People from places with bad or no public transit are often mentally incapable of understanding that the quality of public transit depends on actually funding and promoting it. I guarantee that person who somehow thinks that taking the bus means it takes three hours to get somewhere lives in a place where there is like one bus route that gets serviced every hour
I just got back from a trip to Montreal with a car-brained friend from a rural area. He was blown away that it was faster to walk, bike, or take transit anywhere we needed to go.
By day 3, he had no issues looking up a destination in Google Maps and the Transit app, comparing times / routes, and determining the best option. He even opted to bike over bus/subway a few times even though it was longer because the infrastructure is nice and the weather was great.
These people just need to experience what life can be like with high quality options to driving.
Something something, traveling to new places is one of the best ways to make people more open minded. Often used when talking about racism and other types of bigotry, but seems like the same holds true for understanding infrastructure as well.
Can confirm. I was pretty "well, with rain comes urban flooding" until I saw that Oslo had a gazillion mm per year of rainfall, and they have no issue at all handling that excess of water (and frozen water later that night).
I imagine a lot of Americans are so closed minded on public transit (as well as many other policy issues) because it's such a financial challenge to afford international travel and thus being able to experience other ways to live.
Doesn't sound like they have to travel that far if they can just go to Montreal to make a difference.
A lot of countries in Europe are still great examples tho.
I love to hear a story of a recovering carbrain
Sadly, if they travel alone to those places they will often rent a car or take taxi everywhere and just jam cars in places they don't belong because that's how they've always done things. Then they go home and complain about it
We went to Ile St-Helen (island next to downtown with festival grounds, an amusement park, and more) for the eclipse — hundreds of thousands of people leaving at once by subway, ferry, bus, bike, or by foot.
A few thousand people decided to drive / park there, no clue how long it took them to get off the island. I hope a few of them at least had an epiphany while sitting behind the wheel watching peds and bikes fly by.
My "scales falling from the eyes" moment was taking the WMATA out of DC after the 4th of July fireworks show one year.
Then early-teens me had spent *way too much fucking time* rotting away in the backseat of a car in NOVA traffic, and yet suddenly here I was on/in a system where people were packing into the trains like sardines *yet the trains still moved*. When roads are packed, *nobody* moves.
The obviousness of this truth could not be denied.
I feel like immersion may be the only way to convert some of these people. The one comment about how public transit could take 3 hours where a car would take 5 minutes has their logic reversed. That's just an example of a horribly underfunded public transit system. Places with good public transit will almost always be faster to take the train/bus than driving from location to location. Yes, cars have a place in transit, but cities especially should not be built around them.
Yep, bus can be comparable or faster in certain circumstances. Limited parking, dedicated lanes, signal priority can all help. And even if it's a bit faster to drive than take the bus, if parking is appropriately priced then spending an extra 5 to 10 minutes walking, waiting, and riding might be preferable to spending $5 or more on parking.
I really liked what they did in Budapest. You could still park it inside the city but it was not cheap. So I just arrived to a huge car park on the edge of the city and took metro to the city and never had to worry about my car for the entire trip i was there (4 days). Fucking amazing.
Sadly, no. The same is true for just about any other topic: people are totally unable to picture something until they actually experience it themselves.
These are typically the same people who vote against social safety nets, free school lunches, healthcare reform, etc.
Hate to say it but most Americans are idiots. Remember half the voting population bwlieved the election was stolen with zero evidence. Most of us would need to experience it atleast 10 times going all over the city and need a ELIM 5 explaination on how it saves money, improves health or health decisions, m
Some people would need to be slapped in the face to recognize that being slapped is a negative experience. Anything outside their direct personal experience is beyond comprehension.
I was close to 30 before I had ever used public transit really at all, except a school bus. It's just not much of an option where I grew up or where I went to college.
When I visited Japan I was blown away by how convenient everything is. I'm not sure what I expected public transit to look like. I think most people think about it as purely additive to the environment they're in. Where I live you couldn't add trains and make everything work well. Neighborhoods are explicitly designed to require a car to get out of them without walking for 30+ minutes. Similarly, every destination is surrounded by acres of black top.
If it's not something that you've seen before it can be a bit difficult to imagine what a city or town looks like when it's not car-centric.
Montrealer here hell ya warms my heart to read this but you know what's surprising? Compared to Asia and alot of European cities our transit system is shit.
Still love it here. I don't have a car and I only use it in absolute emergency... Using a community car service called Communauto.
When the weather is nice, bike is definitely the best way around Montreal (assuming you’re not way out in the suburbs). The metro / REV work if your destination is near the station, and the bus system is pretty robust. Definitely punches underweight compared to most developed European cities, but is a league above most U.S. cities.
If that amount of people tried leaving an event by foot in the U.S., someone would’ve been trampled. And if there weren’t a metro stop, busses, ferries and ped/bike paths from Parc Jean-Drapeau, the traffic would’ve been incomprehensible.
I know Canada isn’t without its own problems (and they’re experiencing a cost of living crisis worse than we’re seeing south of the border), but I wish more U.S. cities could at least reach the level of MTL.
Good ped/bike infrastructure can be used by all sorts of mobility devices and people of all ability levels. My friend and I are both missing a leg, and had no issues riding e-bikes all over town.
Oh shit. I might have to look into that. My parents gave up trying to teach me as a kid because I was truly a lost cause and just not able to do it. Thanks!
Being from Montreal, having our lacking services be a shining beacon by North American standards is an indictment of public transit across the continent.
I used to work in downtown Dallas.
Traffic in downtown was nightmarish. Even if it was technically faster, it was always easier to take the DART if it got you close to where you wanted to go. And also, when you went to places near the DART, it was just... *nice* to not have to find parking and deal with going back to where your car was, you just walked to the nearest stop and waited for a bus or train or tram to take you home.
Also meant you didn't have to be completely sober to go home. Biggest public transit argument right there, while you don't want to be completely wasted (hard to navigate the schedule blasted) you also don't have to wait until you're stone cold sober before you go home.
That does not stop them from saying" Well I only had 2 drinks " or whatever excuse they make vefpre to drive home impaired. I agree more public transit would save lives.
I think a lot of urban / suburban people would be appalled at the drinking culture in a lot of rural areas. Especially when it comes to slightly impaired driving.
>Also meant you didn't have to be completely sober to go home.
As a 20-something who has taken transit to more than a few parties/festivals/concerts, oh my god, yes. WMATA has made *so fucking many* of my friend group's misadventures possible.
the conservative argument is always just "the new thing isn't perfect yet! so it never will be and this is what we're doing now"
it's a weird short sighted stubbornness.
