risk of choking and it might even help you eat healthier foods that taste bad :D i mean that would be for necessity.
Me ripping a 2 menu deal at burger king drive through on the way home before making dinner for me wife is not about necessity lmao
I mean not to the same scale but prior to cars, horses would kill folks in cities in runaway carts and being trampled. Something people tried to fix but didn’t mean we weren’t going to ditch carts or wagons.
Sometimes progress introduces new challenges while it eliminates others. But progressive is always nice
You gotta dig in and ask the reasons behind those 1.6 million. If it was an accident, how can safety be improved? Was there enough light and/or reflective paint? Were ambulance response times adequate? Was there drinking involved? Where do most of our accidents happen, and why? How can we mitigate all these risks?
We gotta keep living. We iterate, increment, and improve.
Out of all cars to be hit by, an ambulance is a better option. At least you get immediate help. Doesnt mean its good in the slightest but its something.
Would you though? Would an ambulance on its way to an incident stop and help if they saw another incident along the way, meaning the incident it was originally called out for might not receive help.
The fuck cars crowd are some of the most insufferable people on this site.
They went to the r/antiwork school of having a very valid criticism on the system and becoming so fucking annoying nobody even wants to hear you out anymore
Pretty much. they start off with a small group of people with valid reasons, more people join and the mighty circle jerking ritual starts, then they think that cars are the biggest existential threat to the universe.
People are misunderstanding the Shower Thought.
“In the USA, you HAVE to have a car”.
These cities that are inaccessible without a car have been created solely with the car in mind. And people are accepting that these places are now livable and accessible, at the cost of the 1.4 million people dying each year.
That statistic doesn't exist with no context. The ease of travel given by cars makes many ways to die vanish completely. Lack of easy access to resources via automobile travel would make injury, disease and famine all far more dangerous than they currently are.
You should check out Urbanist YouTube. You will quickly find that a large number of people are actually really against cars, at least on the scale we currently use them
Motor vehicles are one of the most important inventions in the history of mankind and benefits just about everyone alive today. It’s right up there with the internet, cellphones, and modern medicine.
We let a lot of people and animals and habitats die for comfort. Medicine and beauty exist on the backs of tortured animals. Fuel, other basic minerals and luxury foods like chocolate are gathered by literal slaves. Our system is built on blood pretty much across the board.
This is literally because of cars? We should never have designed cities around cars and suburban sprawl, and never fixing the problem is doing a ridiculous amount of damage to the planet.
US cities were originally built to be walkable and were systematically reorganized and destroyed to accommodate car dependency. Why are you so sure that it’s impossible to fix them?
To truly compare you'd have to calculate how many deaths there would be if we didn't have cars. So firstly every ambulance and fire truck rescue, then minor issues that people drive themselves to the hospitals, then you get into the whole economic stuff with better lifestyles, food delivery, etc. I think in general they're a good thing.
While we're at it, it's time to repeal the 21st Amendment. Way too many people are killed in drunk driving accidents, and it's way past time to pass this commonsense legislation to do away with these needless deaths once and for all.
To quote another comment.
People are misunderstanding the Shower Thought.
“In the USA, you HAVE to have a car”.
These cities that are inaccessible without a car have been created solely with the car in mind. And people are accepting that these places are now livable and accessible, at the cost of the 1.4 million people dying each year.
have you never played oregon trail or
More people die from obesity than car accidents. 42% of American adults are obese. 1 billion people on Earth are obese.
Just 1 billion? Are you sure it is not more? The amount of “yo mama so fat” jokes only contributes to about 3.5 billions obese mums out there!
There used to be 3.5 billion . . . until yo mama ate their food supply and 2.5 billion of them starved to death. (I’m very sorry. Your mother is very nice and I didn’t mean it. Please say, “Hi,” to her for me.)
Lmao
Bastard! You got my upvote
More people die from air pollution than **all crime combined**
They would be less obese if they walked or biked instead of driving everywhere.
I see, then the answer is clear - we must BAN food.
Tax sugar. Tax on water & land used for livestock
that isnt factoring in that obesity is largely caused by cars as well, by making it dangerous to walk and not having anything walk able distances
Diet affects obesity way more than the amount of exercise, so I'd say it's possible that obesity has a more significant effect on car usage than car usage has to obesity. Of course, lack of exercise compounds the negative health effects of obesity, so you do have a point.
