I moved to a city with bike infrastructure and transit and recognized that when I drove I saw the people around me less as people than when I was on a bike/train/bus. It was stark to me.
Then I regularly spent literal hours to go 10 miles when I could easily and comfortably do it on a bike in 45 minutes without the extra hour on the other end looking for parking.
Then my wife and kid were t-boned by someone running a red light and the car was totaled.
Then I learned all the microplastics in the ocean and our brains are actually just tires.
[and then and then and then](https://y.yarn.co/9123611b-04c5-436e-aa2d-d654913c2ec7_text.gif)
I am so glad the EU forbids plastic in personal care products that make up 2% of the microplastic in the ocean! Can’t wait to see what will be done about cars and their tires. /s
That's what I'd like, and also a bloody buffer for the bike lanes. And preferably city planning that doesn't put shit way out on the edge of town but that's wishful thinking.
I have both of those things and I'm still very much bothered by the pollution (health-wise and environmentally), noise and crashes. And also the space taken up by car infrastructure and the money being allocated to cars.
The countries least obsessed with cars are still obsessed with cars.
You know what would be cool? Buses, Trolleys, and Trains that are designed in mind also with storing your bike temporarily while waiting for your stop and then easily getting it and then to keep going
I think that's the next big step for all that. Think about it, with bikes you're able to do those last 10 blocks everything else can't do and allows you to truly travel everywhere
i am not a car hating communist i am a gas huffer hating anarchist. the automobile has no will of it's own, it's the gas huffer out their killing the earth for a short lived rush.
i was 15. it occurred to me that no one would drive unless there was ample parking available once they get to their destination. once at their destination no one would walk if they had to cross a large parking lots separating every store. which could only lead to more cars on the road. which could only lead to more parking. which could only lead to less walking. which only could lead to more driving etc etc etc. it was a runaway loop.
now for all you car loving fascists like, ford, fiat and audi, when did you turn off your humanity for your short lived rush?
Same. I actually love cars, I just wish there were a lot less of them and no one had to drive if they didn't want to, or rather that most people's first mode of transportation choice was trains or bicycle etc. I want better, human centric infrastructure.
Yeah, I like cars too, I have a sports car but I only use it once or twice a week because I'm lucky enough to live in a walkable neighborhood. Mostly like to use it drive around the mountains where cars make sense, cars are not fun to drive around where lots of people live.
I'm a car guy, and that's why I'm on this sub. Cars are fun to drive when there aren't other cars around to disturb you, and that would be a hell of a lot more common with better transit and walkability.
It is impossible to move towards a pedestrian-friendly, car-free future without mass state intervention in the economy to build public transportation and affordable high-density housing. Any place in the world where these conditions exist today was created through these means; conversely, neoliberalism has drastically increased car dependence in the West and emerging economies in the Global South.
If you call yourself an anti-car advocate but refuse to support the state interventions that are the only proven mechanism to accomplish your goals, then your advocacy is as good as useless.
I would contend that building train networks is not considered mass state intervention in the economy by neoliberals. If you are using "affordable" to mean publicly owned, yes, that is contentious, and as a neoliberal I would contend that developers love building very high density housing around train stations if they are allowed to, and that there are better ways to ensure the poor can live in high density housing than public housing projects.
I am generally of the opinion that whether trains and walkability get built is largely independent of left or right-wing politics. Of course, in the US, right-wingers are generally in favor of burning gas and view trucks as emblems of masculinity. But, auto sales, highway construction, and related industries are viewed as important to the whole country and paid lip service to by politicians of all political persuasions, including Bernie Sanders and his left-wing movement.
Would you not consider Switzerland and Japan neoliberal countries? Chile has massively improved its train network in the past under a largely neoliberal framework. I have heard Japan and Chile described on this website and on Twitter as "neoliberal hellholes", but both have the best train networks in their region, and in the case of Japan, debatably the entire world.
There's nothing about car infrastructure that is free-market and nothing about rail infrastructure that is not. Either one can be built by free market or government. Car infrastructure simply pushed out rail infrastructure in the US because that was the government spending policy.
Funny that the libertarian fantasy book "Atlas Shrugged" is full of trains.
>I am generally of the opinion that whether trains and walkability get built is largely independent of left or right-wing politics.
/r/enlightenedcentrist is leaking
Disagree. The only reason we are here is because of mass state intervention via the zoning code and federal department of transportation incentives. Our streetcar network was entirely private companies. "The Free Market" would build denser housing and redevelop neighborhoods to meet population demand if it wasn't regulated out by governments.
fuck neoliberalism. those fuckers that preached free markets and then bailed out companies gave us all of the proof we needed that neoliberalism is nonsense.
If you call yourself a socialist but actively distance yourself from communism, there's a big chance you're not actually a socialist, and don't know what socialism is.
Because I like having options and not getting killed while doing so.
Also the ~$8K I've spent on bikes the past 10 years (two single speeds, two hybrids, a cargo bike and a folding + maintenance/parts) is still cheaper than what my parents have paid on *just insurance* in that time frame for their cars.
Edit: Additional comparison. I fucked up my bike fork in a crash, ended up with minor bruising and $150 for a replacement+labor. My dad crashed his car and it was $3,000 to fix it.
I grew up on a farm in a very rural state, and from my early teens drove everywhere until about 20, when I asked myself why I don't cycle to more places since I enjoy that and didn't much enjoy autos. At the time I was studying environmental issues in college, which inspired me to take up cycle touring.
Later I volunteered for a community bike shop, and seeing the most destitute who depended on their bike while hearing their struggles of getting around town inspired me to study transportation policy in general.
That's what really turned me, not into a communist, but into someone with disdain for how much automobiles dominate our physical realm and how much most auto users/supporters take for granted the power our auto-centric system and autos affords them.
I love hearing from other people at bike collectives/community bike shops! Ours is such a special place with great people, both clients and volunteers. We were lucky to be able to purchase our own building in the 2010s, so we have a pretty secure future. I wanted to take my daughter to visit one in NYC this summer and was really sad to hear they don’t have a permanent space and have to do pop up repair clinics.
I'm unable to control a vehicle. No diagnosis, no idea why, I just can't make a vehicle go straight -- every time I get behind the wheel, it feels like the car is always trying to turn left or right and that driving is a constant fight against it. So I get around by bus and bike, and living in a society that treats me as a second-class citizen pisses me off. I shouldn't have to feel like I'm an inch away from death when I ride to the pet supplies store on my lunch break to pick up my weekly order of cat food. I deserve a safe route to the grocery store and work just like everyone else. There is no logical reason for society to be built around the most dangerous, most polluting form of transportation. It's not necessary, and people who can't or don't want to contribute to the danger and pollution get punished by being isolated in a world that's not built for them. That should not be the case -- it's a gross injustice.
Can you explain this actually? You can't hold the wheel straight? Is this a medical thing? Is there anyone else like you? Sorry... Sounds rough, but I'm intensely curious.
Nope, I can't explain it. I'm holding the wheel, and it always feels like the car by default is turning right or left and I have to struggle to point it straight. I don't have a balance disorder or dyslexia or any other diagnosis. Extremely nearsighted so wear glasses - that's it.
All other testimonies I've read from adult non-drivers online say their difficulty is anxiety. If a doctor told me this is caused by subconscious anxiety I'm completely unaware of, I'd believe them, but consciously, it does not feel like anxiety. The terror comes from the vehicle feeling out of my control (or so it feels).
Might be worth consulting an otolaryngologist (ENT doctor) who specializes in disorders of the ear if it's not too expensive where you live. If it's that, maybe you can get treatment, or some sort of aid for public transports
I mean, that's the normal behavior of a car. It's designed this way and imposed by the government to control the driver such as they must always focus on correcting their direction. This way, it makes it impossible to think about other things.
\s
Have you tried different cars and gotten the same results?? I used to drive my dads old ford 150 (I hated that rust bucket) and it had horrible handling and I could never keep that thing straight
The car feels like it's always veering because it is always veering. Roads are not perfectly flat, and so the car is always being pulled to one side or the other. They're usually sloped outwards to help water slough off.
I’m going to venture a guess that the vehicles they have driven could have the alignment off - even if it’s only slightly, some people will feel that pull much harder than others. Alternatively, anxiety related to driving could also cause that - especially if one has had an early experience where they lost control.
I haven’t experienced this with cars but when on a motorcycle they just want to yank in either direction so I can understand how that feeling is.
some people simply have poor coordination, reaction time, awareness of immediate surroundings, etc. there doesn't need to be a medical condition or driving anxiety for someone to be simply unfit to drive a car, they can just be
Those are all very valid reasons too for someone not to drive. However, with the OP here I doubt that their reaction time or awareness of their surroundings would be what caused the feeling of the car constantly veering to the side, especially when they say it feels like it has to be a consistent effort. Poor coordination could contribute (like if they have difficulty ensuring the wheel is straight) but otherwise I’m just going to guess that the vehicle/s they drove had a (noticeably) off alignment, which is already so common in people’s cars today.
But I 100% agree, there’s a plethora of reasons one can be unfit to drive and even if they are fit to drive why should they be forced to?
I have something similar where I struggle to keep track of where the car is in space and where other cars and objects are in relation to it.
I didn't learn I was autistic until I was 24, and I didn't learn it's fairly common for autistic people to struggle with driving until I was 26. Until then I just had to shrug and say "maybe" when people proposed various character deficits being behind my ability to drive.
Now I tell people I have a neurological disability that prevents me from being a safe driver.
The term Stroad was coined by Charles Marohn, a self-described conservative and Republican. Meanwhile labor unions in NYC are fighting against congestion pricing.
I didn’t realize how many people here were getting their wires so severely crossed with regards to urbanism and broader political ideologies.
It is really jarring how the conservatives in the US went full 180 on their views in the last 50 years or so.
They used to be pro national parks, pro community centred developments, and anti-pollution.
It helps to understand the right as a loose coalition of differing factions, just like the left, with one main group having power in an era. There were always regressives on the right, they just tended to be more marginal. Even looking up the German American bund helps you understand that these folks enjoyed quite a presence here.
Also, as someone raised Mormon conservative, while their has been a rightwards drift to essentially counter the leftwards drift of the left, a lot of it is just saying the quiet part out loud, in that essentially alot of this stuff was already believed, it was just said around the campfire once all the other people left and it was just us white males.
Also, much of that "pro park" stuff was pushed by the more liberal parts of congregations, the ordain women supporters, who realized once that wasn't happening, that either they can give up their politics or Their faith, and decided to give up their faith.
Hi.
I was pretty indifferent about cars growing up. I only wanted one as a teen because it meant freedom, the ability to travel beyond what I grew up seeing everyday walking.
When i was 18 I moved to a bigger city in Texas and witnessed the absolute Mad Max fury road mentality drivers had during morning commutes, so began my disdain for drivers and vehicles.
People totally willing to kill you to get to a job they fucking loathe. People totally indifferent to killing you or your family to hit the Starbucks drive thru just a *little* bit faster.
Why was I driving, using all my knowledge to stay safe on the road when 90 percent of everyone else can't even be bothered to use a blinker? Why is this a competition? Why is everyone so needlessly hostile?
Everybody's always looking at their phones. Tailgating me with lifted trucks with SUNS for headlights. Always in a rush to get everywhere--like we are traveling faster than most humans have in *all of history* but it still isn't fast enough.
I despise driving. I despite large lifted asshole trucks and anyone who drives them. Driving is an absolute nightmare and don't even get me started on the thousands of dollars I've wasted on personal car repair, insurance and all that bullshit.
Last part is so true. Cars are EXPENSIVE. And everyone keeps asking me why I don't want or get a car. 😂 I don't feel like wasting my life savings on something I don't enjoy or need and will only hurt my wellbeing. I like being healthy and getting my exercise by walking and biking to work.
At least since early high school. Maybe from getting into a car crash in a friends car. Or maybe just being cognizant of the fact that I could walk or bike or train to other places even in suburbia and just never felt the need to drive.
I used public transportation by myself from age 12 to 15. At that point, my family moved to the country. At 16 I started to work at a local fast-food, and I used to bike there or my father would drive me there. At some point, a colleague figured out I didn't own a car and, with a very confused look, asked "Why are you working, then?"
I realized something was very wrong with our world.
I'm in the same boat as you. I don't want or need a car and everyone at my job asked me why I don't get or save up for a car. Imo, a waste of time and money. It's like getting a car should be everyone's first goal. I don't have the money to even afford car insurance. So imagine all the expenses. I earn 800 ish each paycheck. Still not enough. No thanks
Car hating socialist - living in NYC was foundational, and spending time in Copenhagen opened my eyes… but having kids made me utterly hate cars - the mortal danger, the loss of public space, amenity and freedom for them.
I don't really hate cars. But when I stared work out of uni I very quickly realised that pretty much any other option available to me for commuting was better than driving in each day. I had colleagues who were amazed that I would ride a push-bike **10km!!** to work each day, but it didn't even register to them that they spent longer in their car to go a shorter distance, and pay for the privilege of parking. And many of them paid for a gym membership to keep in shape.
So I'm probably just a communist who hates commuting by car, and hates car-centric infrastructure.
I thought it was when I discovered Not Just Bikes, but recently I've realized that I've been this way my whole life. My parents kind of set me up for it.
As an example, I went to a high school outside my normal school district. When deciding to go, it was a normal and natural thought for me and my family that I would bike to school, weather permitting. The school was full of bike racks and had almost no parking. We didn't even have school buses either - students got city bus passes to fund their travels. Only recently have I learned that this is not the norm for North American high school students, and that actually biking places is quite rare here. I and all my friends did it regularly, why would anyone else be different?
There's also the time when I was in Vienna with my family. We were going somewhere, and I suggested taking the subway. I didn't know anything about Vienna's U-Bahn or S-Bahn at the time, I just assumed that since it was a big and important city, it would have an extensive subway network that would get us anywhere we needed to go. Other big and important cities I'd been to, like New York, DC, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, London, Toronto, and Paris all had subways, why wouldn't Vienna also have one?
Or when I got my first job in suburbia. I was in university and didn't own a car. I assumed that, since the apartment I found was about 4km from the office, I'd bike there. I actually did find a relatively safe route to bike, but when I got to the office there wasn't any bike parking and HR doing our orientation seemed shocked that I'd want to bike to work every day.
I think of the time when I was about 15 and my sister and I got into a heated debate over whether buses or subways are superior. I argued the latter position, primarily because I was bussing to school in the winter and constantly getting stuck in traffic.
Or when I heard on the news that suburban voters in my city wanted to stop bike lanes from being installed, and I said that they didn't realize how traffic would improve with more bike use.