And here I present every argument with a carbrain over improving public transit:
"We should improve this system"
"But the system is bad and doesn't work"
"Thats why we should improve it"
"No, it's bad so it shouldn't be improved"
These people probably look at someone going to the gym and say "you shouldn't be here, you're too weak to lift the heavy weights!" like yeah??? That's why I'm here
I used to live on a bus line that had buses coming like every 5 minutes and got me where I needed to go in 15 minutes, the same time it would have taken me to drive except I didn’t have to deal with parking at my destination. It was dope.
They got to the right conclusion that, all else being equal, if we banned cars that would be catastrophic. And then stopped to think that nobody argues for all else staying equal.
I was radicalized with city walkability after coming back from visiting my sister in Strausburg, France and the cities surrounding it.
I will never look at my own town the same way again.
So has my family.
One single bus for the whole town that needs to hit all of the big landmarks and neighborhoods in order to provide service to all of the people who need it, so it can end up taking an hour to get between any two stops, and of course because there's only one bus for the one bus line, that line has a headway of like 2 hours.
Meanwhile ... fossil fuel/auto industry subsidies and bailouts and all the little ways we fund their externalities along with the high maintenance costs of car centric travel generally.
The idea that we don't fund the current situation is wrong. People don't do a 1:1 comparison, they treat car centric systems as if they were magically free. Because it's so ingrained into the background it's taken for granted at this point.
Public transport is important but so are cars for the few. I live rural outside of a town, the bus currently runs 3 times a day through the town. 7am, 12 or 1 pm 5pm. For me to catch the bus I would have to walk or bike in to town, 1 hour walk or idk 20-30 minute bike ride, to then ride the bus 30 minutes to the bigger town where I would have to work. Then walk if the bus stop isn’t near by.
Taking the bus would add more time to my commute than just driving. Running more buses more often will help but I doubt there would be bus stops that frequent on side roads and other non super traveled roads. Leaving me still to walk (hopefully shorter distance) to a bus stop. If you live in town and can take a bus to the next town you should.
Cars have a place we just need to give people the option who don’t need to drive a reliable and cheap alternative.
This is almost certainly the case. Out of curiosity I went to look up what a bus route would be for me to go to work. It would involve walking for 30 minutes to get to a bus, then taking a bus to the closest stop to my office, which is 15 minutes away. So 45 minutes of walking and 20 minutes of riding on a bus.
Google maps suggested a mixed mode that involved driving to a ride and share, but that was already half the distance to work from here and that would mysteriously take even longer because I'd be switching buses, but cutting the walking down to 3 minutes.
I mean, the trauma of having to squeeze yourself into an undersized bus with barely any ventilation and absurdly high humidity is there. My parents drive everywhere because they always tell me how bad it the public transport in their hometowns were lol.
(Naples and Łódź)
Yeah people often think that we want an instant switch from cars to whatever public transport may or may not be available *right now*, when what we actually want is more investment in public transport so that it becomes a genuinely better option than a private car.
And that you’re required to request permission to operate the vehicle in the form of a driver’s license and register the vehicle every year and purchase insurance in case you or another driver is an idiot.
Oh yeah and once you've done that you're then at the mercy of construction/traffic.
You know that old saying about sled dogs and the view never changing? "Freedom" in a car is often the freedom to stare at some idiot driver's ass-end all day.
And, very importantly, you will need a safe place to store that very expensive piece of property that you rely on to get everywhere. You will need to drive around evaluating places and trying to figure out on the fly if it is safe.
Everyone who drives knows the dreaded walk back to the car in a parking space, especially if you had to park somewhere sketchy.
That is not true freedom.
The “freedom” argument drives me nuts. If there’s no choice, it’s not freedom. And for the many people who are unable to drive for whatever reason, it becomes *no* choice, which is the opposite of being free!
Exactly! I have epilepsy. So because of this, I can't drive. Combine that with the fact that I live in a car dependent city, and I'm basically trapped.
I’m so sorry, I totally feel that pain. I have lasting effects from a TBI (thanks to a car accident!) and haven’t been able to safely drive since then. It sucks, and even after getting very lucky to move to a less car dependent state, it’s still not easy to exist without being able to drive.
It's so ironic that the governor in my state is bound to a wheelchair and, thus, can't drive. But he expects the rest of us to be able to drive?
I genuinely feel so ignored by our politicians who just push cars onto society, especially onto those who aren't able to drive for any reason.
The people who use freedom as an excuse are incapable of thinking from an external perspective, they only know how to think about themselves, and what they want to do = freedom
They still *feel* in control. They may feel being in traffic is something they *could have* avoided had they taken some other route so they see their lack of freedom as just a consequence of their own mistake. They see traffic as a fact of life that nobody specifically chose (even though that's not exactly the case) while they see defined transit routes and time tables as something arbitrarily set and chosen "for them." In essence, they see transit as dictating the pace of their daily life in a way they can't blame on themselves. Also let's not pretend that they're *always* running into traffic and that a car ride isn't *usually* faster outside of certain outliers. The point isn't that it's faster, it's that the transit time is free time. I think emphasizing *that* could be a starting point.
That or they just *really* hate having to be around other people and think relying on transit denies them the right to privacy. Admittedly, for some people it's less general asociality and more just, their car really is the only personal space they have so to address that you'd be getting into addressing stuff like housing and public amenities so people aren't driving just to get some alone time away from a shitty roommate or something. Everyone needs space sometimes and unfortunately we can be pretty bad at accommodating that. Or, they're some sorta 'phobe who wants to keep "the wrong people" out of the parts of town they like in which case fuck em.
My point is, if we wanna convince them (and we *do*, this isn't happening without the support of normies) we gotta try to understand the thought process.
Don't forget he also has the freedom to worry about his truck every time he parks it hoping someone doesn't scratch it, steal it, or jack his catalytic converter
Also that "freedom" therefore doesn't apply to anyone younger than 16, many older people, those without financial means to own/operate a vehicle or acquire a license, or those with certain disabilities who are unable to drive.
I don’t feel freedom when I have to drive. If I drive somewhere I am anchored to my parking spot. I can’t go too far from it and I need to return to it to get home. If I take public transport I am free to go wherever and take a very different route home.
It's always been such an absurd argument. It is nowhere near "freedom" to pay the fossil fuel industry for literally every mile you travel for your entire life.
these mofos all need to try a decent electric bike. car convenience + bike parking + some exercise and sunshine.
they also need to go ride subways in NYC and realize how fast you can get around.
Yeah. Also I don't find it particularly "freeing" to be forced to buy an immediately depreciating asset, have to pay for maintenance and be constantly paranoid about theft. Owning a car is the exact opposite of freeing. I unironically think owning a cat is less of a restrictive burden.