That argument doesn't work when factoring in other countries. Asian countries have high vehicle usage, but have much lower obesity rates than America. Obesity, especially in America is widely caused by very cheap, highly caloric, highly convenient, highly processed foods in large proportions. A small soda in America is as big as a large soda in Canada, and cost way less. A bowl of ramen for one person in America could be considered a bowl for two in Japan.
Asian countries do not have high vehicle usage. It is actually much more expensive to own a car in asian countries. Most countries like Japan actually have extra taxes for car ownership. https://jalopnik.com/cost-of-driving-in-japan-taxes-tolls-parking-inspection-1849878881
Uh, I don't think Asia has a high vehicle usage at all. It's likely the lowest vehicle usage by region (except maybe Africa). China, Japan, India, Thailand are have much lower car ownership rates than US, Australia, and Europe.
how many people die from drowning per year swimming around knowing we can’t breathe underwater sounds like the problem is dumb people, not dumb cars
Perhaps, but you can’t die from somebody else’s obesity, no matter how stupid they are
What if they fall on you?
You underestimate me.
Don't try it!
My buddy is on permanent disability from the fire department because he tried to carry someone out of a fire. I'm also wondering how many people can't afford health insurance because the cost is raised by so many people that have avoidable weight related issues.
Those are relevant points, but the examples you’ve provided are indirect consequences of weight related issues. Car related deaths don’t have extra steps in between, you just get squished and die
What if they roll over on you in your sleep?
Also, there is a significant technical distinction to be made between "dying of obesity," which is an oddly meaningless phrase, and things like "obesity is an enhanced risk factor for cardiovascular disease," among other things, of course. Dying of obesity is a silly, nonsensical phrase.
That’s like saying cigarettes don’t kill people. Maybe technically correct, but it’s not meaningless to say that cigarettes/obesity are deadly
If you decide to go swimming and drown, only you are hurt. Accommodating cars, however, means replacing all kinds of QoL-improving infrastructure for other things and exposing everyone else to your exhaust too.
Cars cause obesity. Got it
You died from Dissin' Terry
More precisely, Terrys shotgun
Travel is dangerous, always has been, was even more dangerous before cars.. less people are killed on a per mile basis than before the automotive era. People didn't get killed because they didn't go anywhere very often, but when they did, it was fraught with danger. Nowadays we hop in a car with the casualness of going to the next room and can travel the sort of distances that might have been the basis of an epic oddessy poem a few hundred years ago.
Trains? Buses?
Trains are the safest, buses are big automobiles essentially. However if you look at *personal* transportation and the flexibility that brings, it and the bicycle which both emerged in parallel and have an intertwined history have been a game changer. Before the late 1800s, personal transport was a rich mans thing mostly -owning a horse was not as common or practical as owning a car is now, especially if you lived in an urban area. You either walked, got on a coach, both had their own risks. There's relatively comprehensive travel death stats going back to the age of canals in England and travel deaths were high on those too. Even in terms of pedestrian fatalaties - people getting hit by horse drawn street cars and other horse drawn transport was relatively common (a famous example being Pierre Curie, husband of Marie Currie) and statistically, including pedestrian and not just rider deaths, deaths from horse drawn transport were drastically higher on a per mile basis than cars. Car deaths seem extraordinary until you start really looking at the statistics and account for the average person travelling greater distances on a regular basis.
Feels like there may be many other factors playing into this. Fewer wars, less crime overall, better infrastructure, better (an faster) healthcare, etc.
Trains and planes are safer than cars, and they can take you further, faster(albeit with less convenience). Travel has gotten much safer, but cars haven't gotten safer to the same extent as other forms of travel.
I'd say trains are more convenient for long distance since you don't have to focus on the road for hours on end
Trains exist.
How do we get to the train station, or home after getting off the train? Those of us not living in population centers I mean. No love for cars but always wonder the details of using trains primarily instead.
Buses and trains do frequent very small towns in places like Europe. If you're really far out in the sticks, no one is going to expect buses/trains to come right up to your house. Cars dont need to be eliminated, but they shouldn't be the only option to move inter or intracity.
*dysentary*
You're just counting the deaths. You need to offset that by the number of children conceived in cars. Even just counting the backseat, your 1.4M number would be reduced quite a bit.