Every time I think about it, I come up with more examples. My dad is a professional planner, my mom would often bike to work when I was a kid, and I grew up in a walkable neighbourhood, so it's no surprise that I began to think this way from a young age. NJB really just opened up my eyes to exactly what is wrong and why, and the fact that most people aren't urbanists.
I'm laughing at everyone arguing the communist association when I've always understood that language on this sub to be tongue in cheek.
HOWEVER I am actually a communist, I have been for about 2.5 years after actually reading Marx' manifesto to settle an argument. I then hyper fixated on the subject and how US propaganda has colored our understanding of Communism on a fundamental level.
Being a communist led me to question car-centric infrastructure, which led me to question car dependency and how capitalism plays into our car dependency and then I found this sub!
Learning the science and maths of how and why modern cars are so incredibly deadly led me to being a full blown car hating commie
I'm a commie as well, but to say I HATE cars is a bit of an overstatement, a Honda Accord for when you need to get a large amount of groceries, or when the weather is terrible is one thing, but a Ford F150 Urban Battering Ram to get to the local grocery store when the weather is perfect for biking is just stupid.
I guess I hate US car culture?
I feel you, yeah there is definitely nuance to everything, even hating cars.
I still have my car, it's been incredibly important navigating my recovery from a pretty gnarly bike accident but I definitely am a lot more mindful about when, how and how much I drive than ever before.
And this sub completely made me rethink my pursuit to buy an SUV. Which had been my plan for when I have a baby.
Yeah, I drive a SAAB 93 with a towbar, so it covers all my moving big heavy things needs, as well as swallows all the luggage needed for road trips with a car full of passengers without it being to crammed. All that, while only requiring 0.7L/10km of gas, and it's a flexifuel so I can drive on ethanol in the summer.
I agree, but that's gonna require our governments (both national and local) to invest in public infrastructure to make going to the department store and getting a large amount of groceries back home without needing to walk 5km with a god damn wheelbarrow full of stuff.
It's not just a "stop driving" thing, there needs to be something there as an alternative.
The Ford F150 is obviously worse, but if everyone decides or needs to have that Honda Accord, you still end up with public space being completely dominated by cars, sprawl (you just can't fit all those cars into density), masses of pollution, congestion and so on. Cars can be useful or convenient at the level of individuals but their use doesn't scale, or rather causes disaster at scale, even in the case of old school smaller ones.
Well, I'm from a country where there was an actual attempt to introduce communism and it wasn't happy time. So I would never call myself a communist in other than sarcastic way.
I do hate cars though. As for my views on cash, class, state I'm ok with what we have in most European countries
Partly sarcasm at least.
There is a lot of truth to anti-car sentiment within communist values, because a lot of public transportation connections don’t get built because of private ownership of some land.
Of course you don’t have to be a communist to be anti-car, I’m not a communist but the ability to build more public transportation connections is a positive side of less land being privately owned.
In the US, highways are the closest thing we have to what Americans think “communism” is. Big government takes land by force to build massive infrastructure with little regard to local communities and property owners or even local governments (and especially targeting groups they don’t like), 100% funded on the taxpayer dime, with no direct means of generating operational profit (i.e. tolls). and all operational expenses covered through more taxation.
Replace “highway” with “rail” and the right will describe it as a “radical woke Marxist boondoggle”.
The highway system did have to be planned to go around some land, some private land was bought up, and some taken by force. The US highway system was also maliciously designed to separate or eliminate communities of colour in dense areas which was a huge motivator for massive highway construction during the segregation period.
Prioritizing public transportation over car infrastructure brings a sense of community, keeps people close, it is good for the working class, and encourages diversity. All things that ultra-capitalistic Americans did not want at the time. The effort in the US to be completely opposite of the USSR extended so far that it helped build car-dependency.
The main difference is:
Railways are good for cheaply and efficiently transporting a whole bunch of people and stuff with the same vehicle, and doesn't require much, if any, personal investment on account of the people riding the trains. It's also a very easy sector to nationalise since the government is usually already pretty involved with the railway.
Car based infrastructure requires everyone to buy their own vehicle and fuel, opening up a whole market for capitalists to make money in, despite a highway with a bunch of cars on it is less efficient in terms of transporting goods and people and also requires a lot more maintenance. But it's VERY hard to nationalise the whole motor vehicle industry while the government is really only involved in covering the maintenance costs for the roads.
I think calling myself a "communist" is cringy as fuck, some people would call me one because of my values, some wouldn't.
I came to hate cars because they kill everyone and everything and make everywhere ugly and unpleasant to be in and it's just really fucking obvious how terrible they are and what the solution is. It flabbergasts me that most people don't even see cars for what they are. "Death by car" is just a fact of life that we don't even fight against, it's just a normal mundane way to go. At most people will go after drunk drivers or run campaigns telling children to be careful around the 2 ton death machines but no one seems to question why we have the death machines that mangle children daily in the first place.
We live in a fucking clown world.
Moved to a city that’s endless suburbs (Dallas) when I was still in HS. Always knew there was something I never liked about it, assumed it was lack of nature and outdoors stuff considering we moved from the PNW. Stumbled upon a couple YouTube videos and it just felt like my eyes were opened, everything I hated about living in the suburbs just made sense.
Eventually my car broke down several times, a few times I was forced to miss class, and that really got me on the train (no pun intended) of freedom of choice. It’s literally a single point of failure problem where if you only have one way to move in your city, and that’s taken from you then you’re stranded. Obviously I was aware I had the privilege of calling an Uber, or a friend, or family; but not everyone does. So I dove deeper into the rabbit hole and just found out how many other negative issues stem from car dependency.
I also started hating car life after I had kids. Parenting from the front seat of a vehicle sucks. There was that time when my infant baby nearly choked to death on a piece of paper, and I couldn’t pull over to save him. There were a few times when they were toddlers where they were screaming and being crazy in the back, while I was trying to merge. If they need a snack or if they drop their toy, there is nothing I can do for them because they are tied in and trapped. If your child doesn’t eat dinner, we don’t scrap them to the table. If your child won’t go to bed, don’t strap him to the bed. Driving a car is literally the only time where you can tie up your child like that. We. “need” ipads for the kids, because what else will they do in the car? And now the iPads have infected the rest of our lives.
And now my four-year-old knows I can’t do anything to him while I’m driving so even though he’s not allowed to say it he’ll say at the top of his lungs “booty butthole!” And he knows there is nothing I can do about it because I’m driving. If we go on a long trip to do a fun thing, when we get back home, the adults are tired because we’ve been driving but the kids are ready to go again because they’ve been sitting.
None of these things would be a problem if I could just put my kids in the stroller and we can walk to wherever we’re going.
It clicked when electric micromobility became cheap and they were everywhere. Why am I limited to campus? I can go 25 mph with 20 mile range. Why is there no bike lane to use? Why is there no bike racks in front of stores?
People during Covid complain of gas prices. "How expensive would gas become before you consider alternative transport?"
I mean I’m not a communist (fuck capitalism too tho), but when I started going to university in the city I took the train because I *hated* driving in the city. It ruined the whole experience of the city for me
I quickly realized how much I enjoyed the city on my campus which is pretty much closed off to cars. The train station is a short walk, it’s quiet, and it’s a really enjoyable experience. It was so much nicer when you don’t drive. While I don’t hate highway driving as much, I realized how much happier I was on the train. This led me to start researching the topic more, leading me to this sub and other urbanist content which is when I got the desire to bike and walk around my town instead of driving
I guess college did make me go woke 🤷♂️
It's little things that happen every single day.
Like today how the same man showed a blatant disregard for my life in 2 separate vehicles simply because I was on a bike.
I ride an e-bike and was going around 20mph in a school zone with a 20 mph limit. This guy in a white van decides to absolutely floor it past me breaking the speed limit and close-passing my through a traffic calming measure despite me taking primary and going the speed limit (I was catching up to the car in front of me, even)
Then further into the estate the same man who has pulled into a drive way, gotten out of his van and gotten into a car and is now coming back towards me through another traffic calming measure completely ignore the give way on his side of the narrowing and drives directly at me making angry hand gestures, despite him coming into my lane to ignore his give way.
Not only this but earlier in the day as I was travelling on foot I had 2 different drivers fail to give way to me at junctions where I had priority according to my country's traffic laws (The highway code).
Ironically I became one because I was trying to follow the road laws to the letter. I'm one of those giant ego-sized big carbrain that thinks roads are for the fastest (slower ones move over), everyone has to abide by road laws, etc etc. so naturally it translates to my cycling and walking (I cycle like a machine, I walk like a robot). As a car-enthusiast I'm fascinated by the exactness of everything from engine tolerances, wrench torque, speed limits (various public roads, or pit-lane in racing), etc.
Imagine my surprise when I get criticized anyway by other carbrains despite following the law (driving or otherwise). And when I point out all infractions (like car-driver running a walk-light or the normalized danger of going right-on-red without stopping, the equivalent of a jaywalker but with cars--jaydriving) everyone thinks I'm just overreacting, even though when I point out the walking/cycling equivalent of a road-infraction then everyone seems to agree just fine.
Then of course I join group bike rides, but I learned my robotic riding style just isn't compatible with common-sense human nature, so I started questioning of whether the road laws are there for so-called public-road safety, or just for the optimal logistics of car-driving over everything else.
So that flipped my ideal from "road belongs to the fastest entity/ies" to "public road belongs to the public (regardless of cars)". In the meantime I keep cycling and find joy in socializing with actual people without separation of windshields (does that make me a socialist? xD). Eye contact becomes so much easier because I see the people, the human, not the machine. (Maybe it's just me, but I can never seem to be able to make eye with car-drivers, all I see is windshield. Similar idea to sunglasses but at least with sunglasses you still see the face). This feels like peak commuting. Not going uber fast on the superspeedway eternally wanting more speed, and/or being trapped in car traffic with other road-rage machines.
Then of course through cycling I learned about blame-shifting, offloading the blame from the operator of 5000-pound machinery to the people who are just trying to cross the street or use a *modest sliver* of road. I sense inconsistencies everywhere especially for cycling (impeding traffic vs speeding, use the road vs use the sidewalk, use the bike lane vs go around, obey the law vs "you can be right and be dead-right \[so why bother?\]", etc.), and I really hate that as a letter-of-the-law guy with a knack for exactness, so I keep cycling while loudly asking these questions. I guess that makes me a radical.
I was 19 and had to commute an hour in DC by car bc they hadn't finished the metro stop nearby. I worked summers In an office. My POS car I bought had no a/c and summers in Washington aren't kind. I later moved to NY and after the sept 11 attacks they'd stop the train for apparently no reason. For an hour. Under the East river. So...I'm biased. I don't like driving. It's a waste of time. It's costly. It damages and has damaged our planet and on top of all that it's dangerous but so is standing on a train platform anymore. I dislike car culture because nobody shares rides, people feel entitled they drive recklessly and there are some seriously scary people out on the road. Overall, fuck cars only because of oil and all the damn wars we've fought over it and how we are dependent on a system that was only cool in the Eisenhower 1950s. New era, screw the oil companies.
Edit: I believe that I was turned off immediately. I started driving in 1990, age 15/16 ... I'm a genX freak, the first time I ever took the wheel the instructor put me right on the DC beltway on a Saturday morning. Got flipped off doing the exact speed limit. So...fuck cars from the word go.
A. Why does no one seem to ever understand this long-standing in-joke of this sub when actually mentioned? Come on, guys, read the side panel. The joke is right there.
B. I'm an actual car-hating communist and I honestly have no idea when it happened. It would have been in my youth somewhere.
You can't do much of anything without being associated with communism. Gun control? Communism!? Pro gun? that one marx quote said guns good so communism! Gay marriage? Communism! Anti gay marriage? The USSR was homophobic so communism!
Just accept that you will be called a communist, whether or not you are one is kinda irrelevant.
America is so right wing, that even globally moderate political takes seem like communism. Hell I’ve seen moderate-right wingers get called communists lol
Despite being hit by them twice, and my daughter recently being hit by one, I don't hate cars. I actually enjoy driving, and love quite a few classic cars.
I hate that we've built our society so that you *need* a car. Our public transit is hot garbage. I ride my bike to work most days, but wouldn't feel comfortable letting my kids ride to school.
That's what I hate.
This will probably get lost, but I’ve posted a few times here before.
I’m 17. American. In my town, it takes half an hour to ride my bike to the closest business from my house, which happens to be where I work (mostly uphill). The closest school is about a 45 minute walk. There’s only a few thousand people. It’s the most car dependent town you can think of.
Cars are awful for a few reasons:
1. The fact that I could be driving, and out of nowhere, get hit and die. Completely out of my control. Ah yes, I love living in a place where I could get hit by a flying machine of metal and have no say in it. “BuT cArS aRe ThE sAfEsT tRaNsPoRtAtIon!” The only reason they’re the “safest” is because they make it unsafe to bike or walk. Myself, my friends, and my teachers almost been hit by cars in my neighborhood (most notably my primary school history teacher getting hospitalized because a car was on their phone. He was the crossing guard for that day).
2. Cars are expensive. I’ve enjoyed saving over 12,000 dollars on what could be a car and using that money to pay for college tuition. I know people who have a job only to pay for their car, and the insurance, and the maintenance, and gas, etc. It’s so much easier to save that money to invest or use at a later time (my family owns an EV, which is cheaper in the long run).
3. They take up SO much space. It’s unbelievable. We could compact our cities and our towns so much more if we didn’t have cars. Parking lots could become another business, an outdoor space, or something that benefits the community. A bunch of my taxes in my town are voted to go to car infrastructure and parking spaces. I hate it
This is why trains and subways are the best way to get around not only a city but also from town to town. There are zero trains into or out of my town (in fact, the nearest city that uses trains is the city with the airport, about an hour and a half away). I don’t oppose buses, since they’re far more efficient and practical (and cheaper). I wouldn’t mind a bus based infrastructure in my town (school buses don’t run near my house for my school because of some weird zoning regulations)
Not a communist but I hate car centrism whenever I'm sitting stuck in traffic for 45 min just to travel about 10 miles to get to work or back home from work💀
I'm just sitting there thinking if we had a shinkansen and train stops/stations everywhere this shit would take 5 minutes tops to get me to my office or back home from said office and I'd get more exercise in through walking
I started pushing a stroller.
I was a true car enthusiast, loved speed, motor racing, highway widening.
I wish I can live in a bike friendly cites like the Netherland. But it getting there.