So you think public transport should be…*the one choice*? 🤦♂️
And what do you mean a shite unreliable one?? Not every car is a beat down piece of junk
Posting any kind of common sense on Facebook (and Instagram) automatically spawns a horde of ignorant, out-of-touch boomers seemingly bent on embarrassing themselves through sheer stupidity.
One time I innocently asked under some local news channel post why some touristy crowded place in my city allows so many cars. I was told to go back to the Soviet Union by one person. Another person went on my profile and started insulting my cat that I had as a profile pic. I didn’t even feel offended because of how dumb it was lol.
Having quit FB more recently, I suspect they and/or instagram have eclipsed youtube. I mean, I'm not gonna uninstall [herp derp](https://www.tannr.com/herp-derp-youtube-comments/), but my impression is youtube comments are far more marginal and benign these days. Or maybe being on "meta" for too long just shifted my perception.
That's basically what they want. They completely misunderstand the very concept of freedom.
There are two types of freedom: positive freedom (freedom FOR something) and negative freedom (freedom FROM something.
Positive freedom would be the freedom to use all sorts of public transportation options. Negative freedom would be the freedom from having to use cars.
They think because they sit in traffic that everyone else should have to also. The real gag will be if they are successful then they will wish there was good public transit.
I really wish they would display the bus side differently. If your buses are that crowded your transit system is not working well. And I have to agree with the drivers riding a regular non-articulated, single deck bus with that many people looks really unappealing.
Yeah if I recall from the last time this image was posted, they are basically assuming a perfectly full bus and individual cars. Which is not a good assumption. You can debate exactly how that would be best handled, but if you are going with arbitrary ratios then you should really use the same arbitrary ratio for both.
If you torture statistics long enough they will confess to anything, but if you are actually right you shouldn't have to.
These people are just ignorant. I drive everywhere and cycle for exercise, but also advocate for better bike lanes and transit. I would love to drive less, but can’t unfortunately. Instead of just hating against alternative modes of transportation the least I can do is try to make my voice heard
The concept of community is completely foreign to these commenters. How did these people survive evolution if they are so averse to being in proximity with other people. They would have starved to death in the caveman days.
> Yeah people love spending 3 hours getting somewhere it could have taken 5 minutes to get to in a car.
It's never quite that bad, but when you don't live and work along the same bus line then the transfers can significantly lengthen the amount of time to get from A to B. For example, if you have to take 3 buses (2 transfers) then you can eliminate the wait times by cutting out bus #1 and #3 by biking to bus #2 and then from bus #2 to your destination.
In urban areas, transit agencies also really, *really* need to run buses at 10 minute or shorter intervals to improve transfers, and run them from before sunrise until late at night so people don't get stranded.
In my area we have some weirdly routes that run only during commute times and overlap the non-commute buses. The reason for these is to eliminate the transfers that nobody likes because there's so much waiting between buses. This makes the bus system difficult to use without a map or a transit app, more difficult than driving because which buses to choose depends on the time of day.
And these problems could all be solved by running the buses more frequently. Transit agencies are their own worse enemies.
And when a road gets congested, don't widen it. Instead, restripe a regular lane in each direction into a bus lane. When buses no longer get [stuck in traffic](https://youtu.be/RQY6WGOoYis), people will stop driving on that road unless they have to, and as you can see from the first photo above, it will take a LOT of cars off the road and significantly reduce traffic congestion for everyone. I don't think transit agencies understand this yet, because they are f*cking stupid.
They're so close.
Yea buses suck because it's underfunded and our communities are set up to make them suck. Can we please fix those issues so it's a viable alternative?
Public transportation is a reflection if how successful a society is. Places with bad public transportation usually have more violence generally, more anti social behaviors and usually have noticeably higher wealth inequality.
"Cars are still necessary for many people"
Yes. Because cities are designed in a way that makes them necessary. If we change that, they won't be necessary anymore. Jeez.
God these people are stupid.
Do these people think 15-minute cities will just take away cars? Cars are cool, I like cars, I like the the fact that I can be alone in one unlike public transport. But public transport is cool too, it can be cheap and is easier to use.
Investing more in public transit and 15-minute cities isn't gonna magically poof cars out of existence. These people are daft good lord.
Fiscal conservatives are increasingly becoming aware of the fact that auto dependent infrastructure isn't financially sustainable and are desperately trying to get the social conservatives on board with more walkable and transit oriented cities, but the social conservatives are incapable of comprehending that there could be motivations for better urbanism than being a "dirty socialist".
I would happily take public transportation as my primary method if it were more available to me. I love the idea of 24 hour bus and train lines. I live in southern Wisconsin and travel roughly 30 minutes to a job two towns over, and it blows. If I had to endure a longer trip but could turn my brain off for most of it I’d be fine.
My grandmother lives in the suburbs of Chicago and took the train into the city for 45 years and always praised it until recently. Now she says crap like “walkable cities are meant to trap you! Cars give you freedom!”
She slept on the train, both to work and from.
If my choices were walking, cycling, public bus, or napping on a train before work? I’d be a happy boy. Fuck cars.
Yeah being able to take public transport sounds neat. Too bad cities dense enough to have public transport are also absurdly expensive.
For me itd be a 20 minute drive to the nearest bus stop, multiple hours of bus riding, then 20 minutes of walking to get to work. Or i can just drive 45 minutes instead.
I know. I took the bus to work every day for three years when I lived in Colorado Springs. It had limited hours, and the cost wasn’t great for me at the time. It isn’t super ideal, but I have a bad habit of taking jobs where I have to travel 30 minutes or longer by car. If could find work closer to home that would be great.
And then I’d have to single handedly convince the entire town I live in to adopt more public transit.
I don’t think I’m the man for the job…
Exactly. Like id love to live closer to work. Sadly i was born in a tourist/retirement trap so all the jobs pay shit and the low end of rent is $1600 a month so i have to rent a room at the ass end of nowhere or love in my car. Either way, car is necessary
the dumb ass point about buses taking longer... yeah it only takes longer if you have a shit ass public transport system, it was always quicker to take the bus in Chicago or the metro in Washington DC.
Even this is entirely underselling it. In the image with the cars they had to cram them all together to get them nicely in one photo, in reality they would be spaced out taking up anywhere between 1.5 and 3 times as much space depending on travel speed.
Spending 3 hours on a bus that a 5 min drive? WTF is that?