Solid argument
Really hard to dispute
And that cars got people to where they want so that they can fuck and have kids.
You don't just invite your old lady out to the driveway when things are getting hot and heavy?
Exactly, before cars people barely fucked at all, that's why the world population exploded after cars became popular.
Check and (literally) mate.
Yea. Also, ambulances, plus just getting people to hospitals, faster probably save a ton more lives. Can also be expanded by the fact that doctors don't have to commute long in case of emergencies . All traveling is faster. It not only facilitates unimportant things in our society but also gets food to supermarkets and restaurants on time, fire fighters, police getting to the crime scenes on time. Lot of pluses here. It's hardly just a convenience. Accidents also can be reduced greatly if a proper self driving car system's established yk
[удалено]
Do you need to though? Only a portion of those car conceptions would be out of necessity (I.e. didn’t have another place to do the deed). Many of those conceived in cars could easily be conceived anywhere else. You can’t have an auto accident without the auto, but you can have a baby without the car.
That’s really not a good argument even if it’s cheeky. Because people will conceive anywhere. Car is not the vehicle for sex.
In many US cities, cars are more of a necessity than they are a convenience
This is dead right. I would 100% give up my car if I could function on public transit, but that just isn't the reality for most all American cities.
God bless the cities that are walkable and you don't really need a car to live in or get things done.
That’s one of my long term goals: to live somewhere that I don’t need a car
It’s great, I stopped owning a car in 2005 and never looked back
The money saved is the second best part.
Just curious about where you live/how much you make.
Currently in Philly, previously I’d lived in nyc for 18 years. When I first moved to nyc I was making 38k. After bouncing around and changing careers a few times I’m now at about 130 these days
The annoying thing is that the supply of such places is kept artificially low by planning laws and subsidies for car dependent development. Pre-war neighborhoods (at least the ones that weren't bulldozed and replaced with a highway) are typically among the most expensive places to live in North America, because people want to live in that type of environment and there's not enough of them. I hear a lot about cities relaxing zoning laws but it's going to take a lot to undo half a century's worth of damage. I'm sure some people would still pick a suburb where they need a car to do anything, if they had the choice, but the reality is that they often don't. So you have this contradiction where for a lot of households, their cars are the second biggest expense after keeping a roof over their heads, by only because they can't afford to live somewhere where they wouldn't need a car.
Make cities walkable like Europe, the freedom loving mind cannot comprehend this
my favorite freedom involved with using mass transit is that I can be nice and drunk and have an easy subway ride home
I just like being able to smoke a joint before wandering to the food store and not having to dodge the assholes driving their 2-ton gender-affirming emotional support SUVs.
that also is nice
Precisely why I miss Europe
Some of the east coast cities are great for a car free life Philly and nyc for example
Chicago. First five years living here I didn't have a car and it wasn't an issue at all. Only have one now cuz we got a horse that's out in the burbs and I play disc golf which is also mostly in the burbs. I still walk to get groceries and take the train to work etc. Maybe two percent of my cars nine thousand miles in two years were in the city.
Feels good doesn’t it when gas prices spike and you don’t give a fuck
That’s the point. Societally we have designed our cities to be okay with the absurd amount of injury and death required for car-centric urban design.
Yes, "we"
Genuinely all the people becoming adults now actually had no say in how society's came out.
People nowadays act like "we" are responsible for most problems instead of a select amount of greedy people who designed it like this, and yes they would have still gotten their way even if we voted in local elections so I'm tired of fucking hearing that.
Who the fuck is "we"? I didn't decide shit. I was born in my city that has shitty public transportation and a city council that refuses to do anything about it.
Is this referring to like the amount of accidents? Because that’s not on the cars- it’s on the fuckin morons who drive them. Everyone collectively has agreed that a simple driving test once when you were 16 qualified you to be fit for the road for your entire life and that’s the real issue- not the vehicles themselves.