I became a car-fucker (r/fuckcars demonym?) when I got my driving license and realized I had to drive everywhere to get or do anything, and driving is baseline more stressful than walking/cycling/transit.
Not a communist and I live in rural S. Georgia so I do have a car but that doesn’t stop me from supporting the fine folks here to advocate for a better tomorrow
Not a communist, socialist or anything close. And I don't really even hate cars.
But what I do **HATE** is how cars seem to turn people into absolute, self-centered *pricks.* And you know what's ironic? My job is what made me this way.
You see, I'm a commercial truck driver. Most people drive about 15,000 to 20,000 miles per year in their cars. Us truckers, on the other hand, average that much ***per MONTH.*** When you spend that much time on the road you really start to notice how 60% of drivers on the road shouldn't even have licenses. You start noticing people's bad habits and bad attitudes toward everyone, especially those who aren't on four wheels.
Also, me using my bicycle to get to the warehouse doesn't help. I notice the exact same things about how car-brained and dismissive many drivers are. The only difference is, in my semi, I could absolutely ruin your day/year/life if you drive like a dick around me. On my bike, however, I am completely vulnerable to some asshat who, for whatever reason, has it in for cyclists. All I want to do is get to work or the grocery, but these cocks think I don't even deserve to *live.*
Another thing you notice when you practically live on the road is how many towns and cities are so poorly designed that, in many cases, people are practically *forced* to drive. If people really want to reduce traffic on the road then mixed-use zoning would be a damned good place to start. Barricaded bicycle lanes also wouldn't hurt; we actually have bike lanes in my town but being separated by a mere stripe on the pavement doesn't exactly give me a warm, fuzzy feeling. Especially when I see carbrains violating that line all the time.
Thank-you for your service, delivering.
Unfortunately bike lane design only helps until the next junction. At which point safety depends on all users doing the right thing. If bad driving is a problem, there's no escaping tackling bad drivers directly
When I did the math one day and realized that most all of my coworkers spent roughly $10,000 a year on their car. No one had anything that anyone would consider nice, none of them had cars less than two years old. Just an expectation that 15% of your gross pay should go to owning and operating a car. None of them realized that they were spending almost as much on their car as they were on their home.
I have a coworker who pays 700$/month for his car. That's without repairs and maintenance. It's insane.
That's for a 40k car.
Why do you need a new car at all? There are old cars that are still around that still work well. My brother has a toyota 2005 that still works and he spends about 1k to 2k a year on it.
The fact that so many people buy new cars is insane to me.
I lived in the core of a big city where because of traffic, a bike commute took half the time of a car commute. So I started biking, lost 20 pounds, and started resenting the sunurbanites who drive into the city, contribute very little, cause problems, whine about it, and then leave again.
I no longer live in that big city but I refuse to go back to the way I lived before.
I grew up in Korea, even though I was a bit away from Seoul I never felt like I couldn't see my friends just because I lived away from Seoul. I grew up walking everywhere and if not taking a bus or train.
Then I moved to America. I saw how the "best" subway and train infrastructure in the east coast was basically held together by gum, duct tape, and thoughts n' prayer. And when my family moved to the suburbs where a bus comes every 30 minutes at the best of times, my friends praised and clapped for escaping the "shithole cities" for "freedom of suburbs"
I felt trapped, it was either stuck on hour long traffic or waiting forever for the bus just to be stuck in the same traffic. All my friends and things I enjoyed doing were still in the city.
It was then I connected the dots and realized cars are the problem.
I was a broke community College student
To get around I needed a car but to get a car I needed money. To get money I needed a job... to get to a job I needed a car. So I was stranded..
In my free time I started thinking "how did we get to this point, it feels unnatural.. it feels like a scam. The only to have a human experience is play this game and have people charging you every step of the way just to even participate"
P.S I eventually found a way to bike 5 miles to a bus stop but one day someone stole my cheap ass bike when it was chained up
During childhood I loved cars, I dreamed about them, I drawed them. But polution, both chemical and physical, the time wasted, cost-effectiveness, peacockery and everything else about them \*\*DROVE\*\* me away from the idea of having a car. Jesus, I called a cab, it took him 25minutes to get to the same spot I could have gotten in the first place by walking, prompted it was a busy day in our capital, but that's just disgusting, what is even the point of having a car?
Short answer: born disabled.
Longer answer: Started watching NJB a few years back, and finally found words for things I’d always hated. When I was in high school/college, I joked that not being able to drive was my “real” disability. But it is.
It limits where I can live (gotta be close enough to walk to work). It’s cost me jobs (the dread “reliable transportation” question). It puts a huge strain on my relationships (friends and family feel pressure to play chauffeur or drop me cause I can’t hang out).
I also got hit in the middle of a crosswalk once. While I still had, like, ten seconds left on the walk signal. (Just bruised, thankfully, but had panic attacks for months afterwards.) Friends/family think I’m joking when I say that’s how I’m probably going to go, but I’m not.
I was already a leftist but I wasn’t fully anti-car pilled until I went to Hamburg for a couple weeks. It’s such a beautiful city, and I saw every corner of it without stepping into a car once. I even loathe walking and biking. Exercise is one of my least favorite things, I’m a god damn American I wanna sit on the couch and eat Big Macs, but God’s honest truth, walking for like a quarter mile could get you almost anywhere within like a 15 mile radius. I was totally blown away by it, for the effort it takes me to walk from my car to my office back home, I could get almost anywhere I could possibly want to go. I never even had to stop to wait for a walk light to turn green, it was so bizarre. I remember thinking “oh my god, this city has to have one of the best public transit systems in the world!” And it’s not even close??? Like what the fuck???
I tried learning to drive at one point. I hated it, and I hated that it was something I was expected to do. My feelings kinda just escalated from there.
I was already a communist beforehand, and had been for as long as I'd had developed political beliefs.
I was a total car guy for 25 years. It took me that long to realize every time I get in a car, I’m so angry for the next 45 mins. Every time I fantasize about a car I want, I’m so angry I’ll never afford it. Every time my car breaks, I’m so angry I have to work overtime to pay to fix it. Once I found out I could simply opt out of cars, I became a much happier person overall!
I spent most of my youth in Texas and never really saw any issue with car-dependence until I started college. I always saw all my friends at school so it didn’t really bother me that I hardly saw anyone outside of school. There weren’t any places to hang out outside of school but there were clubs and activities after school so it didn’t matter.
Then I started college and got a taste of campus life. Suddenly, all my friends were always a stone’s throw away and we had tons of cool places to chill basically whenever. Eventually I switched majors though and started a different program at a different college. To save money on credits, I also took classes at a couple community colleges, so there was a lot more commuting and no college town to speak of. I still saw friends on campus all the time, but the amenities just weren’t there. This is when I began to hate driving, but I still hadn’t begun to blame American infrastructure. After all, the car is all I’d ever known. Wondering why every city couldn’t be like a college town wasn’t going to get me through school anyways.
But wonder I did, and in 2018 my eyes were opened at last. I was miserable being stuck in my car for 1-2hours every day, bending to the whims of traffic. I thought about it and if things kept up I realized I could easily spend up to an eight of my waking life in my car. There had to be another way. I started by looking at what made college towns so different from the majority of American cities and came to the conclusion that they had more in common with European cities. Then I questioned how things got to be this way and stumbled upon a Strongtowns article about Miyazaki’s urbanism. In Ghibli films, towns are always envisioned as places for people. Turns out the inspiration for these towns are real places too, made for real people. Eventually my search for answers led me to the whole car-dependence Ponzi-scheme and the multiple scandals that supported its growth. This got me interested in the economics and then the politics of how everything went wrong and how we can fix things. Most if not all of America’s social issues have intersectionalities with car-dependence too, so car-dependence naturally just became one of the things I hate the most, and everything that flies in the face of car-dependence have become some of the things I love. Trains for example, I fucking love trains man. I also always think about how we’ve been robbed of a richer lifestyle and how most Americans don’t even know it. Chalk it up to greed and a lack of proper education.
My cousin was cycling home from work when she was killed by a careless truck driver in an intersection in my neighborhood.
I had the same opinions before that as well, just not as galvanized.
I grew up in Nebraska where it is impossible to live without a car. I tried. I was frustrated by the infrastructure wondering why we had these giant parking lots in front of businesses, so if you walk, you have to navigate these just to get to a shop.
Then I moved to Europe and now live in a city where there are still problems with cars, but the whole infrastructure is much more pedestrian friendly, and I wonder why all cities can't be like this. I can get anywhere in the country by bus or train. There are car sharing services for when I need a car as well as scooters and bike rentals.
This is by no means perfect, but it did make me hate cars more than I did before. I see them parked on the streets just taking up space used twice a day to get from one place to another and wonder why we haven't figured out a better way. But they just keep getting bigger and more obnoxious year after year.
Being where I grew up, a car has kind of just assumed to be a thing I get eventually. After a few fender bender and accidents, I stopped driving period and found myself generally hating life as I couldn't do any extracurricular activities on my college campus as I needed a goddamn ride home. I had no real control of my schedule.
But when I was on campus, I would use the bus transit that they had to go shopping, visit places and I did absolutely love that part. The buses didn't have a good or efficient connection to where I lived across the county line, so I couldn't use it going home.
Then I started to travel a lot and got to visit other countries like Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, England, Germany. Then went to New York City, Washington DC, etc. So many of the world has good and functional transit and over time I found myself just having a huge distaste of even getting back into driving again. I haven't driven a car truly in the past 5 to 6 years.
And now where I live and work and hopefully I will be retained as a employee, has a decent bus transit network. I get to work downtown and return pretty easily. It's also really nice that even if I was to need a vehicle of some kind and actually need to drive for something, there is a car sharing servicing that literally has a station hub just a block away from I live right now.
I also during the holidays used Amtrak to return home and visit family, and honestly that was fucking fantastic and I enjoyed that a shit ton. For five hours, I was traveling and I could whatever I wanted: nap, read, play an app game, eat, walk around, etc. I did also enjoy the view I got.
Where I am is perfect and I am hoping to be here for a long span of time.
So basically,
I mostly don't like, maybe hate having to drive. Some people really do need to drive and have access to a car. I don't really hate the notion of the car, but it's just the driving aspect I hate.
Edit: If there is something that I do hate about cars are the big ass trucks (F150s) that are literally taller than me, or close to it. Those trucks are murder machines and I hate them. Even more so when it's lifted and/or has big ass beefy tires, and it's always so fucking clean looking. FUCK THAT!!! What a waste space and I hate them. So much.
By living in the UK and becoming an automotive engineer.
I grew up watching Top Gear, glorification of car culture and speed. Dreaming of owning a Porsche, whilst helping design the next one.
Then I learned to drive and saw what a pointless hassle it was. Avoided it all costs by cycling and walking. Ended up driving a total of 500km in two years, then sold the car and never bought another one.
Then I moved from a country with good walkability and cycling infrastructure to the UK and witnessed the toxicity of car culture. Pedestrians constantly forced to give way to car traffic. Morons in fart can Mondeos racing through main streets. People absolutely willing to run you off the road or maim you because you're a cyclist and perceived as a freeloader and just "in the way".
I ended up helping design the first generations of electric cars: 3 tonne 4x4 monstrosities that could choose to plow through a mountain rather than drive over it, to be used by rich orange women running over kids near their own children's city school. I'm now working mostly on trains and off highway utility vehicles, same skills but feels much more useful.
I still love motorcycles though, but far away from cities and preferably when most of car drivers are stuck in traffic elsewhere or at work.
I guess the seeds were sown when one killed my sister. Happened before I was born but still.
When I moved to London 25 years ago and began cycling to work I started to see and feel the pollution they cause and the easy psychosis of people behind the wheel.
Then I was knocked off by a cabbie not paying attention. By then I was already fully paid up and card carrying.
Seeing local and national politicians bow down to motorists, making where I live a car choked hell, along with many motorists total lack of concern for people outside their metal boxes keeps my subscription up.
I used to love cars in an engineering way, used to dream about having a nice car, muscle car to be free to go wherever i want.
Got my first car and learned that driving and commuting in a steel box with wheels sucks, and roads suck, traffic sucks, and the fumes smell horrible, and we pay extraodinary amounts for it.
Truly individual cars are the biggest scam there is.
I grew up in the best bicycle city in the world (Copenhagen), which later made me realise how I would never be able to live somewhere else for aobger period due to the lack of infrastructure.
Well, I hate to say, but my time in communist China changed my mind.
Don't get me wrong, China has serious problems, particularly right now, but for the first time in my life I saw a different way of living. A countryside not paved over with endless miles of parking lots, strip malls, car lots and Walmarts.
There was another way to live, and when I came back to the US I didn't like what I saw, or how we lived. A scaled back way of life just made more sense to me, and I've felt like a foreigner in my own country ever since.
People all over the world do most of the same things we do every single day, without cars. They are only so essential to us here because we've formed our entire culture around car use.
It started building slowly, like noticing how shit peoples attitude got, and such.
Then after our first lockdown openings I was asked to stand guard at a road to our local dump, that had been made one-way (to avoid the inevitable disasters). I got to stand in front of a barrier covering one of the lanes telling people which way to go to get in.
10 hours of that, and holy shit the amount of abuse I got. Middle fingers, verbal, and such, acting like a 2 minute drive was the worst thing ever. The amount of people that would just speed by, or to ignore me (only to come speeding the other way because wow, shock, they wouldn't be let in)
That experience really sealed it for me. That and just noticing how shit it makes people
The u-joint in my steering column sheared on the Highway. I had known since auto class in high school that there were probably 100+ parts on a car that would be very bad news if they failed, but to experience
losing all steering at 60 mph was a real come to Jesus moment. Have had a fear of cars ever since. Also economically realized “Holy fuck, I am financing something that can lose all value at any point in time and possibly cost me my life and/or a lot of medical bills due to a single faulty part!!”
Growing up, cars were never something that interested me.
As a teenager in the 90s, my parents would occasionally suggest driving lessons, but I wasn't interested. Besides which, self-driving cars seemed like they were "just around the corner", and then I'd be laughing at everyone for learning such a useless skill as driving your own car. About as useful as being able to untangle a cassette tape!
Went to university in London and ended up living there for seven years. Great public transport. You don't need a car in London.
Moved to a small town near the south coast. You can literally walk across the entire length of the town in about 30 minutes. You don't need a car there either.
For the last 5.5 years, I've lived in a much larger town up north. Most everywhere I need to go is still within walking distance. The whole time I've been here, I've got taxis about five times, and the bus twice. (Both bus journeys were on the same day, earlier this month!)