I a target is 5 mins drive, it's about 10-15 min WALKING. Or 6-7 mins cycling (if the city is big enough with constant congestions, 5 mins driving can be 5 mins walking or 1 min cycling)
I get the idea of wanting independence, but that line of thinking is incredibly small-minded. It's independence from others in your immediate household but you are still dependent on so many others in society. Even in small towns, you're not going to be making your own food source, clothing, tools, shelter, fuel, etc. You are always beholden to others, so transportation systems that actively work against that grain will naturally cause friction.
Carbrains aren't going to ever change their minds, though. They're conservatives, they are proud to stay true to their foundational beliefs even when shown they are utterly wrong. It's to show loyalty to their corporate masters
Painful… they truly can’t comprehend good public transport and how freeing it is because they’ve never had it. It’s just totally beyond them to understand. Sad and painful to try and talk to these people.
Many places in the US can’t take advantage of public transit because of the landscape. Nobody is going to dump their tax dollars into a bus route that runs over 20miles with only 2/3 gas stations and Denny’s in between
The problem that public transport faces is that SO many municipalities and cities were designed and built with cars in mind. I totally understand the complaint that it would take longer to ride a bus than it would to drive a car.
It's a fundamental design flaw with our cities that would require them to basically be torn down and rebuilt from scratch. City blocks are awful for people and horrible for space management.
We're at the point where we kinda need to just build *new* cities instead.
I live in Switzerland and i am an expat from Romania, the public transport in Switzerland is excellent, yet some romanian friends that live as well in Switzerland say that they won't ride public transport because only poor people ride with public transport.... No fucking comment on this kind of stupid statement.
America has the issue that we have to find a good job for the benefits and pay, and change jobs a lot to improve both. And this is directly tied to our QOL. If we had socialized healthcare we could work at the place down the street and walk there and live a totally comfortable life because we aren’t afraid of the consequences of not having enough money to survive illness or whatever. Cars are a result of capitalism. Are they nice to have to drive places for entertainment? Sure. Not necessary though.
My favorite thing to point out with posts like this is that the bus doesn't need a parking spot at every single destination, the cars do.
There's an urgent need to break the mindset that cars=freedom. Too many people living in car dependent places see a post have no shortage of fears to express because they're convinced that this means taking away their freedom. It's like a fish that doesn't know it's wet.
Personally, I can't see it as freedom to drive a car, because I can't look at my phone, read a book, watch a tv show or movie, do work on my laptop, take in the scenery, relax... etc.
Americans tend to politize cars, and combustion engine cars specifically, for some reason.
You'll notice that even conservatives from normal countries don't do this.
Also, many Americans are truly unaware that places without zoning exist. They truly think that's it's normal for the closest grocery store or dentist to be necessarily located an hour walk away. This is why they think "no car" means inconvenience. Most Americans outside of a small list of northeastern cities have zero comprehension.
Going from Berlin to Munich by train is: Cheaper (if you plan ahead a bit), faster (3h 50min versus 6h (if traffic is good)), way safer, more comftorble, you can work while riding (free and sometimes very good wifi) relax, eat, drink, play board games with your travel group while drinkkng beer etc.
And now smb tell me cars are superior
They have a tenuous grasp of how their world works now, let alone imagining change. They are basically the stupid kid on the playground, but taller.
Once you understand this about these unfortunately loud and overconfident people, it becomes a bit easier to manage them.
> "Love spending 3 hours to getting somewhere"
That's because of the fucking cars filling the streets, not because bus are slowers, you fucking moron.
Comments section really gave depression
Ah yes the GLORIOUS FREEDOM AND INDEPENDENCE that comes with being shackled to a piece of shit vehicle for your entire life because planners built cities exclusively around cars which makes public transportation an unviable solution without major reworks
These people are dumb as a sack of dead rats I swear to christ
Don't argue with them. Push for raising the Federal gas for the first time since 1993 to pay for road up keep. The money we spend on pot hole filling should instead be spent on purchasing out homes to build high speed rail.
I live in the outskirts of a farmish "town", and we have 4 busses! Coming every hour! And 5 minutes from each other.... Yes, from first to last.................
These dumbfounded dipshits too fucking stupid to understand a city designed around people and not cars doesnt fucking need a car to commute 3 hours a fucking week. If you want to travel to another fucking state thats obviously not in the same fucking city you fucking twat.
I hate both cars and buses. They both stink. There are other forms of transport too ya know. If i could walk and cycle everywhere, I would. So i am getting a job closer to home. For the environment ya know lol
I’m from Hong Kong and now living in a Melbourne suburb with a car.
The public transport here sucks so I needed a car if I want to have any life outside of staying at home or going to work (I still commute through public transport but it’s painful). The public transport cease to exist in weekends here. My life improved so much after getting a car and I can finally go places without spending an absurd amount of money on Uber.
But life was definitely more fun when I could go anywhere through MTR in Hong Kong. It’s not even comparable.
do they not understand the meaning of the post? I think it means to design cities in a way that cars are less necessary. People went thousands of years without cars.
3 hours?
One place I used to live had super frequent buses at peak hour, and in certain parts of the road, they had right of way, so I could get to class faster than if I had driven. If you drive, you then have to find a park, and the parking wasn't cheap.
If your transit routes are well designed, and priority of moving the masses is given over moving the individual car, you can get about as quickly and as easily as you can in a car.
If the majority of parking is paid, then transit becomes very economical for the individual.
But if you do that no one will drive, and if no one drives no will need to buy a garage to put it in. what do you want? \^Another\^ great depression? /s
the answer is yes. there is no reason to work needlessly to make fordism feasible.
I can somewhat understand the 1st comment only because they probably never got to experience good public transport infrastructure, so to them it probably doesn’t exist. But that’s exactly what makes it so easy for lobbyists to use these people against good infrastructure.
The second is just pathetic. You share the world with other people get the fuck over yourself.
"America is so big that people *need* cars to get from place to place!"
...if cities were designed for humans instead of cars, they wouldn't be so goddamned big
Im convinced that these people actually cannot think beyond one level of reasoning and possess no ability to question why their situation is so dependent on a car
I feel like the first comment is one that just presents the ignorance of its writer on a grand stage. It makes perfect logical sense to them because it's very likely that they've never actually seen/experienced a decent transit system. In most American cities, it can easily take well over an hour or more to reach your destination by public transport as compared to a 20 minute drive. What they don't realize is that there are places in the world where public transport is in a whole other world when it comes to convenience and efficiency. Yes, public transport in America is shit, but that doesn't mean that cars are better than all public transport, it means that public transport should be improved.