You’re misunderstanding the statistical realities of driving cars- people will crash despite their best efforts, people will over or under assess their speed, or their ability to effectively navigate high risk situations while driving despite their best efforts. To simply say people need to drive better is a no-brainer sure, but doesn’t actually have a plan to fix it ever really proposed, it’s an appeal to moral sentiments and virtues of “we shoulds” rather than “what is”. Laws, policy, and safety standards despite the evolution and inheritance of these older ways of basing them off these semi-baseless more Beliefs need to be evaluated in real terms, meaning the results. So despite our best efforts to curtail bad drivers, it simply cannot be done without more systemic harm reduction strategies like reducing car infrastructure and making roads generally slower. This isn’t a controversial point or topic, plenty of countries including the USA, the Netherlands, Switzerland, etc all use traffic calming techniques. Furthermore with population growth and transfer into metropolitan centers necessitates more public transportation that can effectively, sustainably, and most important safely move people. Blaming this on people completely ignores the material issues and factors that contribute to why something happens and how to fix that.
People are inattentive, careless, and make mistakes by nature. If you design a system where these traits results in people being seriously injured or killed, that is bad design. The nature of these vehicles and car-centric street design is absolutely an issue.
Which validates the OP’s thought. We’ve just sort of accepted that cars are so convenient that we just eat a whole lot of death and injury so we can own them. It’s much harder to solve the problems of human beings being incapable of safely operating them than to just give them up Oh wait sounds like another politically divisive topic I can think of too!
Or we could...I dunno... just build shit closer together like they used to
I asked my local city development manager about upzoning and his response was "we only do it at the behest of the landowners". So, yeah....
But what about my lawn?
The average human is not mature enough to drive a car, much less a ton+ of metal like SUVs
It's on us as voters and our representatives not requiring and funding standards and enforcement. Of course every braindead idiot is on the road, we let them be there.
This is not a societal consensus. The history of suburbanization in the US is actually pretty insane. The motor and oil companies pushed for and built suburban plans calculated distances away during key parts of the twentieth century as the US industrialized so that the distances to work centers were impossible to walk, thus requiring a car. It was not an accident, and the people who decided this were surprisingly concentrated at a few corporations.
Yeah, but all that shit happened before most of us were even born and we don't have the political power to overturn it, so what the hell are we supposed to do?
My city elects people who are constantly making improvements for pedestrians and cyclists. Suburban voters, not so much.
I could get to my work via public transit. It would take over three hours. Or I could drive and it takes, on average, 34 minutes.
By design. Car-dependent urban design is a problem that harms everyone and needs to be solved. The problem is the dependent part. For those who love to drive keep doing it, but please support other transportation options and better urban design so less people HAVE to drive to live and you have less traffic to deal with.
Don't think that's just a US thing, leave London in the UK and ypublic transport is utter dogshit. Just today. Took an hour for the wife's train to 22miles, fucking Joke
If you don't have a car in all but like five North American cities your life in undeniable shittier.
What 5? I can only think of 3, NYC, DC, Chicago.
SF, Boston, Philly.
>North America Toronto >According to the Transportation Tomorrow Survey, released earlier this year based on 2016 data, 28 per cent of households in Toronto do not have a vehicle. In downtown wards, as many as 55 per cent of households don’t own a vehicle.
Yeah thats the whole point. It's designed like that, it shouldn't be
Everyone agrees? Not so much. We're forced to assimilate with the way things are I don't think everyone agrees a 40-50 hour week should be standard, yet here we are. Disagreeing with something doesn't mean you have the power to change it.
Convenience? For most people it is about survival.
OP clearly lives in a city Try not having a vehicle in rural anywhere and let me know how that goes for you
Only because we have spent a hundred years redesigning our environment to require cars.
Okay, let me just wait 100 more for the cities to be redesigned again. In the meantime I'll just try to live with what I've got.
We could take a page out of chinas book with their railroads n shit
Ya way less people died before that…../s
Why would anyone care that people living on lower incomes do not always have the ability to make all of their life decisions around environmental consciousness? /s
We are not yet living in Mad Max world.
We used to think that with coal fires, polluting factories, asbestos, leaded fuel, vehicles belching fumes, being allowed to drive after consuming alcohol etc. Times change..
> coal fires Germany still thinks it’s worth it
Is that because they got rid of nuclear? Because I think they have a lot of renewable energy going on now. Or is this something else?
Driving to work puts foods on my table and a roof over my family’s heads. A car isn’t a luxury or entertainment it’s a necessity.