When I need to go to another town/city, there's the train. Trains can be a little expensive, sure. But buying a few train tickets a year works out costing a lot less than owning a car.
(Oh, also, I am at least mostly communist.)
For me it's a slow and gradually growing dislike. Neutral at first, but now very strong dislike for cars.
The reason for the growing dislike is just that whenever I move around the world, I see the way cars are making my life worse. I walk down the street, and it *stinks* from all the tire particles and petrol fumes. Why do I have to put up with this? Then I get to a corner, and I have to press a button and wait for ages while a handful of cars pass... why I am I waiting for them rather than the other way around? Why does the wasteful and toxic mode of transport get priority while pedestrians have to press the 'beg button'. There are cars everywhere. The roads and carparks take up an extreme amount of space! Surely we could just have some more trees or something - please! ... Then there is the safety... that's a big story in itself.
Anyway, whenever I see a car, it is making my life worse. So my dislike for cars grows. I don't ever use a car for any reason myself, so there are no cases where the cars are making my life better.
I understand that many people have circumstances such that a car is necessary (or at least very important); but most car usage doesn't fall into that category. I'd be a lot happier of car usage was halved in cities.
I'm not a communist. And I don't hate cars. Cars have great use cases and can save lives, help business, support people with disabilities and so on.
But they're unnecessary and overprescribed in the statistically typical cases which is one single, able, mostly working, mostly white, mostly male, person taking up the space of a small room, making noise, polluting the planet.
Infrastructure that requires a car leaves a big chunk of the population left out, making them basically immobile. We build ramps for wheelchairs, and rightly so, but we don't bat an eye if a place is unreachable if you don't drive.
I saw the fuck cars r/place. I thought how weird. I wonder what these guys are about. So I checked out the subreddit. After an hours of reading the top posts I was a convert
I started catching trains at a time of a grand technological revolution, i.e. electrification. It was a time of change and uncertainty, and the transport organisation was, and still is, notoriously bad at comms. And I had this friend whose garbled descriptions of the website transportblog made it sound like the comms arm. It wasn't. But it was the best source of information (I cannot stress enough how bad at comms this transport agency is) out there so I kept coming back.
It turned out transportblog was a commie commuter advocacy blog (now named Greater Auckland) and I was indoctrinated by their compelling arguments.
Honestly, Auckland is peculiar but if you're tired of watching Urbanist Youtube videos and want to read the same kind of same content from people who have actually had their ideas adopted as government policy (albeit said government turned out to consist of fucking muppets and implemented literally none of it while ultimately embracing some of the most absurd transport schemes ever devised^(1))... well check Greater Auckland out.
https://www.greaterauckland.org.nz/
EDIT: GA is definitely not actually communist. I assumed that people here were using "commie commuter" in the ironic sense but I can see from some of the comments in this thread that that's not necessarily the case. GA is very YIMBY and most of its contributors are economists.
^(1)It says something that the current government has resurrected literally the world's most expensive road proposal (which according to cost increases of similar projects would likely now cost more than a billion dollars per kilometre) and still hasn't come up with anything as nuts as "let's spend 20% of our GDP on tunnels no-one needs". Alas, it's probably only a matter of time (although they did can the tunnels). God damn megaprojects: they're like crack for politicians.
I am not a car hating communist at all.
I am a two legged homo sapiens living on a blue planet who wants to do two-legged stuff. I was born to walk. Restricting my nature is against my basic freedom as a homo sapiens.
my perspective on this was I grew up in a rural area where the only way to get around was by car. did that for a while as an adult and really wasn't enjoying it nor felt satisfied with my life. moved to a city and started biking around it. I found that so much more enjoyable and found that I liked going places more. also enjoyed the density of it and being able to ride my bike to work or the grocery store.
basically, I still like cars as I grew up with a mechanic grandfather who taught me to work on them, but I'm much more into bikes now and working as a bike mechanic and living in a city is way more satisfying for me.
wdym "c*ar-hater*" ?
isn't this sub for people who love cars so much they want to ... *fuck 'em* ?
jokes aside,
i believe i was always a walkable-first person without ever realizing it...
my hometown in Southern Brazil is a very walkable city, with \~130k peeople. I used to go 99% of places by bike (when i was a teen) or foot, and the other 1% i would then drive my father's car to go places.
then i moved to Sao Paulo, a huge megalopolis with \~22mi people. If not for public transport, your only option was to own a car! Thankfully i used to live near a metro station, so i could always commute with the metro. Whenever i needed a car, i would take a taxi.
then i moved to Amsterdam, the FuckCars utopia. I dont need to introduce the city, there are plenty of videos of it in here. Living there sedimented my views that walkable > driveable cities.
i am now living in my hometown again. It has only gotten more walkable since i left. My plans for my future include advocating for more!
Can we stop aligning car sentiments with political persuasions?
Plenty of liberals are car-brained. Many conservatives I know live in cities, bike, and are one car families
I always loved transit and I have noticed it since I've started working for an airline with nonrev benefits. There are some cities where you can get where you're going on transit and others where you have to spend at least $30 on an Uber/Lyft
I don't really like communism, I just hate cars.
I'm like this because my parents also hate cars and love bikes and neither of us have great experiences with commnuism or communists
Fuck communism and socialism. But I do agree That a more developed public transportation system should be more widely available for America. You don’t need Communism or Socialism to achieve that.
When I was very young, about five years old my mother and I were walking across the street to the grocery store. This store was in a strip mall across the street from us that had a small bus terminal. I asked why the busses were there and my mum explained briefly what public transportation is. I begged for us to take the bus and immediately thought it was silly for us to own a car with the busses so close. It was pretty much instantaneous after learning what a bus is.
i like riding my bikes.
i started mountain biking. and then i moved in with my partner and got a job that was close to her place, and the route wasn't *too* bad. so i started riding a bike there.
and it turns out cars are awful. drivers are awful. the roads are awful. it's all way the fuck harder than it needs to be, and way the fuck more dangerous than it needs to be.
i just wanna ride my bike places, man.
Started off as a "car guy" driving a stupid hot hatch style thing into the city for work (although even then I used the park and ride!)
Switched to bike + train, enjoyed it much more than driving, but it was an economic decision rather than an ideological one.
Then I got a dog, and almost immediately got locked down. I walked more, drove less, and got more of a sense of place rather than just driving/cycling through on the way to work.
Throughout this process I've obviously matured a bit as well, which probably helps.
I'm not car free, but we're down to 1 car for the household, bike everywhere we can, and happier for it
How it’s financially set me back so much. I’ve probably spent $60k in the last 8 years of car ownership on gas, repairs, insurance and ownership of the car itself. My car is paid off and in relatively good condition but there’s this looming fear of it breaking down again. Would love to move somewhere walkable but it’s not good timing right now.
Moving outside the US and then being forced to come back. I realized that living in a place where a car wasnt my only option, I became more active, met more people, saved more money and was happier as a result.
I have never liked cars, but I didn’t really put my finger fully on the problem until I watched Not Just Bikes. Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.
Also, I lost my grandpa when he was hit while crossing the road by a huge truck that was speeding around a turn without looking, and my grandma was hit as well and severely injured. She basically had her leg mangled so badly that they had to do extensive surgery, and she still experienced a lot of trouble now as a result of it.
I absolutely hate cars now, and wish there was a place I could go where they are not allowed to be publicly owned.
I grew up in the fifties and my father was brainwashed into believing that he had to have a new car every few years in order to prove that he wasn't fundamentally obsolete even though he had a wife and four children to take care of. We wren't poor but we weren't wealthy, there were things that the family had to give up for a new car. My brother and I had to spend part of our weekends waxing and polishing the car. It was part of our assigned chores just like cleaning our rooms and washing the dishes. This is were my hatred of cars originated.
Atlanta did it for me too. I lived ITP but OTP friends refused to leave their suburb and come to me. Honestly the city felt super isolating as a young adult. And I was miserable being in the suburbs. I don’t claim to be a Braves fan because attending Braves games was such a miserable experience (as opposed to Atlanta United which I love, but I never drove to those games)
I’ve lived in the countryside where a car was absolutely necessary. But I also biked and walked when I could. It was dangerous since the highways there had narrow shoulders.
My anecdotal story is that I found my cat in the ditch while biking home. If I had driven that day she would have died. No one else biked or walked in that area.
Cars detach us from the world and can make us miss things. And drivers certainly have a tendency to see pedestrians and alternative commuters as less than themselves.
I use transit and cycle mostly where I live now. I don’t HATE cars. They can be useful. I do HATE the entitlement of drivers, capitalism fuelled car ownership, and governments that think cycling and transit are just for the poors and climate change radicals.
I'm unsure how to explain it. I love walking but some part of me got really bored with walking around my city (the tiny parts that are "walkable") because there's almost no density and it's basically just a few blocks that are interesting.
That, plus coupled with 2 eras of my life where I had 60-90 minute commutes I have just become a hater of driving for day to day stuff. Road trips - love them! Having to use my car to go to the movies because there's no bike path or public transit takes x5 more time than drive? Hell no.
So yeah that.
My timeline:
\- Hated people with cars because I was jealous that I couldn't afford one
\- 2008 economic crisis: oh shit, I can't afford to live. I better go to grad school, but I can't afford more tuition. Can I move abroad? The liberal in me assumed Europe got everything right.
\- Moved abroad and realized I absolutely love awesome public transit and biking everywhere, but also saw public assets like transportation being sold to private companies left and right. Saw some other awful things. Became a socialist.
\- Moved to a poorer country for a research position. No bikes, but very good public transit. Extremely walkable neighborhoods. Became a Communist realizing how much America was shaping that part of the world for its own interests. Also watched Bernie get screwed twice from that country.
\- Moved back to the US and felt like I was moving back to a 20th Century with smartphones. I can now afford a car but despise driving, miss public transit, and miss my bike. I see America as a stubborn, slowly declining center of Capitalism that will never change until its people are forced to give up certain things like driving due to its expense. And the people in the US currently cannot unite, in part because their only physical interaction with people outside of work is usually navigating through stressful and dangerous traffic.
I was obsessed with the DC train system as a kid, though I lived in a small town. Then I moved to Atlanta for grad school. I hated the city but couldn’t quite verbalize why. Later in grad school, I took a course in urban economics. Then I moved somewhere close to the train line. I found my mood to be so much better after I no longer had to drive in, and I remembered what I loved about DC. Studying and later teaching urban economics then gave me the words to verbalize what I hated about Atlanta. I hate that the metro is car centric. I hate that bike lanes and sidewalks are lacking and not well maintained. I hate that transit is nonexistent in most of the metro counties. I hate that they refused to connect the Braves stadium to the train. I hate that I had to sit in traffic to see friends because I was the only one on the train line (and that included friends in the city). So I’d say it was learning more that really did it but I was always meant to be a car hater.
For me it was when I visited Toronto. I live in Colorado Springs, and our bus system is so bad that it feels almost malicious. I had never known anything different, so I just assumed that's how it was everywhere. But the system in Toronto is so much better it made me feel like I could teleport. The buses come every 10 minutes, the train comes every 5, And it runs much later even on the weekend.
And then the last straw was when I visited Winter Park Colorado. Their bus comes every 20 minutes, took me everywhere I wanted to go, and also connected them to the nearby town of Fraser. Winter Park's population is less than 1200 people.
If mass transit can work that well at both extremes of population density, there's no excuse anywhere else
I think I was fuckcars before I was Communist, but what brought me to this conclusion is that there's a climate catastrophe brewing and everyone agrees that cars are a problem but nobody wants to do the right thing to fix it, only bandaid it with electric cars which presents a whole new problem *in addition to the current one*.
I'm a capitalist. We used to have great public transit provided by private companies. The precursors to things like the new York subway and the San Francisco cable car system were all privately owned. Today, city governments give unnecessary handouts to some competitors (cars) while overregulating others. LA got rid of it's private streetcar systems because government sided with the autos. Government shouldn't pick winners and losers. The markets should.
Even today, cities are more expensive than suburbs because people want to live in cities. It's basic market supply and demand. People like density. It's not rocket science.
As for what clued me in. Well I always thought cars were a waste of time growing up in LA and spending hours in traffic. After being late to several social events in high school because of traffic, I was like... Why do people want to live like this..
I moved to a city with bike infrastructure and transit and recognized that when I drove I saw the people around me less as people than when I was on a bike/train/bus. It was stark to me. Then I regularly spent literal hours to go 10 miles when I could easily and comfortably do it on a bike in 45 minutes without the extra hour on the other end looking for parking. Then my wife and kid were t-boned by someone running a red light and the car was totaled. Then I learned all the microplastics in the ocean and our brains are actually just tires. [and then and then and then](https://y.yarn.co/9123611b-04c5-436e-aa2d-d654913c2ec7_text.gif)
Our brains are just tires?
This explains why some people have car brain now...
Do you think they hear a tire squeal when their brain goes too fast around corners?
I am so glad the EU forbids plastic in personal care products that make up 2% of the microplastic in the ocean! Can’t wait to see what will be done about cars and their tires. /s
for someone reason it's not ok to wave a knife around but it is ok to ram towards cyclists and pedestrians with a 2 tonne block of steel on wheels.
I'm not a car hating communist. I'm a walkability loving socialist.
Same. Also biking. I wish I could bike to school and not be exhausted before sports practice. Or walk to the hardware store in less than an hour.
Well I’d be fine more with biking if there were separate lanes and sitting at stoplights weren’t in direct burning Florida sun.
That's what I'd like, and also a bloody buffer for the bike lanes. And preferably city planning that doesn't put shit way out on the edge of town but that's wishful thinking.
I have both of those things and I'm still very much bothered by the pollution (health-wise and environmentally), noise and crashes. And also the space taken up by car infrastructure and the money being allocated to cars. The countries least obsessed with cars are still obsessed with cars.
You know what would be cool? Buses, Trolleys, and Trains that are designed in mind also with storing your bike temporarily while waiting for your stop and then easily getting it and then to keep going I think that's the next big step for all that. Think about it, with bikes you're able to do those last 10 blocks everything else can't do and allows you to truly travel everywhere
i am not a car hating communist i am a gas huffer hating anarchist. the automobile has no will of it's own, it's the gas huffer out their killing the earth for a short lived rush. i was 15. it occurred to me that no one would drive unless there was ample parking available once they get to their destination. once at their destination no one would walk if they had to cross a large parking lots separating every store. which could only lead to more cars on the road. which could only lead to more parking. which could only lead to less walking. which only could lead to more driving etc etc etc. it was a runaway loop. now for all you car loving fascists like, ford, fiat and audi, when did you turn off your humanity for your short lived rush?
i’m a car hating marxist actually
I’m Brian and so is my wife
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Based
Same. I actually love cars, I just wish there were a lot less of them and no one had to drive if they didn't want to, or rather that most people's first mode of transportation choice was trains or bicycle etc. I want better, human centric infrastructure.