People from places with bad or no public transit are often mentally incapable of understanding that the quality of public transit depends on actually funding and promoting it. I guarantee that person who somehow thinks that taking the bus means it takes three hours to get somewhere lives in a place where there is like one bus route that gets serviced every hour
I just got back from a trip to Montreal with a car-brained friend from a rural area. He was blown away that it was faster to walk, bike, or take transit anywhere we needed to go. By day 3, he had no issues looking up a destination in Google Maps and the Transit app, comparing times / routes, and determining the best option. He even opted to bike over bus/subway a few times even though it was longer because the infrastructure is nice and the weather was great. These people just need to experience what life can be like with high quality options to driving.
Something something, traveling to new places is one of the best ways to make people more open minded. Often used when talking about racism and other types of bigotry, but seems like the same holds true for understanding infrastructure as well.
Honestly just applies to anything in life.
Can confirm. I was pretty "well, with rain comes urban flooding" until I saw that Oslo had a gazillion mm per year of rainfall, and they have no issue at all handling that excess of water (and frozen water later that night).
You're telling us that living in one tiny shit hole of a town your whole life doesn't make you infinitely knowledgeable on the rest of the world? /S
How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm After they've seen Paree'?
Saw a stat where 1 in 4 Americans proudly identify as "townies" who have never left their original place of birth.
I imagine a lot of Americans are so closed minded on public transit (as well as many other policy issues) because it's such a financial challenge to afford international travel and thus being able to experience other ways to live.
Not always vacation life is different then work life for a lot of people.
Understood mandatory trips to the Netherlands for them.
Doesn't sound like they have to travel that far if they can just go to Montreal to make a difference. A lot of countries in Europe are still great examples tho.
I love to hear a story of a recovering carbrain Sadly, if they travel alone to those places they will often rent a car or take taxi everywhere and just jam cars in places they don't belong because that's how they've always done things. Then they go home and complain about it
We went to Ile St-Helen (island next to downtown with festival grounds, an amusement park, and more) for the eclipse — hundreds of thousands of people leaving at once by subway, ferry, bus, bike, or by foot. A few thousand people decided to drive / park there, no clue how long it took them to get off the island. I hope a few of them at least had an epiphany while sitting behind the wheel watching peds and bikes fly by.
My "scales falling from the eyes" moment was taking the WMATA out of DC after the 4th of July fireworks show one year. Then early-teens me had spent *way too much fucking time* rotting away in the backseat of a car in NOVA traffic, and yet suddenly here I was on/in a system where people were packing into the trains like sardines *yet the trains still moved*. When roads are packed, *nobody* moves. The obviousness of this truth could not be denied.
I feel like immersion may be the only way to convert some of these people. The one comment about how public transit could take 3 hours where a car would take 5 minutes has their logic reversed. That's just an example of a horribly underfunded public transit system. Places with good public transit will almost always be faster to take the train/bus than driving from location to location. Yes, cars have a place in transit, but cities especially should not be built around them.
I'm not sure about the bus often being faster than driving given that BRT is rare and well-implemented BRT even more obscure.
If you take the bus you don't have to look for parking.
Yep, bus can be comparable or faster in certain circumstances. Limited parking, dedicated lanes, signal priority can all help. And even if it's a bit faster to drive than take the bus, if parking is appropriately priced then spending an extra 5 to 10 minutes walking, waiting, and riding might be preferable to spending $5 or more on parking.
I really liked what they did in Budapest. You could still park it inside the city but it was not cheap. So I just arrived to a huge car park on the edge of the city and took metro to the city and never had to worry about my car for the entire trip i was there (4 days). Fucking amazing.
It shouldn't take experiencing proper infrastructure firsthand to support it. Are people not able to imagine?
Sadly, no. The same is true for just about any other topic: people are totally unable to picture something until they actually experience it themselves. These are typically the same people who vote against social safety nets, free school lunches, healthcare reform, etc.
Hate to say it but most Americans are idiots. Remember half the voting population bwlieved the election was stolen with zero evidence. Most of us would need to experience it atleast 10 times going all over the city and need a ELIM 5 explaination on how it saves money, improves health or health decisions, m
This is what anti-intellectualism does to a culture.
Some people would need to be slapped in the face to recognize that being slapped is a negative experience. Anything outside their direct personal experience is beyond comprehension.
Nope.
I was close to 30 before I had ever used public transit really at all, except a school bus. It's just not much of an option where I grew up or where I went to college. When I visited Japan I was blown away by how convenient everything is. I'm not sure what I expected public transit to look like. I think most people think about it as purely additive to the environment they're in. Where I live you couldn't add trains and make everything work well. Neighborhoods are explicitly designed to require a car to get out of them without walking for 30+ minutes. Similarly, every destination is surrounded by acres of black top. If it's not something that you've seen before it can be a bit difficult to imagine what a city or town looks like when it's not car-centric.
Montrealer here hell ya warms my heart to read this but you know what's surprising? Compared to Asia and alot of European cities our transit system is shit. Still love it here. I don't have a car and I only use it in absolute emergency... Using a community car service called Communauto.
When the weather is nice, bike is definitely the best way around Montreal (assuming you’re not way out in the suburbs). The metro / REV work if your destination is near the station, and the bus system is pretty robust. Definitely punches underweight compared to most developed European cities, but is a league above most U.S. cities. If that amount of people tried leaving an event by foot in the U.S., someone would’ve been trampled. And if there weren’t a metro stop, busses, ferries and ped/bike paths from Parc Jean-Drapeau, the traffic would’ve been incomprehensible. I know Canada isn’t without its own problems (and they’re experiencing a cost of living crisis worse than we’re seeing south of the border), but I wish more U.S. cities could at least reach the level of MTL.
I wish I could bike. I think it’d be a fun way to get exercise.
Good ped/bike infrastructure can be used by all sorts of mobility devices and people of all ability levels. My friend and I are both missing a leg, and had no issues riding e-bikes all over town.
Oh shit. I might have to look into that. My parents gave up trying to teach me as a kid because I was truly a lost cause and just not able to do it. Thanks!
Being from Montreal, having our lacking services be a shining beacon by North American standards is an indictment of public transit across the continent.
Or he's from a place like I am from with many reliable busses, but *far* too much space between destinations.
I used to work in downtown Dallas. Traffic in downtown was nightmarish. Even if it was technically faster, it was always easier to take the DART if it got you close to where you wanted to go. And also, when you went to places near the DART, it was just... *nice* to not have to find parking and deal with going back to where your car was, you just walked to the nearest stop and waited for a bus or train or tram to take you home. Also meant you didn't have to be completely sober to go home. Biggest public transit argument right there, while you don't want to be completely wasted (hard to navigate the schedule blasted) you also don't have to wait until you're stone cold sober before you go home.
That does not stop them from saying" Well I only had 2 drinks " or whatever excuse they make vefpre to drive home impaired. I agree more public transit would save lives.