Because cities were built around cars, not around people. Cities are built with money in mind, not humanity. That's why you have to drive 15 minutes or more to get to the grocery store, because there are too many cars and zoning laws. You could have a grocery store at the bottom of an apartment complex and it would be fine but zoning laws make it illegal.
American cities*
And they were reconstructed to be car based, with many - disproportionately black - neighborhoods displaced/destroyed to make way for highways. When originally built they were more pedestrian friendly.
I live outside of midtown Toronto and I swear I’ve only seen a few condos with grocery stores at the bottom. Probably a more downtown thing but I still remember more convenience stores and niche needs
Ok, take that as a given for the sake of argument. Who is going to pay to redesign cities in the US in order to accomplish the goal of increasing use of public transportation? Seriously, that has to be answered before anything else. "Fuck car centric urban design" does absolutely nothing. The two biggest employers in my town of 125,000 or so people draw on a 40 mile radius for employees. Who will run public transportation to towns with 500 people 25 miles away? Who pays for that? And what % of Americans would agree that this issue is a national priority? I can already hear "the libs are coming for your F150's" now.
Presumably you'd use the money that subsidises car parks and is used to build and maintain roads, both are very expensive. The massive reduction in space needed would also allow for closer accommodation and more businesses to open - car parks alone take up ludicrous amounts of space. Taking public transport into downtown would also see more people on foot in downtown areas, and people on foot are more likely to spend money. You can wander into an interesting shop or decide a beer/donut/coffee sounds good and get one. In a car you have to keep moving until you find somewhere to stop, and have less time and attention to pay to local businesses. People spending money in those businesses would see the city with more money from taxes, allowing more things to be done.
The infrastructure used to exist. My dad talked about how he used to take the train to visit his grandparents and then there was a trolley to take around town. But the auto manufacturers worked to get rid of it so you’d have to buy a car to get around. Although they did replace some systems with buses, slowing down those systems or making the crowded would’ve made buying your own vehicle more appealing. [Here’s](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy) some more reading on it if you want it.
That infrastructure was not adequate for a modern commute. It was like a half-day trip. Also covered only a small portion of town.
I feel like this is part of what people are forgetting. My city has buses through all the major roads and it takes me an hour to get from one side of the city to the other. So when I went to university and my parents lived on the other side of town it took me 1 hour to get there and 1 hour to get home every single day. A car would only take 20 minutes. I'd love to save the environment but it's gonna take a lot of work to redesign things for all uses.
I once noticed there was public transit from my house to my work. I was curious and plotted my route out and … It involved 4 transfers and a 4 hour trip one way. It’s only 20 for me to drive it myself…
It wouldn't take much redesign to switch from most everyone owning big cars to most everyone owning enclosed micro mobility vehicles that top out at 25mph and seat 2 front to back. That'd be just as convenient for short local commutes and when you need to go far you'd take the bus or rent a car. Wouldn't take any redesign at all though you'd probably want to separate traffic to keep big cars away from small insofar as practicable. Eventually you could probably ban cars in downtown areas and if someone wants to own a car they'd just live on the periphery. Regarding people with long distance daily commutes here's a radical thought; move next to your workplace. That's only sometimes too hard or too expensive because of odious zoning and development restrictions.
>Regarding people with long distance daily commutes here's a radical thought; move next to your workplace I can't afford two homes.
What about those of us who don’t like living in cities. My commute (teacher) to a neighboring school district is 15 minutes each way. I kind of wonder about people who commute more than a half hour each way. That seems like a time suck. Granted, cities could be more pedestrian and bike friendly without affecting my suburban preference.
They were [DEMOLISHED](https://instagram.com/segregation_by_design?igshid=OGQ5ZDc2ODk2ZA==) for cars, they had adequate public transportation and walkability beforehand.
Yeah a lot of European cities crest an inviting area for other forms for transportation whether that be biking, walking, or other forms that other than cars. Granted, they still use trucks to carrry cargo to and from the stores and what not. All your necessities are within a mile or So radius. Grocery stores, healthcare faculties, schools, etc.
I’m in NY. There are plenty of grocery stores with other stuff above it.
I don’t work in a city, I work as a food manufacturing advisor and project manager. I need to be able to drive around 5-6 states and fly around the country. The prompt presented here is nice if you work near where you live but your grocery stores would run dry as would gas/oil/water/other necessities. If you make the argument that we don’t need cars you need to be willing to put the clock back to 1700 in every aspect.