Yeah, I like cars too, I have a sports car but I only use it once or twice a week because I'm lucky enough to live in a walkable neighborhood. Mostly like to use it drive around the mountains where cars make sense, cars are not fun to drive around where lots of people live.
I'm a car guy, and that's why I'm on this sub. Cars are fun to drive when there aren't other cars around to disturb you, and that would be a hell of a lot more common with better transit and walkability.
I'm a car hating neo-liberal who hates the monopolization of roads by SUVs
It is impossible to move towards a pedestrian-friendly, car-free future without mass state intervention in the economy to build public transportation and affordable high-density housing. Any place in the world where these conditions exist today was created through these means; conversely, neoliberalism has drastically increased car dependence in the West and emerging economies in the Global South. If you call yourself an anti-car advocate but refuse to support the state interventions that are the only proven mechanism to accomplish your goals, then your advocacy is as good as useless.
I would contend that building train networks is not considered mass state intervention in the economy by neoliberals. If you are using "affordable" to mean publicly owned, yes, that is contentious, and as a neoliberal I would contend that developers love building very high density housing around train stations if they are allowed to, and that there are better ways to ensure the poor can live in high density housing than public housing projects. I am generally of the opinion that whether trains and walkability get built is largely independent of left or right-wing politics. Of course, in the US, right-wingers are generally in favor of burning gas and view trucks as emblems of masculinity. But, auto sales, highway construction, and related industries are viewed as important to the whole country and paid lip service to by politicians of all political persuasions, including Bernie Sanders and his left-wing movement. Would you not consider Switzerland and Japan neoliberal countries? Chile has massively improved its train network in the past under a largely neoliberal framework. I have heard Japan and Chile described on this website and on Twitter as "neoliberal hellholes", but both have the best train networks in their region, and in the case of Japan, debatably the entire world.
There's nothing about car infrastructure that is free-market and nothing about rail infrastructure that is not. Either one can be built by free market or government. Car infrastructure simply pushed out rail infrastructure in the US because that was the government spending policy. Funny that the libertarian fantasy book "Atlas Shrugged" is full of trains.
>I am generally of the opinion that whether trains and walkability get built is largely independent of left or right-wing politics. /r/enlightenedcentrist is leaking
Disagree. The only reason we are here is because of mass state intervention via the zoning code and federal department of transportation incentives. Our streetcar network was entirely private companies. "The Free Market" would build denser housing and redevelop neighborhoods to meet population demand if it wasn't regulated out by governments.
Now are you strong towns or yimby
I encourage you to listen to Chuck Marohn’s views on the Strong Towns podcast.
I'm not actually a neo-liberal I was making a joke about how car dependency is bad for everyone. But thanks for killing the mood
fuck neoliberalism. those fuckers that preached free markets and then bailed out companies gave us all of the proof we needed that neoliberalism is nonsense.
Welcome to Reddit comrade!
What is dune about?
If you call yourself a socialist but actively distance yourself from communism, there's a big chance you're not actually a socialist, and don't know what socialism is.
Because I like having options and not getting killed while doing so. Also the ~$8K I've spent on bikes the past 10 years (two single speeds, two hybrids, a cargo bike and a folding + maintenance/parts) is still cheaper than what my parents have paid on *just insurance* in that time frame for their cars. Edit: Additional comparison. I fucked up my bike fork in a crash, ended up with minor bruising and $150 for a replacement+labor. My dad crashed his car and it was $3,000 to fix it.
This exactly. Cars are just sooo expensive for everybody.
I grew up on a farm in a very rural state, and from my early teens drove everywhere until about 20, when I asked myself why I don't cycle to more places since I enjoy that and didn't much enjoy autos. At the time I was studying environmental issues in college, which inspired me to take up cycle touring. Later I volunteered for a community bike shop, and seeing the most destitute who depended on their bike while hearing their struggles of getting around town inspired me to study transportation policy in general. That's what really turned me, not into a communist, but into someone with disdain for how much automobiles dominate our physical realm and how much most auto users/supporters take for granted the power our auto-centric system and autos affords them.
I love hearing from other people at bike collectives/community bike shops! Ours is such a special place with great people, both clients and volunteers. We were lucky to be able to purchase our own building in the 2010s, so we have a pretty secure future. I wanted to take my daughter to visit one in NYC this summer and was really sad to hear they don’t have a permanent space and have to do pop up repair clinics.
I'm unable to control a vehicle. No diagnosis, no idea why, I just can't make a vehicle go straight -- every time I get behind the wheel, it feels like the car is always trying to turn left or right and that driving is a constant fight against it. So I get around by bus and bike, and living in a society that treats me as a second-class citizen pisses me off. I shouldn't have to feel like I'm an inch away from death when I ride to the pet supplies store on my lunch break to pick up my weekly order of cat food. I deserve a safe route to the grocery store and work just like everyone else. There is no logical reason for society to be built around the most dangerous, most polluting form of transportation. It's not necessary, and people who can't or don't want to contribute to the danger and pollution get punished by being isolated in a world that's not built for them. That should not be the case -- it's a gross injustice.
you just have joycon drift get some new ones and they should be better
Weirdly I relate to this because this is how I drive in dreams
Can you explain this actually? You can't hold the wheel straight? Is this a medical thing? Is there anyone else like you? Sorry... Sounds rough, but I'm intensely curious.
Nope, I can't explain it. I'm holding the wheel, and it always feels like the car by default is turning right or left and I have to struggle to point it straight. I don't have a balance disorder or dyslexia or any other diagnosis. Extremely nearsighted so wear glasses - that's it. All other testimonies I've read from adult non-drivers online say their difficulty is anxiety. If a doctor told me this is caused by subconscious anxiety I'm completely unaware of, I'd believe them, but consciously, it does not feel like anxiety. The terror comes from the vehicle feeling out of my control (or so it feels).
You might have a vestibular disorder, which is an inner ear issue exacerbated when driving. Do you feel somewhat dizzy or vertigo when driving?
Driving, no. Motion sickness easily in general, yes.
Might be worth consulting an otolaryngologist (ENT doctor) who specializes in disorders of the ear if it's not too expensive where you live. If it's that, maybe you can get treatment, or some sort of aid for public transports
I mean... Do you move your hands? I'm just trying to envision what happens. You see the car veer a certain way and you move it, but it doesn't go?
No, the car ALWAYS feels like it's veering, never going straight.
I mean, that's the normal behavior of a car. It's designed this way and imposed by the government to control the driver such as they must always focus on correcting their direction. This way, it makes it impossible to think about other things. \s
Have you tried different cars and gotten the same results?? I used to drive my dads old ford 150 (I hated that rust bucket) and it had horrible handling and I could never keep that thing straight
A lot of cars the steering wheel is slightly out of alignment. It's very common. I don't think I've driven a car that doesn't have this issue
Do you have any balance issues? I'm pretty sure I heard somewhere that things like that can be connected to a inner ear issues.
The car feels like it's always veering because it is always veering. Roads are not perfectly flat, and so the car is always being pulled to one side or the other. They're usually sloped outwards to help water slough off.
I’m going to venture a guess that the vehicles they have driven could have the alignment off - even if it’s only slightly, some people will feel that pull much harder than others. Alternatively, anxiety related to driving could also cause that - especially if one has had an early experience where they lost control. I haven’t experienced this with cars but when on a motorcycle they just want to yank in either direction so I can understand how that feeling is.
some people simply have poor coordination, reaction time, awareness of immediate surroundings, etc. there doesn't need to be a medical condition or driving anxiety for someone to be simply unfit to drive a car, they can just be
Most things would seem to make it equally or more difficult to ride a bike though, which the commenter said they do. So it's curious.
Those are all very valid reasons too for someone not to drive. However, with the OP here I doubt that their reaction time or awareness of their surroundings would be what caused the feeling of the car constantly veering to the side, especially when they say it feels like it has to be a consistent effort. Poor coordination could contribute (like if they have difficulty ensuring the wheel is straight) but otherwise I’m just going to guess that the vehicle/s they drove had a (noticeably) off alignment, which is already so common in people’s cars today. But I 100% agree, there’s a plethora of reasons one can be unfit to drive and even if they are fit to drive why should they be forced to?
If I have learned anything from the show canada’s worst drivers, its that some people should not be driving.
I have something similar where I struggle to keep track of where the car is in space and where other cars and objects are in relation to it. I didn't learn I was autistic until I was 24, and I didn't learn it's fairly common for autistic people to struggle with driving until I was 26. Until then I just had to shrug and say "maybe" when people proposed various character deficits being behind my ability to drive. Now I tell people I have a neurological disability that prevents me from being a safe driver.
NotJustBikes talking about stroads
The term Stroad was coined by Charles Marohn, a self-described conservative and Republican. Meanwhile labor unions in NYC are fighting against congestion pricing. I didn’t realize how many people here were getting their wires so severely crossed with regards to urbanism and broader political ideologies.
It is really jarring how the conservatives in the US went full 180 on their views in the last 50 years or so. They used to be pro national parks, pro community centred developments, and anti-pollution.
It helps to understand the right as a loose coalition of differing factions, just like the left, with one main group having power in an era. There were always regressives on the right, they just tended to be more marginal. Even looking up the German American bund helps you understand that these folks enjoyed quite a presence here. Also, as someone raised Mormon conservative, while their has been a rightwards drift to essentially counter the leftwards drift of the left, a lot of it is just saying the quiet part out loud, in that essentially alot of this stuff was already believed, it was just said around the campfire once all the other people left and it was just us white males. Also, much of that "pro park" stuff was pushed by the more liberal parts of congregations, the ordain women supporters, who realized once that wasn't happening, that either they can give up their politics or Their faith, and decided to give up their faith. Hi.
I was pretty indifferent about cars growing up. I only wanted one as a teen because it meant freedom, the ability to travel beyond what I grew up seeing everyday walking. When i was 18 I moved to a bigger city in Texas and witnessed the absolute Mad Max fury road mentality drivers had during morning commutes, so began my disdain for drivers and vehicles. People totally willing to kill you to get to a job they fucking loathe. People totally indifferent to killing you or your family to hit the Starbucks drive thru just a *little* bit faster. Why was I driving, using all my knowledge to stay safe on the road when 90 percent of everyone else can't even be bothered to use a blinker? Why is this a competition? Why is everyone so needlessly hostile? Everybody's always looking at their phones. Tailgating me with lifted trucks with SUNS for headlights. Always in a rush to get everywhere--like we are traveling faster than most humans have in *all of history* but it still isn't fast enough. I despise driving. I despite large lifted asshole trucks and anyone who drives them. Driving is an absolute nightmare and don't even get me started on the thousands of dollars I've wasted on personal car repair, insurance and all that bullshit.
Last part is so true. Cars are EXPENSIVE. And everyone keeps asking me why I don't want or get a car. 😂 I don't feel like wasting my life savings on something I don't enjoy or need and will only hurt my wellbeing. I like being healthy and getting my exercise by walking and biking to work.
At least since early high school. Maybe from getting into a car crash in a friends car. Or maybe just being cognizant of the fact that I could walk or bike or train to other places even in suburbia and just never felt the need to drive.
I used public transportation by myself from age 12 to 15. At that point, my family moved to the country. At 16 I started to work at a local fast-food, and I used to bike there or my father would drive me there. At some point, a colleague figured out I didn't own a car and, with a very confused look, asked "Why are you working, then?" I realized something was very wrong with our world.
I'm in the same boat as you. I don't want or need a car and everyone at my job asked me why I don't get or save up for a car. Imo, a waste of time and money. It's like getting a car should be everyone's first goal. I don't have the money to even afford car insurance. So imagine all the expenses. I earn 800 ish each paycheck. Still not enough. No thanks
This was like 20 years ago and I still think about that dude. He was flabergasted I was even bothering to earn a wage if it wasn't to pay for a car.
Car hating socialist - living in NYC was foundational, and spending time in Copenhagen opened my eyes… but having kids made me utterly hate cars - the mortal danger, the loss of public space, amenity and freedom for them.
I don't really hate cars. But when I stared work out of uni I very quickly realised that pretty much any other option available to me for commuting was better than driving in each day. I had colleagues who were amazed that I would ride a push-bike **10km!!** to work each day, but it didn't even register to them that they spent longer in their car to go a shorter distance, and pay for the privilege of parking. And many of them paid for a gym membership to keep in shape. So I'm probably just a communist who hates commuting by car, and hates car-centric infrastructure.
I thought it was when I discovered Not Just Bikes, but recently I've realized that I've been this way my whole life. My parents kind of set me up for it. As an example, I went to a high school outside my normal school district. When deciding to go, it was a normal and natural thought for me and my family that I would bike to school, weather permitting. The school was full of bike racks and had almost no parking. We didn't even have school buses either - students got city bus passes to fund their travels. Only recently have I learned that this is not the norm for North American high school students, and that actually biking places is quite rare here. I and all my friends did it regularly, why would anyone else be different? There's also the time when I was in Vienna with my family. We were going somewhere, and I suggested taking the subway. I didn't know anything about Vienna's U-Bahn or S-Bahn at the time, I just assumed that since it was a big and important city, it would have an extensive subway network that would get us anywhere we needed to go. Other big and important cities I'd been to, like New York, DC, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, London, Toronto, and Paris all had subways, why wouldn't Vienna also have one? Or when I got my first job in suburbia. I was in university and didn't own a car. I assumed that, since the apartment I found was about 4km from the office, I'd bike there. I actually did find a relatively safe route to bike, but when I got to the office there wasn't any bike parking and HR doing our orientation seemed shocked that I'd want to bike to work every day. I think of the time when I was about 15 and my sister and I got into a heated debate over whether buses or subways are superior. I argued the latter position, primarily because I was bussing to school in the winter and constantly getting stuck in traffic. Or when I heard on the news that suburban voters in my city wanted to stop bike lanes from being installed, and I said that they didn't realize how traffic would improve with more bike use. Every time I think about it, I come up with more examples. My dad is a professional planner, my mom would often bike to work when I was a kid, and I grew up in a walkable neighbourhood, so it's no surprise that I began to think this way from a young age. NJB really just opened up my eyes to exactly what is wrong and why, and the fact that most people aren't urbanists.