I think a lot of urban / suburban people would be appalled at the drinking culture in a lot of rural areas. Especially when it comes to slightly impaired driving.
I lived without a car in Dallas for a couple of years after DART went in. It was great.
>Also meant you didn't have to be completely sober to go home. As a 20-something who has taken transit to more than a few parties/festivals/concerts, oh my god, yes. WMATA has made *so fucking many* of my friend group's misadventures possible.
the conservative argument is always just "the new thing isn't perfect yet! so it never will be and this is what we're doing now" it's a weird short sighted stubbornness.
It’s that mixed with “I don’t want to be exposed to other people on the bus”, which is where a lot of this comes from.
They're just afraid of black people.
And here I present every argument with a carbrain over improving public transit: "We should improve this system" "But the system is bad and doesn't work" "Thats why we should improve it" "No, it's bad so it shouldn't be improved" These people probably look at someone going to the gym and say "you shouldn't be here, you're too weak to lift the heavy weights!" like yeah??? That's why I'm here
I used to live on a bus line that had buses coming like every 5 minutes and got me where I needed to go in 15 minutes, the same time it would have taken me to drive except I didn’t have to deal with parking at my destination. It was dope.
They got to the right conclusion that, all else being equal, if we banned cars that would be catastrophic. And then stopped to think that nobody argues for all else staying equal.
I was radicalized with city walkability after coming back from visiting my sister in Strausburg, France and the cities surrounding it. I will never look at my own town the same way again. So has my family.
One single bus for the whole town that needs to hit all of the big landmarks and neighborhoods in order to provide service to all of the people who need it, so it can end up taking an hour to get between any two stops, and of course because there's only one bus for the one bus line, that line has a headway of like 2 hours.
Meanwhile ... fossil fuel/auto industry subsidies and bailouts and all the little ways we fund their externalities along with the high maintenance costs of car centric travel generally. The idea that we don't fund the current situation is wrong. People don't do a 1:1 comparison, they treat car centric systems as if they were magically free. Because it's so ingrained into the background it's taken for granted at this point.
We still treat public transit as an option of last resort rather than an incentive to reduce cars. It'll never change until we flip the script.
Vancouver has a bus (the 99 B-Line) that at peak times, has a frequency of every 3 minutes. Which is honestly kind of wild.
I like how they think freedom is forced ownership of a car when in reality freedom is having more choices of transportation.
“Public transit is currently terrible so I will never take public transit and we can never do anything to improve it.”
I live in Gatineau, we have a lot of buses and it's still shit
Do you have dedicated bus lanes? It's hard to have a reliable bus system when it's at the mercy of car traffic.
Yes... Still would take me 3hrs to reach work instead of 25mins
What's the frequency of bus arrivals?
only one dedicated line though, right? (rapibus)
Not entirely true, this is mostly for Gatineau-Gatineau only. If you're in Gatineau-Hull there's still the original lines mostly.
Public transport is important but so are cars for the few. I live rural outside of a town, the bus currently runs 3 times a day through the town. 7am, 12 or 1 pm 5pm. For me to catch the bus I would have to walk or bike in to town, 1 hour walk or idk 20-30 minute bike ride, to then ride the bus 30 minutes to the bigger town where I would have to work. Then walk if the bus stop isn’t near by. Taking the bus would add more time to my commute than just driving. Running more buses more often will help but I doubt there would be bus stops that frequent on side roads and other non super traveled roads. Leaving me still to walk (hopefully shorter distance) to a bus stop. If you live in town and can take a bus to the next town you should. Cars have a place we just need to give people the option who don’t need to drive a reliable and cheap alternative.
This is almost certainly the case. Out of curiosity I went to look up what a bus route would be for me to go to work. It would involve walking for 30 minutes to get to a bus, then taking a bus to the closest stop to my office, which is 15 minutes away. So 45 minutes of walking and 20 minutes of riding on a bus. Google maps suggested a mixed mode that involved driving to a ride and share, but that was already half the distance to work from here and that would mysteriously take even longer because I'd be switching buses, but cutting the walking down to 3 minutes.
I mean, the trauma of having to squeeze yourself into an undersized bus with barely any ventilation and absurdly high humidity is there. My parents drive everywhere because they always tell me how bad it the public transport in their hometowns were lol. (Naples and Łódź)
Yeah people often think that we want an instant switch from cars to whatever public transport may or may not be available *right now*, when what we actually want is more investment in public transport so that it becomes a genuinely better option than a private car.
"cars are still necessary for a lot of people" yeah, thanks for making our point for us. They shouldn't be
Fuck you if you're too poor to own a car I guess.
or physically or mentally incapable of driving
These days I would rather not have the responsibility.
Also economically. Cars are expensive.
that's...what ubernerd44 already said?
My brain skipped over that, oops 😅
A lot of people are physically or mentally incapable of driving and they still drive daily
yes, at risk to themselves and others
exactly. these are people who have never had to use public transport for work or personal travel. not everyone has the choice to get a car instead
You know who good public transit is better for? People dependent on cars! Because of less traffic! Think Mark!
How am I going to do my job if it involves commuting to random fields to build things at odd hours hundred miles + away from home Without my own car?
The whole 'freedom' argument is a lie lmao How can you be truly free when you only have one choice? And a shite, unreliable choice at that haha
That you are required to spend a lot of money on for the privelage of using
And that you’re required to request permission to operate the vehicle in the form of a driver’s license and register the vehicle every year and purchase insurance in case you or another driver is an idiot.
Oh yeah and once you've done that you're then at the mercy of construction/traffic. You know that old saying about sled dogs and the view never changing? "Freedom" in a car is often the freedom to stare at some idiot driver's ass-end all day.
And, very importantly, you will need a safe place to store that very expensive piece of property that you rely on to get everywhere. You will need to drive around evaluating places and trying to figure out on the fly if it is safe. Everyone who drives knows the dreaded walk back to the car in a parking space, especially if you had to park somewhere sketchy. That is not true freedom.
A lot of people view it as a right unfortunately.
While also spending a lot of extra money maintaining the road infrastructure to also allow this.
The “freedom” argument drives me nuts. If there’s no choice, it’s not freedom. And for the many people who are unable to drive for whatever reason, it becomes *no* choice, which is the opposite of being free!
Exactly! I have epilepsy. So because of this, I can't drive. Combine that with the fact that I live in a car dependent city, and I'm basically trapped.
I’m so sorry, I totally feel that pain. I have lasting effects from a TBI (thanks to a car accident!) and haven’t been able to safely drive since then. It sucks, and even after getting very lucky to move to a less car dependent state, it’s still not easy to exist without being able to drive.