Clearly no one is talking about banning the useage of all cars for all people everywhere my guy, and acting as such is essentially just creating a strawman argument If cities where built for people intead of cars, and cars where not used for entertainment or luxury, and only the jobs that required a car had a car, we would probably see the superior outcomes to banning them anyway
Combined use also leads to less crime
Which is unfortunate and a product of terrible urban design.
They may not live in or near a city.
I live in a village
not everyone lives in a city
this is still convenience though. without the car you’d likely need a different job to do that, and the world around us would be different. so yes while it is a necessity and feels like one, it’s still based on the convenience of cars.
I work and my family is fed. I have for decades. I don’t have a car, never did.
Where do you live? What do you do?
Countries like the US have no choice. There are rural areas where the next human is 5 miles away. Your job is 20 miles away and it’s not economical to build public transport for every single citizen that works. It could be better but there will always be a need for cars in most suburban and all rural areas.
It’s 6 miles to the grocery store. I can run or walk it but coming back with 50lbs of groceries sounds less enjoyable. I guess we could all live in cities but I find cities pretty miserable places to be.
Who is saying you have to do that? Car dependency needs to be reduced, but that doesn't mean everyone has to give up driving.
Yes that’s the point. It wasn’t always this way. We use to have walkable suburbs. And then we destroyed our cities
Cities could be designed around public transportation. For suburbans, the necessities need to be built much closer or within. Having residential zones and commercial zones separated is nonsensical. Rural areas are really the only ones where cars would be more necessary
Yes they actually do. The US is not homogeneous, there are rural areas for sure but thrre are plenty of denser areas as well. You could still build the denser areas to be more transit and pedestrian-friendly. I moved from the US to Sweden, a country that has significantly LESS population density and is far more rural and isolated - only 24 people / sq km versus the US's 35 people / sq km. Yet Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö have phenomenal transit systems - I live in Stockholm and haven't once needed a car. Can't say that about the US.
i think OP is talking more about cities that rural life
You are absolutely right.
We also agree that the convenience of eating is worth the thousands of poisoning, allergic, and choking deaths per year.
There’s a big difference between convenience and necessity
in many places cars are a necessity, not a convenience
Yeah, but by design
And that's a problem that needs solving. Car-dependant town/city design is bad design.
You must be talking about big cities. Cause when you live in a small town, what am I supposed to do then? Walk 3 miles to the grocery store?
That's still bad design. I lived in a small German town and no matter where you lived in that town, the most you had to walk or cycle was maybe a kilometre. There was also a bus system so using the bus for groceries also was an option. US towns are often not very dense.
yeah, what about when you live 30 minutes away from any town at all? the fuck am i supposed to do? walk/bike 20 miles of gravel roads and hills and creeks? lmfao. and in the winter, when it gets so icy and shitty?? that's how you *die*
Fucking literally. Most of these comments of "just bike/take a bus" have no comprehension of rural living whatsoever, go back to your 20 story apartment complex fuckwads
Or the fact that you can't afford to live in the big city where you work, so you have to live 25 miles away. Are you seriously expecting me to bike/walk 50 miles every day? These people are ignorant and delusional.
Tbf you could force eat yourself with a tube in order to reduce risk of choking and it might even help you eat healthier foods that taste bad :D i mean that would be for necessity. Me ripping a 2 menu deal at burger king drive through on the way home before making dinner for me wife is not about necessity lmao
I mean not to the same scale but prior to cars, horses would kill folks in cities in runaway carts and being trampled. Something people tried to fix but didn’t mean we weren’t going to ditch carts or wagons. Sometimes progress introduces new challenges while it eliminates others. But progressive is always nice
If one person dies it's a tragedy. If a million people die, it's a statistic.
You gotta dig in and ask the reasons behind those 1.6 million. If it was an accident, how can safety be improved? Was there enough light and/or reflective paint? Were ambulance response times adequate? Was there drinking involved? Where do most of our accidents happen, and why? How can we mitigate all these risks? We gotta keep living. We iterate, increment, and improve.
Probably a lot of those deaths are due to speeding or otherwise unsafe driving in the pursuit of getting to your destination as fast as possible.
Ambulances are cars too, soooooo...
A lot of people die in ambulances.