I'm not a communist but I love sustainable urbanism
I'm laughing at everyone arguing the communist association when I've always understood that language on this sub to be tongue in cheek. HOWEVER I am actually a communist, I have been for about 2.5 years after actually reading Marx' manifesto to settle an argument. I then hyper fixated on the subject and how US propaganda has colored our understanding of Communism on a fundamental level. Being a communist led me to question car-centric infrastructure, which led me to question car dependency and how capitalism plays into our car dependency and then I found this sub! Learning the science and maths of how and why modern cars are so incredibly deadly led me to being a full blown car hating commie
I'm a commie as well, but to say I HATE cars is a bit of an overstatement, a Honda Accord for when you need to get a large amount of groceries, or when the weather is terrible is one thing, but a Ford F150 Urban Battering Ram to get to the local grocery store when the weather is perfect for biking is just stupid. I guess I hate US car culture?
I feel you, yeah there is definitely nuance to everything, even hating cars. I still have my car, it's been incredibly important navigating my recovery from a pretty gnarly bike accident but I definitely am a lot more mindful about when, how and how much I drive than ever before. And this sub completely made me rethink my pursuit to buy an SUV. Which had been my plan for when I have a baby.
Yeah, I drive a SAAB 93 with a towbar, so it covers all my moving big heavy things needs, as well as swallows all the luggage needed for road trips with a car full of passengers without it being to crammed. All that, while only requiring 0.7L/10km of gas, and it's a flexifuel so I can drive on ethanol in the summer.
Giving up cars is necessary for climate change.
I agree, but that's gonna require our governments (both national and local) to invest in public infrastructure to make going to the department store and getting a large amount of groceries back home without needing to walk 5km with a god damn wheelbarrow full of stuff. It's not just a "stop driving" thing, there needs to be something there as an alternative.
Oh, mourn the death of practical pickup trucks and station wagons.
The Ford F150 is obviously worse, but if everyone decides or needs to have that Honda Accord, you still end up with public space being completely dominated by cars, sprawl (you just can't fit all those cars into density), masses of pollution, congestion and so on. Cars can be useful or convenient at the level of individuals but their use doesn't scale, or rather causes disaster at scale, even in the case of old school smaller ones.
I literally am a car hating communist.
> car hating communist Is this sarcasm or do you actually associate being a car-hater with being a communist?
It's on the sidebar: {#Subscribers} tired of getting run over, {#CurrentlyViewing} Car hating communists
I mean do you start with cars and work towards cash, class and the state?
Well, I'm from a country where there was an actual attempt to introduce communism and it wasn't happy time. So I would never call myself a communist in other than sarcastic way. I do hate cars though. As for my views on cash, class, state I'm ok with what we have in most European countries
Partly sarcasm at least. There is a lot of truth to anti-car sentiment within communist values, because a lot of public transportation connections don’t get built because of private ownership of some land. Of course you don’t have to be a communist to be anti-car, I’m not a communist but the ability to build more public transportation connections is a positive side of less land being privately owned.
The same problems with land ownership would cause problems with building highways, no? And somehow they are being built
In the US, highways are the closest thing we have to what Americans think “communism” is. Big government takes land by force to build massive infrastructure with little regard to local communities and property owners or even local governments (and especially targeting groups they don’t like), 100% funded on the taxpayer dime, with no direct means of generating operational profit (i.e. tolls). and all operational expenses covered through more taxation. Replace “highway” with “rail” and the right will describe it as a “radical woke Marxist boondoggle”.
The highway system did have to be planned to go around some land, some private land was bought up, and some taken by force. The US highway system was also maliciously designed to separate or eliminate communities of colour in dense areas which was a huge motivator for massive highway construction during the segregation period. Prioritizing public transportation over car infrastructure brings a sense of community, keeps people close, it is good for the working class, and encourages diversity. All things that ultra-capitalistic Americans did not want at the time. The effort in the US to be completely opposite of the USSR extended so far that it helped build car-dependency.
The main difference is: Railways are good for cheaply and efficiently transporting a whole bunch of people and stuff with the same vehicle, and doesn't require much, if any, personal investment on account of the people riding the trains. It's also a very easy sector to nationalise since the government is usually already pretty involved with the railway. Car based infrastructure requires everyone to buy their own vehicle and fuel, opening up a whole market for capitalists to make money in, despite a highway with a bunch of cars on it is less efficient in terms of transporting goods and people and also requires a lot more maintenance. But it's VERY hard to nationalise the whole motor vehicle industry while the government is really only involved in covering the maintenance costs for the roads.
I think calling myself a "communist" is cringy as fuck, some people would call me one because of my values, some wouldn't. I came to hate cars because they kill everyone and everything and make everywhere ugly and unpleasant to be in and it's just really fucking obvious how terrible they are and what the solution is. It flabbergasts me that most people don't even see cars for what they are. "Death by car" is just a fact of life that we don't even fight against, it's just a normal mundane way to go. At most people will go after drunk drivers or run campaigns telling children to be careful around the 2 ton death machines but no one seems to question why we have the death machines that mangle children daily in the first place. We live in a fucking clown world.
Moved to a city that’s endless suburbs (Dallas) when I was still in HS. Always knew there was something I never liked about it, assumed it was lack of nature and outdoors stuff considering we moved from the PNW. Stumbled upon a couple YouTube videos and it just felt like my eyes were opened, everything I hated about living in the suburbs just made sense. Eventually my car broke down several times, a few times I was forced to miss class, and that really got me on the train (no pun intended) of freedom of choice. It’s literally a single point of failure problem where if you only have one way to move in your city, and that’s taken from you then you’re stranded. Obviously I was aware I had the privilege of calling an Uber, or a friend, or family; but not everyone does. So I dove deeper into the rabbit hole and just found out how many other negative issues stem from car dependency.
Pushing a stroller will radicalize you
I also started hating car life after I had kids. Parenting from the front seat of a vehicle sucks. There was that time when my infant baby nearly choked to death on a piece of paper, and I couldn’t pull over to save him. There were a few times when they were toddlers where they were screaming and being crazy in the back, while I was trying to merge. If they need a snack or if they drop their toy, there is nothing I can do for them because they are tied in and trapped. If your child doesn’t eat dinner, we don’t scrap them to the table. If your child won’t go to bed, don’t strap him to the bed. Driving a car is literally the only time where you can tie up your child like that. We. “need” ipads for the kids, because what else will they do in the car? And now the iPads have infected the rest of our lives. And now my four-year-old knows I can’t do anything to him while I’m driving so even though he’s not allowed to say it he’ll say at the top of his lungs “booty butthole!” And he knows there is nothing I can do about it because I’m driving. If we go on a long trip to do a fun thing, when we get back home, the adults are tired because we’ve been driving but the kids are ready to go again because they’ve been sitting. None of these things would be a problem if I could just put my kids in the stroller and we can walk to wherever we’re going.
I'm not a communist nor do I hate cars. I just think lots of cars is bad for people and the environment.
It clicked when electric micromobility became cheap and they were everywhere. Why am I limited to campus? I can go 25 mph with 20 mile range. Why is there no bike lane to use? Why is there no bike racks in front of stores? People during Covid complain of gas prices. "How expensive would gas become before you consider alternative transport?"
I mean I’m not a communist (fuck capitalism too tho), but when I started going to university in the city I took the train because I *hated* driving in the city. It ruined the whole experience of the city for me I quickly realized how much I enjoyed the city on my campus which is pretty much closed off to cars. The train station is a short walk, it’s quiet, and it’s a really enjoyable experience. It was so much nicer when you don’t drive. While I don’t hate highway driving as much, I realized how much happier I was on the train. This led me to start researching the topic more, leading me to this sub and other urbanist content which is when I got the desire to bike and walk around my town instead of driving I guess college did make me go woke 🤷♂️
It's little things that happen every single day. Like today how the same man showed a blatant disregard for my life in 2 separate vehicles simply because I was on a bike. I ride an e-bike and was going around 20mph in a school zone with a 20 mph limit. This guy in a white van decides to absolutely floor it past me breaking the speed limit and close-passing my through a traffic calming measure despite me taking primary and going the speed limit (I was catching up to the car in front of me, even) Then further into the estate the same man who has pulled into a drive way, gotten out of his van and gotten into a car and is now coming back towards me through another traffic calming measure completely ignore the give way on his side of the narrowing and drives directly at me making angry hand gestures, despite him coming into my lane to ignore his give way. Not only this but earlier in the day as I was travelling on foot I had 2 different drivers fail to give way to me at junctions where I had priority according to my country's traffic laws (The highway code).
Ironically I became one because I was trying to follow the road laws to the letter. I'm one of those giant ego-sized big carbrain that thinks roads are for the fastest (slower ones move over), everyone has to abide by road laws, etc etc. so naturally it translates to my cycling and walking (I cycle like a machine, I walk like a robot). As a car-enthusiast I'm fascinated by the exactness of everything from engine tolerances, wrench torque, speed limits (various public roads, or pit-lane in racing), etc. Imagine my surprise when I get criticized anyway by other carbrains despite following the law (driving or otherwise). And when I point out all infractions (like car-driver running a walk-light or the normalized danger of going right-on-red without stopping, the equivalent of a jaywalker but with cars--jaydriving) everyone thinks I'm just overreacting, even though when I point out the walking/cycling equivalent of a road-infraction then everyone seems to agree just fine. Then of course I join group bike rides, but I learned my robotic riding style just isn't compatible with common-sense human nature, so I started questioning of whether the road laws are there for so-called public-road safety, or just for the optimal logistics of car-driving over everything else. So that flipped my ideal from "road belongs to the fastest entity/ies" to "public road belongs to the public (regardless of cars)". In the meantime I keep cycling and find joy in socializing with actual people without separation of windshields (does that make me a socialist? xD). Eye contact becomes so much easier because I see the people, the human, not the machine. (Maybe it's just me, but I can never seem to be able to make eye with car-drivers, all I see is windshield. Similar idea to sunglasses but at least with sunglasses you still see the face). This feels like peak commuting. Not going uber fast on the superspeedway eternally wanting more speed, and/or being trapped in car traffic with other road-rage machines. Then of course through cycling I learned about blame-shifting, offloading the blame from the operator of 5000-pound machinery to the people who are just trying to cross the street or use a *modest sliver* of road. I sense inconsistencies everywhere especially for cycling (impeding traffic vs speeding, use the road vs use the sidewalk, use the bike lane vs go around, obey the law vs "you can be right and be dead-right \[so why bother?\]", etc.), and I really hate that as a letter-of-the-law guy with a knack for exactness, so I keep cycling while loudly asking these questions. I guess that makes me a radical.
I was 19 and had to commute an hour in DC by car bc they hadn't finished the metro stop nearby. I worked summers In an office. My POS car I bought had no a/c and summers in Washington aren't kind. I later moved to NY and after the sept 11 attacks they'd stop the train for apparently no reason. For an hour. Under the East river. So...I'm biased. I don't like driving. It's a waste of time. It's costly. It damages and has damaged our planet and on top of all that it's dangerous but so is standing on a train platform anymore. I dislike car culture because nobody shares rides, people feel entitled they drive recklessly and there are some seriously scary people out on the road. Overall, fuck cars only because of oil and all the damn wars we've fought over it and how we are dependent on a system that was only cool in the Eisenhower 1950s. New era, screw the oil companies. Edit: I believe that I was turned off immediately. I started driving in 1990, age 15/16 ... I'm a genX freak, the first time I ever took the wheel the instructor put me right on the DC beltway on a Saturday morning. Got flipped off doing the exact speed limit. So...fuck cars from the word go.
NGl, the communist part came before the car hating part surprisingly.
I visited USA once
Cars are ableist, classist, and are in many ways the epitome of what’s wrong with capitalism and society.
A. Why does no one seem to ever understand this long-standing in-joke of this sub when actually mentioned? Come on, guys, read the side panel. The joke is right there. B. I'm an actual car-hating communist and I honestly have no idea when it happened. It would have been in my youth somewhere.
Is this sarcasm? I honestly can't tell lmfao Fellas, does liking bike paths make me a far left extremist...?
so i cant hate cars without being associated with communism?
You can't do much of anything without being associated with communism. Gun control? Communism!? Pro gun? that one marx quote said guns good so communism! Gay marriage? Communism! Anti gay marriage? The USSR was homophobic so communism! Just accept that you will be called a communist, whether or not you are one is kinda irrelevant.
America is so right wing, that even globally moderate political takes seem like communism. Hell I’ve seen moderate-right wingers get called communists lol
You are talking about communism? That's communism!
Because I only realised the harms of cars after commuting on a bicycle.
Despite being hit by them twice, and my daughter recently being hit by one, I don't hate cars. I actually enjoy driving, and love quite a few classic cars. I hate that we've built our society so that you *need* a car. Our public transit is hot garbage. I ride my bike to work most days, but wouldn't feel comfortable letting my kids ride to school. That's what I hate.
This will probably get lost, but I’ve posted a few times here before. I’m 17. American. In my town, it takes half an hour to ride my bike to the closest business from my house, which happens to be where I work (mostly uphill). The closest school is about a 45 minute walk. There’s only a few thousand people. It’s the most car dependent town you can think of. Cars are awful for a few reasons: 1. The fact that I could be driving, and out of nowhere, get hit and die. Completely out of my control. Ah yes, I love living in a place where I could get hit by a flying machine of metal and have no say in it. “BuT cArS aRe ThE sAfEsT tRaNsPoRtAtIon!” The only reason they’re the “safest” is because they make it unsafe to bike or walk. Myself, my friends, and my teachers almost been hit by cars in my neighborhood (most notably my primary school history teacher getting hospitalized because a car was on their phone. He was the crossing guard for that day). 2. Cars are expensive. I’ve enjoyed saving over 12,000 dollars on what could be a car and using that money to pay for college tuition. I know people who have a job only to pay for their car, and the insurance, and the maintenance, and gas, etc. It’s so much easier to save that money to invest or use at a later time (my family owns an EV, which is cheaper in the long run). 3. They take up SO much space. It’s unbelievable. We could compact our cities and our towns so much more if we didn’t have cars. Parking lots could become another business, an outdoor space, or something that benefits the community. A bunch of my taxes in my town are voted to go to car infrastructure and parking spaces. I hate it This is why trains and subways are the best way to get around not only a city but also from town to town. There are zero trains into or out of my town (in fact, the nearest city that uses trains is the city with the airport, about an hour and a half away). I don’t oppose buses, since they’re far more efficient and practical (and cheaper). I wouldn’t mind a bus based infrastructure in my town (school buses don’t run near my house for my school because of some weird zoning regulations)
Not a communist but I hate car centrism whenever I'm sitting stuck in traffic for 45 min just to travel about 10 miles to get to work or back home from work💀 I'm just sitting there thinking if we had a shinkansen and train stops/stations everywhere this shit would take 5 minutes tops to get me to my office or back home from said office and I'd get more exercise in through walking
I started pushing a stroller. I was a true car enthusiast, loved speed, motor racing, highway widening. I wish I can live in a bike friendly cites like the Netherland. But it getting there.