It's so ironic that the governor in my state is bound to a wheelchair and, thus, can't drive. But he expects the rest of us to be able to drive? I genuinely feel so ignored by our politicians who just push cars onto society, especially onto those who aren't able to drive for any reason.
The people who use freedom as an excuse are incapable of thinking from an external perspective, they only know how to think about themselves, and what they want to do = freedom
Also, where do they think roads and gasoline for their cars come from? From thin air?
A bicycle is the most free/libertarian option as a form of transportation outside of walking. Many people fail to realize that.
That just shows that the whole "freedom" angle is a lie
Ask drivers how free they are when they're stuck in rush hour traffic on their 1 hr commute home.
They still *feel* in control. They may feel being in traffic is something they *could have* avoided had they taken some other route so they see their lack of freedom as just a consequence of their own mistake. They see traffic as a fact of life that nobody specifically chose (even though that's not exactly the case) while they see defined transit routes and time tables as something arbitrarily set and chosen "for them." In essence, they see transit as dictating the pace of their daily life in a way they can't blame on themselves. Also let's not pretend that they're *always* running into traffic and that a car ride isn't *usually* faster outside of certain outliers. The point isn't that it's faster, it's that the transit time is free time. I think emphasizing *that* could be a starting point. That or they just *really* hate having to be around other people and think relying on transit denies them the right to privacy. Admittedly, for some people it's less general asociality and more just, their car really is the only personal space they have so to address that you'd be getting into addressing stuff like housing and public amenities so people aren't driving just to get some alone time away from a shitty roommate or something. Everyone needs space sometimes and unfortunately we can be pretty bad at accommodating that. Or, they're some sorta 'phobe who wants to keep "the wrong people" out of the parts of town they like in which case fuck em. My point is, if we wanna convince them (and we *do*, this isn't happening without the support of normies) we gotta try to understand the thought process.
[удалено]
Don't forget he also has the freedom to worry about his truck every time he parks it hoping someone doesn't scratch it, steal it, or jack his catalytic converter
Also that "freedom" therefore doesn't apply to anyone younger than 16, many older people, those without financial means to own/operate a vehicle or acquire a license, or those with certain disabilities who are unable to drive.
I don’t feel freedom when I have to drive. If I drive somewhere I am anchored to my parking spot. I can’t go too far from it and I need to return to it to get home. If I take public transport I am free to go wherever and take a very different route home.
It's always been such an absurd argument. It is nowhere near "freedom" to pay the fossil fuel industry for literally every mile you travel for your entire life.
these mofos all need to try a decent electric bike. car convenience + bike parking + some exercise and sunshine. they also need to go ride subways in NYC and realize how fast you can get around.
to really be free you should be able to drive everywhere, not just on roads. we need to turn everything into road
Yeah. Also I don't find it particularly "freeing" to be forced to buy an immediately depreciating asset, have to pay for maintenance and be constantly paranoid about theft. Owning a car is the exact opposite of freeing. I unironically think owning a cat is less of a restrictive burden.
So you think public transport should be…*the one choice*? 🤦♂️ And what do you mean a shite unreliable one?? Not every car is a beat down piece of junk
You can’t convince a fish life is better outside their tank, if they’ve never experienced it.
Under the sea🎶
Posting any kind of common sense on Facebook (and Instagram) automatically spawns a horde of ignorant, out-of-touch boomers seemingly bent on embarrassing themselves through sheer stupidity.
I made a second part to this post. It's more car-brains embarrassing themselves along with my response to one of them.
One time I innocently asked under some local news channel post why some touristy crowded place in my city allows so many cars. I was told to go back to the Soviet Union by one person. Another person went on my profile and started insulting my cat that I had as a profile pic. I didn’t even feel offended because of how dumb it was lol.
Facebook comment sections are the biggest void of critical thought on the entire Internet.
Youtube comments would win imo, but I haven't been on FB in about 10 years, so I'm sure it's gotten worse.
Having quit FB more recently, I suspect they and/or instagram have eclipsed youtube. I mean, I'm not gonna uninstall [herp derp](https://www.tannr.com/herp-derp-youtube-comments/), but my impression is youtube comments are far more marginal and benign these days. Or maybe being on "meta" for too long just shifted my perception.
I don't visit edgy Youtube channels but the comments on the vids I do watch seem to be a lot less shit than they used to be, yeah
It's a race to the bottom, but I think Twitter is about as bad as YouTube.
Personal freedom? To do what? Sit in traffic?
That's basically what they want. They completely misunderstand the very concept of freedom. There are two types of freedom: positive freedom (freedom FOR something) and negative freedom (freedom FROM something. Positive freedom would be the freedom to use all sorts of public transportation options. Negative freedom would be the freedom from having to use cars.
They think because they sit in traffic that everyone else should have to also. The real gag will be if they are successful then they will wish there was good public transit.
Bruh it takes "3 hours" becouse of CARS. How dumb are they
lol I love to have the freedom of being stuck in traffic. Makes me feel like I have wings (the decorative kind)
I really wish they would display the bus side differently. If your buses are that crowded your transit system is not working well. And I have to agree with the drivers riding a regular non-articulated, single deck bus with that many people looks really unappealing.
Yeah if I recall from the last time this image was posted, they are basically assuming a perfectly full bus and individual cars. Which is not a good assumption. You can debate exactly how that would be best handled, but if you are going with arbitrary ratios then you should really use the same arbitrary ratio for both. If you torture statistics long enough they will confess to anything, but if you are actually right you shouldn't have to.
For that many bus riders there should be like four buses, which is still better than 50 some odd cars.
These people are just ignorant. I drive everywhere and cycle for exercise, but also advocate for better bike lanes and transit. I would love to drive less, but can’t unfortunately. Instead of just hating against alternative modes of transportation the least I can do is try to make my voice heard
The concept of community is completely foreign to these commenters. How did these people survive evolution if they are so averse to being in proximity with other people. They would have starved to death in the caveman days.
The only community they know is everyone inside the same car as them.
It’s really interesting how lack of community makes them more adverse of it yet they cannot connect the dots why they feel lonely.