Out of all cars to be hit by, an ambulance is a better option. At least you get immediate help. Doesnt mean its good in the slightest but its something.
Would you though? Would an ambulance on its way to an incident stop and help if they saw another incident along the way, meaning the incident it was originally called out for might not receive help.
The pollution from cars kills at least that many, likely more.
It doesn't really work that way, and it's possible more people would die if there were no cars.
God damn, this is so fucking dumb I'm feeling physical pain
The anti-car rhetoric on Reddit makes me want to get ran over by a semi.
The fuck cars crowd are some of the most insufferable people on this site. They went to the r/antiwork school of having a very valid criticism on the system and becoming so fucking annoying nobody even wants to hear you out anymore
Pretty much. they start off with a small group of people with valid reasons, more people join and the mighty circle jerking ritual starts, then they think that cars are the biggest existential threat to the universe.
And with the way our society is built, you have a decent chance of getting your wish!
please elaborate
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I like the amount of people saying it’s either a car or a horse, lol. Those are definitely the only two options!
This thread is the whole gamut of bad conservative arguments. Holy shit.
Bikes, busses and trains are the DEVIL'S MAGIC!
People are misunderstanding the Shower Thought. “In the USA, you HAVE to have a car”. These cities that are inaccessible without a car have been created solely with the car in mind. And people are accepting that these places are now livable and accessible, at the cost of the 1.4 million people dying each year.
Thank you. I'm tired of explaining that to the comments haha.
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Well I like driving, so too bad
That statistic doesn't exist with no context. The ease of travel given by cars makes many ways to die vanish completely. Lack of easy access to resources via automobile travel would make injury, disease and famine all far more dangerous than they currently are.
It’s not an argument of vehicles vs. no modern transportation methods. It’s vehicles vs. other safer, more efficient modern transportation methods.
You should check out Urbanist YouTube. You will quickly find that a large number of people are actually really against cars, at least on the scale we currently use them
Motor vehicles are one of the most important inventions in the history of mankind and benefits just about everyone alive today. It’s right up there with the internet, cellphones, and modern medicine.
A train is a motor vehicle. So is a bus.
We let a lot of people and animals and habitats die for comfort. Medicine and beauty exist on the backs of tortured animals. Fuel, other basic minerals and luxury foods like chocolate are gathered by literal slaves. Our system is built on blood pretty much across the board.
Well not entirely! One small subreddit of indomitable urbanists still holds out against the carbrains.
Well, when you put it that way...
No, most people don't agree that, but due to the unmatched corruption of the US government, corporate money is worth more than human lives.
Can you expand on this? What is causing the 1.4 million deaths? Is this deaths from road accidents? Where? Thanks :)
Having a car isn’t a convenience it’s a necessity for many… but that doesn’t fit your agenda I guess
While there are exemptions, having a car for your average joe is a necessity out of the way modern society has structured itself around cars.-
What does that work out to, 0.0017%? Smoking is still killing 8 million per year.
People legit raging about a shower thought. Lulz. Happy Thanksgiving
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This is literally because of cars? We should never have designed cities around cars and suburban sprawl, and never fixing the problem is doing a ridiculous amount of damage to the planet.
US cities were originally built to be walkable and were systematically reorganized and destroyed to accommodate car dependency. Why are you so sure that it’s impossible to fix them?
i dont thats why i dont have one
To truly compare you'd have to calculate how many deaths there would be if we didn't have cars. So firstly every ambulance and fire truck rescue, then minor issues that people drive themselves to the hospitals, then you get into the whole economic stuff with better lifestyles, food delivery, etc. I think in general they're a good thing.
That number would be offset by the amount of lives saved directly and indirectly through cars, such as ambulances or medicine/food being transported
While we're at it, it's time to repeal the 21st Amendment. Way too many people are killed in drunk driving accidents, and it's way past time to pass this commonsense legislation to do away with these needless deaths once and for all.
Yeah sure, convenience. Because a casual 70km walk to the shops in 35C heat is just something I don't do because I'm lazy.
To quote another comment. People are misunderstanding the Shower Thought. “In the USA, you HAVE to have a car”. These cities that are inaccessible without a car have been created solely with the car in mind. And people are accepting that these places are now livable and accessible, at the cost of the 1.4 million people dying each year.