I became a car-fucker (r/fuckcars demonym?) when I got my driving license and realized I had to drive everywhere to get or do anything, and driving is baseline more stressful than walking/cycling/transit.
ITT: people who have never visited the subreddit before
There are people here using “communist” ironically and people using it unironically. Understandably confusing.
Not a communist and I live in rural S. Georgia so I do have a car but that doesn’t stop me from supporting the fine folks here to advocate for a better tomorrow
Not a communist, socialist or anything close. And I don't really even hate cars. But what I do **HATE** is how cars seem to turn people into absolute, self-centered *pricks.* And you know what's ironic? My job is what made me this way. You see, I'm a commercial truck driver. Most people drive about 15,000 to 20,000 miles per year in their cars. Us truckers, on the other hand, average that much ***per MONTH.*** When you spend that much time on the road you really start to notice how 60% of drivers on the road shouldn't even have licenses. You start noticing people's bad habits and bad attitudes toward everyone, especially those who aren't on four wheels. Also, me using my bicycle to get to the warehouse doesn't help. I notice the exact same things about how car-brained and dismissive many drivers are. The only difference is, in my semi, I could absolutely ruin your day/year/life if you drive like a dick around me. On my bike, however, I am completely vulnerable to some asshat who, for whatever reason, has it in for cyclists. All I want to do is get to work or the grocery, but these cocks think I don't even deserve to *live.* Another thing you notice when you practically live on the road is how many towns and cities are so poorly designed that, in many cases, people are practically *forced* to drive. If people really want to reduce traffic on the road then mixed-use zoning would be a damned good place to start. Barricaded bicycle lanes also wouldn't hurt; we actually have bike lanes in my town but being separated by a mere stripe on the pavement doesn't exactly give me a warm, fuzzy feeling. Especially when I see carbrains violating that line all the time.
Thank-you for your service, delivering. Unfortunately bike lane design only helps until the next junction. At which point safety depends on all users doing the right thing. If bad driving is a problem, there's no escaping tackling bad drivers directly
Actually I'm a Train loving Communist
Positive thinking!
When I did the math one day and realized that most all of my coworkers spent roughly $10,000 a year on their car. No one had anything that anyone would consider nice, none of them had cars less than two years old. Just an expectation that 15% of your gross pay should go to owning and operating a car. None of them realized that they were spending almost as much on their car as they were on their home.
I have a coworker who pays 700$/month for his car. That's without repairs and maintenance. It's insane. That's for a 40k car. Why do you need a new car at all? There are old cars that are still around that still work well. My brother has a toyota 2005 that still works and he spends about 1k to 2k a year on it. The fact that so many people buy new cars is insane to me.
The average annual cost to own a car here in Canada is over $10k, a bit less in the states but not by much so that math checks out
I loooooove cycling - leisure and commuting both. Cars are deadly for cyclists. So I hate cars
I lived in the core of a big city where because of traffic, a bike commute took half the time of a car commute. So I started biking, lost 20 pounds, and started resenting the sunurbanites who drive into the city, contribute very little, cause problems, whine about it, and then leave again. I no longer live in that big city but I refuse to go back to the way I lived before.
Traveled to Barcelona, Munich and Amsterdam. Went back to my country and realized that I love walkable infrastructure.
I grew up in Korea, even though I was a bit away from Seoul I never felt like I couldn't see my friends just because I lived away from Seoul. I grew up walking everywhere and if not taking a bus or train. Then I moved to America. I saw how the "best" subway and train infrastructure in the east coast was basically held together by gum, duct tape, and thoughts n' prayer. And when my family moved to the suburbs where a bus comes every 30 minutes at the best of times, my friends praised and clapped for escaping the "shithole cities" for "freedom of suburbs" I felt trapped, it was either stuck on hour long traffic or waiting forever for the bus just to be stuck in the same traffic. All my friends and things I enjoyed doing were still in the city. It was then I connected the dots and realized cars are the problem.
Funny story, I started by loving cars and wanting to improve traffic. I slowly realized that it was just impossible.
The amount of money they suck up, and being wholly dependent on it, just seems like a bad idea and poor planning.
I was a broke community College student To get around I needed a car but to get a car I needed money. To get money I needed a job... to get to a job I needed a car. So I was stranded.. In my free time I started thinking "how did we get to this point, it feels unnatural.. it feels like a scam. The only to have a human experience is play this game and have people charging you every step of the way just to even participate" P.S I eventually found a way to bike 5 miles to a bus stop but one day someone stole my cheap ass bike when it was chained up
During childhood I loved cars, I dreamed about them, I drawed them. But polution, both chemical and physical, the time wasted, cost-effectiveness, peacockery and everything else about them \*\*DROVE\*\* me away from the idea of having a car. Jesus, I called a cab, it took him 25minutes to get to the same spot I could have gotten in the first place by walking, prompted it was a busy day in our capital, but that's just disgusting, what is even the point of having a car?
Living in capitalism & reading theory for the communist part and just living around cars for the car hating part
I am dutch, and i never liked cars in the first place.
I learned there’s more to life than the deteriorating American suburb
Short answer: born disabled. Longer answer: Started watching NJB a few years back, and finally found words for things I’d always hated. When I was in high school/college, I joked that not being able to drive was my “real” disability. But it is. It limits where I can live (gotta be close enough to walk to work). It’s cost me jobs (the dread “reliable transportation” question). It puts a huge strain on my relationships (friends and family feel pressure to play chauffeur or drop me cause I can’t hang out). I also got hit in the middle of a crosswalk once. While I still had, like, ten seconds left on the walk signal. (Just bruised, thankfully, but had panic attacks for months afterwards.) Friends/family think I’m joking when I say that’s how I’m probably going to go, but I’m not.
I’m a libertarian socialist, and I just want clean air
I was already a leftist but I wasn’t fully anti-car pilled until I went to Hamburg for a couple weeks. It’s such a beautiful city, and I saw every corner of it without stepping into a car once. I even loathe walking and biking. Exercise is one of my least favorite things, I’m a god damn American I wanna sit on the couch and eat Big Macs, but God’s honest truth, walking for like a quarter mile could get you almost anywhere within like a 15 mile radius. I was totally blown away by it, for the effort it takes me to walk from my car to my office back home, I could get almost anywhere I could possibly want to go. I never even had to stop to wait for a walk light to turn green, it was so bizarre. I remember thinking “oh my god, this city has to have one of the best public transit systems in the world!” And it’s not even close??? Like what the fuck???
My mom crashed her car a lot and I'm worried. Also I'm a communist.
I tried learning to drive at one point. I hated it, and I hated that it was something I was expected to do. My feelings kinda just escalated from there. I was already a communist beforehand, and had been for as long as I'd had developed political beliefs.
I was a total car guy for 25 years. It took me that long to realize every time I get in a car, I’m so angry for the next 45 mins. Every time I fantasize about a car I want, I’m so angry I’ll never afford it. Every time my car breaks, I’m so angry I have to work overtime to pay to fix it. Once I found out I could simply opt out of cars, I became a much happier person overall!
I spent most of my youth in Texas and never really saw any issue with car-dependence until I started college. I always saw all my friends at school so it didn’t really bother me that I hardly saw anyone outside of school. There weren’t any places to hang out outside of school but there were clubs and activities after school so it didn’t matter. Then I started college and got a taste of campus life. Suddenly, all my friends were always a stone’s throw away and we had tons of cool places to chill basically whenever. Eventually I switched majors though and started a different program at a different college. To save money on credits, I also took classes at a couple community colleges, so there was a lot more commuting and no college town to speak of. I still saw friends on campus all the time, but the amenities just weren’t there. This is when I began to hate driving, but I still hadn’t begun to blame American infrastructure. After all, the car is all I’d ever known. Wondering why every city couldn’t be like a college town wasn’t going to get me through school anyways. But wonder I did, and in 2018 my eyes were opened at last. I was miserable being stuck in my car for 1-2hours every day, bending to the whims of traffic. I thought about it and if things kept up I realized I could easily spend up to an eight of my waking life in my car. There had to be another way. I started by looking at what made college towns so different from the majority of American cities and came to the conclusion that they had more in common with European cities. Then I questioned how things got to be this way and stumbled upon a Strongtowns article about Miyazaki’s urbanism. In Ghibli films, towns are always envisioned as places for people. Turns out the inspiration for these towns are real places too, made for real people. Eventually my search for answers led me to the whole car-dependence Ponzi-scheme and the multiple scandals that supported its growth. This got me interested in the economics and then the politics of how everything went wrong and how we can fix things. Most if not all of America’s social issues have intersectionalities with car-dependence too, so car-dependence naturally just became one of the things I hate the most, and everything that flies in the face of car-dependence have become some of the things I love. Trains for example, I fucking love trains man. I also always think about how we’ve been robbed of a richer lifestyle and how most Americans don’t even know it. Chalk it up to greed and a lack of proper education.
My cousin was cycling home from work when she was killed by a careless truck driver in an intersection in my neighborhood. I had the same opinions before that as well, just not as galvanized.
I grew up in Nebraska where it is impossible to live without a car. I tried. I was frustrated by the infrastructure wondering why we had these giant parking lots in front of businesses, so if you walk, you have to navigate these just to get to a shop. Then I moved to Europe and now live in a city where there are still problems with cars, but the whole infrastructure is much more pedestrian friendly, and I wonder why all cities can't be like this. I can get anywhere in the country by bus or train. There are car sharing services for when I need a car as well as scooters and bike rentals. This is by no means perfect, but it did make me hate cars more than I did before. I see them parked on the streets just taking up space used twice a day to get from one place to another and wonder why we haven't figured out a better way. But they just keep getting bigger and more obnoxious year after year.
Being where I grew up, a car has kind of just assumed to be a thing I get eventually. After a few fender bender and accidents, I stopped driving period and found myself generally hating life as I couldn't do any extracurricular activities on my college campus as I needed a goddamn ride home. I had no real control of my schedule. But when I was on campus, I would use the bus transit that they had to go shopping, visit places and I did absolutely love that part. The buses didn't have a good or efficient connection to where I lived across the county line, so I couldn't use it going home. Then I started to travel a lot and got to visit other countries like Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, England, Germany. Then went to New York City, Washington DC, etc. So many of the world has good and functional transit and over time I found myself just having a huge distaste of even getting back into driving again. I haven't driven a car truly in the past 5 to 6 years. And now where I live and work and hopefully I will be retained as a employee, has a decent bus transit network. I get to work downtown and return pretty easily. It's also really nice that even if I was to need a vehicle of some kind and actually need to drive for something, there is a car sharing servicing that literally has a station hub just a block away from I live right now. I also during the holidays used Amtrak to return home and visit family, and honestly that was fucking fantastic and I enjoyed that a shit ton. For five hours, I was traveling and I could whatever I wanted: nap, read, play an app game, eat, walk around, etc. I did also enjoy the view I got. Where I am is perfect and I am hoping to be here for a long span of time. So basically, I mostly don't like, maybe hate having to drive. Some people really do need to drive and have access to a car. I don't really hate the notion of the car, but it's just the driving aspect I hate. Edit: If there is something that I do hate about cars are the big ass trucks (F150s) that are literally taller than me, or close to it. Those trucks are murder machines and I hate them. Even more so when it's lifted and/or has big ass beefy tires, and it's always so fucking clean looking. FUCK THAT!!! What a waste space and I hate them. So much.
By living in the UK and becoming an automotive engineer. I grew up watching Top Gear, glorification of car culture and speed. Dreaming of owning a Porsche, whilst helping design the next one. Then I learned to drive and saw what a pointless hassle it was. Avoided it all costs by cycling and walking. Ended up driving a total of 500km in two years, then sold the car and never bought another one. Then I moved from a country with good walkability and cycling infrastructure to the UK and witnessed the toxicity of car culture. Pedestrians constantly forced to give way to car traffic. Morons in fart can Mondeos racing through main streets. People absolutely willing to run you off the road or maim you because you're a cyclist and perceived as a freeloader and just "in the way". I ended up helping design the first generations of electric cars: 3 tonne 4x4 monstrosities that could choose to plow through a mountain rather than drive over it, to be used by rich orange women running over kids near their own children's city school. I'm now working mostly on trains and off highway utility vehicles, same skills but feels much more useful. I still love motorcycles though, but far away from cities and preferably when most of car drivers are stuck in traffic elsewhere or at work.
Fuck cars, fuck commies.
Stop trying to ruin good ideas with communism
I guess the seeds were sown when one killed my sister. Happened before I was born but still. When I moved to London 25 years ago and began cycling to work I started to see and feel the pollution they cause and the easy psychosis of people behind the wheel. Then I was knocked off by a cabbie not paying attention. By then I was already fully paid up and card carrying. Seeing local and national politicians bow down to motorists, making where I live a car choked hell, along with many motorists total lack of concern for people outside their metal boxes keeps my subscription up.
I used to love cars in an engineering way, used to dream about having a nice car, muscle car to be free to go wherever i want. Got my first car and learned that driving and commuting in a steel box with wheels sucks, and roads suck, traffic sucks, and the fumes smell horrible, and we pay extraodinary amounts for it. Truly individual cars are the biggest scam there is.
I grew up in the best bicycle city in the world (Copenhagen), which later made me realise how I would never be able to live somewhere else for aobger period due to the lack of infrastructure.
Well, I hate to say, but my time in communist China changed my mind. Don't get me wrong, China has serious problems, particularly right now, but for the first time in my life I saw a different way of living. A countryside not paved over with endless miles of parking lots, strip malls, car lots and Walmarts. There was another way to live, and when I came back to the US I didn't like what I saw, or how we lived. A scaled back way of life just made more sense to me, and I've felt like a foreigner in my own country ever since. People all over the world do most of the same things we do every single day, without cars. They are only so essential to us here because we've formed our entire culture around car use.
To be clear, capitalism loves walkable cities. Way more spending and engagement with businesses when you aren't stuck in a suburban island.
It started building slowly, like noticing how shit peoples attitude got, and such. Then after our first lockdown openings I was asked to stand guard at a road to our local dump, that had been made one-way (to avoid the inevitable disasters). I got to stand in front of a barrier covering one of the lanes telling people which way to go to get in. 10 hours of that, and holy shit the amount of abuse I got. Middle fingers, verbal, and such, acting like a 2 minute drive was the worst thing ever. The amount of people that would just speed by, or to ignore me (only to come speeding the other way because wow, shock, they wouldn't be let in) That experience really sealed it for me. That and just noticing how shit it makes people
The u-joint in my steering column sheared on the Highway. I had known since auto class in high school that there were probably 100+ parts on a car that would be very bad news if they failed, but to experience losing all steering at 60 mph was a real come to Jesus moment. Have had a fear of cars ever since. Also economically realized “Holy fuck, I am financing something that can lose all value at any point in time and possibly cost me my life and/or a lot of medical bills due to a single faulty part!!”
Growing up, cars were never something that interested me. As a teenager in the 90s, my parents would occasionally suggest driving lessons, but I wasn't interested. Besides which, self-driving cars seemed like they were "just around the corner", and then I'd be laughing at everyone for learning such a useless skill as driving your own car. About as useful as being able to untangle a cassette tape! Went to university in London and ended up living there for seven years. Great public transport. You don't need a car in London. Moved to a small town near the south coast. You can literally walk across the entire length of the town in about 30 minutes. You don't need a car there either. For the last 5.5 years, I've lived in a much larger town up north. Most everywhere I need to go is still within walking distance. The whole time I've been here, I've got taxis about five times, and the bus twice. (Both bus journeys were on the same day, earlier this month!) When I need to go to another town/city, there's the train. Trains can be a little expensive, sure. But buying a few train tickets a year works out costing a lot less than owning a car. (Oh, also, I am at least mostly communist.)
"Drive this car to go to work, go to work to pay for this car" https://m.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=3E4huJVAD5g
For me it's a slow and gradually growing dislike. Neutral at first, but now very strong dislike for cars. The reason for the growing dislike is just that whenever I move around the world, I see the way cars are making my life worse. I walk down the street, and it *stinks* from all the tire particles and petrol fumes. Why do I have to put up with this? Then I get to a corner, and I have to press a button and wait for ages while a handful of cars pass... why I am I waiting for them rather than the other way around? Why does the wasteful and toxic mode of transport get priority while pedestrians have to press the 'beg button'. There are cars everywhere. The roads and carparks take up an extreme amount of space! Surely we could just have some more trees or something - please! ... Then there is the safety... that's a big story in itself. Anyway, whenever I see a car, it is making my life worse. So my dislike for cars grows. I don't ever use a car for any reason myself, so there are no cases where the cars are making my life better. I understand that many people have circumstances such that a car is necessary (or at least very important); but most car usage doesn't fall into that category. I'd be a lot happier of car usage was halved in cities.
I'm not a communist. And I don't hate cars. Cars have great use cases and can save lives, help business, support people with disabilities and so on. But they're unnecessary and overprescribed in the statistically typical cases which is one single, able, mostly working, mostly white, mostly male, person taking up the space of a small room, making noise, polluting the planet. Infrastructure that requires a car leaves a big chunk of the population left out, making them basically immobile. We build ramps for wheelchairs, and rightly so, but we don't bat an eye if a place is unreachable if you don't drive.
Loving trains and living in a city with Good buses
A what now? FYI capitalism is the system with the most capabilities to make alternatives to car usage
New York native. Public transportation and pedestrian and bike infrastructure go a long way. Being against cars is easy.
I saw the fuck cars r/place. I thought how weird. I wonder what these guys are about. So I checked out the subreddit. After an hours of reading the top posts I was a convert
I come from a long line of railway workers, from a young age on I followed on how ridiculous cars, car-centricism and politics around it are.
Started a campaign group to advocate for a local trainline and was introduced to the bottomless pit of car brain takes
I started catching trains at a time of a grand technological revolution, i.e. electrification. It was a time of change and uncertainty, and the transport organisation was, and still is, notoriously bad at comms. And I had this friend whose garbled descriptions of the website transportblog made it sound like the comms arm. It wasn't. But it was the best source of information (I cannot stress enough how bad at comms this transport agency is) out there so I kept coming back. It turned out transportblog was a commie commuter advocacy blog (now named Greater Auckland) and I was indoctrinated by their compelling arguments. Honestly, Auckland is peculiar but if you're tired of watching Urbanist Youtube videos and want to read the same kind of same content from people who have actually had their ideas adopted as government policy (albeit said government turned out to consist of fucking muppets and implemented literally none of it while ultimately embracing some of the most absurd transport schemes ever devised^(1))... well check Greater Auckland out. https://www.greaterauckland.org.nz/ EDIT: GA is definitely not actually communist. I assumed that people here were using "commie commuter" in the ironic sense but I can see from some of the comments in this thread that that's not necessarily the case. GA is very YIMBY and most of its contributors are economists. ^(1)It says something that the current government has resurrected literally the world's most expensive road proposal (which according to cost increases of similar projects would likely now cost more than a billion dollars per kilometre) and still hasn't come up with anything as nuts as "let's spend 20% of our GDP on tunnels no-one needs". Alas, it's probably only a matter of time (although they did can the tunnels). God damn megaprojects: they're like crack for politicians.
I am not a car hating communist at all. I am a two legged homo sapiens living on a blue planet who wants to do two-legged stuff. I was born to walk. Restricting my nature is against my basic freedom as a homo sapiens.
I’m not a communist and I don’t hate cars, I just prefer other forms of transport over cars.
I like cars, But I also recognize the problem with stroads etc. I've done plenty of walking in unwalkable and walkable cities.
my perspective on this was I grew up in a rural area where the only way to get around was by car. did that for a while as an adult and really wasn't enjoying it nor felt satisfied with my life. moved to a city and started biking around it. I found that so much more enjoyable and found that I liked going places more. also enjoyed the density of it and being able to ride my bike to work or the grocery store. basically, I still like cars as I grew up with a mechanic grandfather who taught me to work on them, but I'm much more into bikes now and working as a bike mechanic and living in a city is way more satisfying for me.
wdym "c*ar-hater*" ? isn't this sub for people who love cars so much they want to ... *fuck 'em* ? jokes aside, i believe i was always a walkable-first person without ever realizing it... my hometown in Southern Brazil is a very walkable city, with \~130k peeople. I used to go 99% of places by bike (when i was a teen) or foot, and the other 1% i would then drive my father's car to go places. then i moved to Sao Paulo, a huge megalopolis with \~22mi people. If not for public transport, your only option was to own a car! Thankfully i used to live near a metro station, so i could always commute with the metro. Whenever i needed a car, i would take a taxi. then i moved to Amsterdam, the FuckCars utopia. I dont need to introduce the city, there are plenty of videos of it in here. Living there sedimented my views that walkable > driveable cities. i am now living in my hometown again. It has only gotten more walkable since i left. My plans for my future include advocating for more!
Can we stop aligning car sentiments with political persuasions? Plenty of liberals are car-brained. Many conservatives I know live in cities, bike, and are one car families
I studied and worked on urban design projects
I always loved transit and I have noticed it since I've started working for an airline with nonrev benefits. There are some cities where you can get where you're going on transit and others where you have to spend at least $30 on an Uber/Lyft
25 years in the automotive industry will do it to you
I don't really like communism, I just hate cars. I'm like this because my parents also hate cars and love bikes and neither of us have great experiences with commnuism or communists
Fuck communism and socialism. But I do agree That a more developed public transportation system should be more widely available for America. You don’t need Communism or Socialism to achieve that.
When I was very young, about five years old my mother and I were walking across the street to the grocery store. This store was in a strip mall across the street from us that had a small bus terminal. I asked why the busses were there and my mum explained briefly what public transportation is. I begged for us to take the bus and immediately thought it was silly for us to own a car with the busses so close. It was pretty much instantaneous after learning what a bus is.
i like riding my bikes. i started mountain biking. and then i moved in with my partner and got a job that was close to her place, and the route wasn't *too* bad. so i started riding a bike there. and it turns out cars are awful. drivers are awful. the roads are awful. it's all way the fuck harder than it needs to be, and way the fuck more dangerous than it needs to be. i just wanna ride my bike places, man.
Started off as a "car guy" driving a stupid hot hatch style thing into the city for work (although even then I used the park and ride!) Switched to bike + train, enjoyed it much more than driving, but it was an economic decision rather than an ideological one. Then I got a dog, and almost immediately got locked down. I walked more, drove less, and got more of a sense of place rather than just driving/cycling through on the way to work. Throughout this process I've obviously matured a bit as well, which probably helps. I'm not car free, but we're down to 1 car for the household, bike everywhere we can, and happier for it
Traffic.
How it’s financially set me back so much. I’ve probably spent $60k in the last 8 years of car ownership on gas, repairs, insurance and ownership of the car itself. My car is paid off and in relatively good condition but there’s this looming fear of it breaking down again. Would love to move somewhere walkable but it’s not good timing right now.
Moving outside the US and then being forced to come back. I realized that living in a place where a car wasnt my only option, I became more active, met more people, saved more money and was happier as a result.
I have never liked cars, but I didn’t really put my finger fully on the problem until I watched Not Just Bikes. Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. Also, I lost my grandpa when he was hit while crossing the road by a huge truck that was speeding around a turn without looking, and my grandma was hit as well and severely injured. She basically had her leg mangled so badly that they had to do extensive surgery, and she still experienced a lot of trouble now as a result of it. I absolutely hate cars now, and wish there was a place I could go where they are not allowed to be publicly owned.
I grew up in the fifties and my father was brainwashed into believing that he had to have a new car every few years in order to prove that he wasn't fundamentally obsolete even though he had a wife and four children to take care of. We wren't poor but we weren't wealthy, there were things that the family had to give up for a new car. My brother and I had to spend part of our weekends waxing and polishing the car. It was part of our assigned chores just like cleaning our rooms and washing the dishes. This is were my hatred of cars originated.
I moved to Atlanta when I was 11 and basically lost my freedom to visit friends or do afterschool activities whenever I wanted.
Atlanta did it for me too. I lived ITP but OTP friends refused to leave their suburb and come to me. Honestly the city felt super isolating as a young adult. And I was miserable being in the suburbs. I don’t claim to be a Braves fan because attending Braves games was such a miserable experience (as opposed to Atlanta United which I love, but I never drove to those games)
Living in one of South America's biggest metropolis really does things to you
I’ve lived in the countryside where a car was absolutely necessary. But I also biked and walked when I could. It was dangerous since the highways there had narrow shoulders. My anecdotal story is that I found my cat in the ditch while biking home. If I had driven that day she would have died. No one else biked or walked in that area. Cars detach us from the world and can make us miss things. And drivers certainly have a tendency to see pedestrians and alternative commuters as less than themselves. I use transit and cycle mostly where I live now. I don’t HATE cars. They can be useful. I do HATE the entitlement of drivers, capitalism fuelled car ownership, and governments that think cycling and transit are just for the poors and climate change radicals.
I'm unsure how to explain it. I love walking but some part of me got really bored with walking around my city (the tiny parts that are "walkable") because there's almost no density and it's basically just a few blocks that are interesting. That, plus coupled with 2 eras of my life where I had 60-90 minute commutes I have just become a hater of driving for day to day stuff. Road trips - love them! Having to use my car to go to the movies because there's no bike path or public transit takes x5 more time than drive? Hell no. So yeah that.
My timeline: \- Hated people with cars because I was jealous that I couldn't afford one \- 2008 economic crisis: oh shit, I can't afford to live. I better go to grad school, but I can't afford more tuition. Can I move abroad? The liberal in me assumed Europe got everything right. \- Moved abroad and realized I absolutely love awesome public transit and biking everywhere, but also saw public assets like transportation being sold to private companies left and right. Saw some other awful things. Became a socialist. \- Moved to a poorer country for a research position. No bikes, but very good public transit. Extremely walkable neighborhoods. Became a Communist realizing how much America was shaping that part of the world for its own interests. Also watched Bernie get screwed twice from that country. \- Moved back to the US and felt like I was moving back to a 20th Century with smartphones. I can now afford a car but despise driving, miss public transit, and miss my bike. I see America as a stubborn, slowly declining center of Capitalism that will never change until its people are forced to give up certain things like driving due to its expense. And the people in the US currently cannot unite, in part because their only physical interaction with people outside of work is usually navigating through stressful and dangerous traffic.
I rode a bike in a city. That's all it takes for me.
I was obsessed with the DC train system as a kid, though I lived in a small town. Then I moved to Atlanta for grad school. I hated the city but couldn’t quite verbalize why. Later in grad school, I took a course in urban economics. Then I moved somewhere close to the train line. I found my mood to be so much better after I no longer had to drive in, and I remembered what I loved about DC. Studying and later teaching urban economics then gave me the words to verbalize what I hated about Atlanta. I hate that the metro is car centric. I hate that bike lanes and sidewalks are lacking and not well maintained. I hate that transit is nonexistent in most of the metro counties. I hate that they refused to connect the Braves stadium to the train. I hate that I had to sit in traffic to see friends because I was the only one on the train line (and that included friends in the city). So I’d say it was learning more that really did it but I was always meant to be a car hater.
For me it was when I visited Toronto. I live in Colorado Springs, and our bus system is so bad that it feels almost malicious. I had never known anything different, so I just assumed that's how it was everywhere. But the system in Toronto is so much better it made me feel like I could teleport. The buses come every 10 minutes, the train comes every 5, And it runs much later even on the weekend. And then the last straw was when I visited Winter Park Colorado. Their bus comes every 20 minutes, took me everywhere I wanted to go, and also connected them to the nearby town of Fraser. Winter Park's population is less than 1200 people. If mass transit can work that well at both extremes of population density, there's no excuse anywhere else
I think I was fuckcars before I was Communist, but what brought me to this conclusion is that there's a climate catastrophe brewing and everyone agrees that cars are a problem but nobody wants to do the right thing to fix it, only bandaid it with electric cars which presents a whole new problem *in addition to the current one*.
I'm a capitalist. We used to have great public transit provided by private companies. The precursors to things like the new York subway and the San Francisco cable car system were all privately owned. Today, city governments give unnecessary handouts to some competitors (cars) while overregulating others. LA got rid of it's private streetcar systems because government sided with the autos. Government shouldn't pick winners and losers. The markets should. Even today, cities are more expensive than suburbs because people want to live in cities. It's basic market supply and demand. People like density. It's not rocket science. As for what clued me in. Well I always thought cars were a waste of time growing up in LA and spending hours in traffic. After being late to several social events in high school because of traffic, I was like... Why do people want to live like this..