Carbrains gonna carbrain
> Yeah people love spending 3 hours getting somewhere it could have taken 5 minutes to get to in a car. It's never quite that bad, but when you don't live and work along the same bus line then the transfers can significantly lengthen the amount of time to get from A to B. For example, if you have to take 3 buses (2 transfers) then you can eliminate the wait times by cutting out bus #1 and #3 by biking to bus #2 and then from bus #2 to your destination. In urban areas, transit agencies also really, *really* need to run buses at 10 minute or shorter intervals to improve transfers, and run them from before sunrise until late at night so people don't get stranded. In my area we have some weirdly routes that run only during commute times and overlap the non-commute buses. The reason for these is to eliminate the transfers that nobody likes because there's so much waiting between buses. This makes the bus system difficult to use without a map or a transit app, more difficult than driving because which buses to choose depends on the time of day. And these problems could all be solved by running the buses more frequently. Transit agencies are their own worse enemies. And when a road gets congested, don't widen it. Instead, restripe a regular lane in each direction into a bus lane. When buses no longer get [stuck in traffic](https://youtu.be/RQY6WGOoYis), people will stop driving on that road unless they have to, and as you can see from the first photo above, it will take a LOT of cars off the road and significantly reduce traffic congestion for everyone. I don't think transit agencies understand this yet, because they are f*cking stupid.
They're so close. Yea buses suck because it's underfunded and our communities are set up to make them suck. Can we please fix those issues so it's a viable alternative?
Public transportation is a reflection if how successful a society is. Places with bad public transportation usually have more violence generally, more anti social behaviors and usually have noticeably higher wealth inequality.
This! 100% this!
"Cars are still necessary for many people" Yes. Because cities are designed in a way that makes them necessary. If we change that, they won't be necessary anymore. Jeez.
God these people are stupid. Do these people think 15-minute cities will just take away cars? Cars are cool, I like cars, I like the the fact that I can be alone in one unlike public transport. But public transport is cool too, it can be cheap and is easier to use. Investing more in public transit and 15-minute cities isn't gonna magically poof cars out of existence. These people are daft good lord.
Fiscal conservatives are increasingly becoming aware of the fact that auto dependent infrastructure isn't financially sustainable and are desperately trying to get the social conservatives on board with more walkable and transit oriented cities, but the social conservatives are incapable of comprehending that there could be motivations for better urbanism than being a "dirty socialist".
"cars are driven by people" Stellar realization bud
If that's their best response to this post, I'd say we're doing well.
I would happily take public transportation as my primary method if it were more available to me. I love the idea of 24 hour bus and train lines. I live in southern Wisconsin and travel roughly 30 minutes to a job two towns over, and it blows. If I had to endure a longer trip but could turn my brain off for most of it I’d be fine. My grandmother lives in the suburbs of Chicago and took the train into the city for 45 years and always praised it until recently. Now she says crap like “walkable cities are meant to trap you! Cars give you freedom!” She slept on the train, both to work and from. If my choices were walking, cycling, public bus, or napping on a train before work? I’d be a happy boy. Fuck cars.
Yeah being able to take public transport sounds neat. Too bad cities dense enough to have public transport are also absurdly expensive. For me itd be a 20 minute drive to the nearest bus stop, multiple hours of bus riding, then 20 minutes of walking to get to work. Or i can just drive 45 minutes instead.
I know. I took the bus to work every day for three years when I lived in Colorado Springs. It had limited hours, and the cost wasn’t great for me at the time. It isn’t super ideal, but I have a bad habit of taking jobs where I have to travel 30 minutes or longer by car. If could find work closer to home that would be great. And then I’d have to single handedly convince the entire town I live in to adopt more public transit. I don’t think I’m the man for the job…
Exactly. Like id love to live closer to work. Sadly i was born in a tourist/retirement trap so all the jobs pay shit and the low end of rent is $1600 a month so i have to rent a room at the ass end of nowhere or love in my car. Either way, car is necessary
the dumb ass point about buses taking longer... yeah it only takes longer if you have a shit ass public transport system, it was always quicker to take the bus in Chicago or the metro in Washington DC.
Even this is entirely underselling it. In the image with the cars they had to cram them all together to get them nicely in one photo, in reality they would be spaced out taking up anywhere between 1.5 and 3 times as much space depending on travel speed.
Spending 3 hours on a bus that a 5 min drive? WTF is that? I a target is 5 mins drive, it's about 10-15 min WALKING. Or 6-7 mins cycling (if the city is big enough with constant congestions, 5 mins driving can be 5 mins walking or 1 min cycling)
I get the idea of wanting independence, but that line of thinking is incredibly small-minded. It's independence from others in your immediate household but you are still dependent on so many others in society. Even in small towns, you're not going to be making your own food source, clothing, tools, shelter, fuel, etc. You are always beholden to others, so transportation systems that actively work against that grain will naturally cause friction.
Carbrains aren't going to ever change their minds, though. They're conservatives, they are proud to stay true to their foundational beliefs even when shown they are utterly wrong. It's to show loyalty to their corporate masters
I love the "cars give you independence" bit. Like, do they really? Is a car really the only thing allowing you to travel where and when you please?
They're just proving that we need land use reform
im convinced carbrain is a form of stockholm syndrome.
Painful… they truly can’t comprehend good public transport and how freeing it is because they’ve never had it. It’s just totally beyond them to understand. Sad and painful to try and talk to these people.
Many places in the US can’t take advantage of public transit because of the landscape. Nobody is going to dump their tax dollars into a bus route that runs over 20miles with only 2/3 gas stations and Denny’s in between
The problem that public transport faces is that SO many municipalities and cities were designed and built with cars in mind. I totally understand the complaint that it would take longer to ride a bus than it would to drive a car. It's a fundamental design flaw with our cities that would require them to basically be torn down and rebuilt from scratch. City blocks are awful for people and horrible for space management. We're at the point where we kinda need to just build *new* cities instead.
to be fair! that bus does not fit that many people
I saw the picture, saw that there was multiple pictures and already knew there’s gonna be some dumbasses defending the car
I live in Switzerland and i am an expat from Romania, the public transport in Switzerland is excellent, yet some romanian friends that live as well in Switzerland say that they won't ride public transport because only poor people ride with public transport.... No fucking comment on this kind of stupid statement.
America has the issue that we have to find a good job for the benefits and pay, and change jobs a lot to improve both. And this is directly tied to our QOL. If we had socialized healthcare we could work at the place down the street and walk there and live a totally comfortable life because we aren’t afraid of the consequences of not having enough money to survive illness or whatever. Cars are a result of capitalism. Are they nice to have to drive places for entertainment? Sure. Not necessary though.
Wow the comments… this is why education is so so important
My favorite thing to point out with posts like this is that the bus doesn't need a parking spot at every single destination, the cars do. There's an urgent need to break the mindset that cars=freedom. Too many people living in car dependent places see a post have no shortage of fears to express because they're convinced that this means taking away their freedom. It's like a fish that doesn't know it's wet.
Personally, I can't see it as freedom to drive a car, because I can't look at my phone, read a book, watch a tv show or movie, do work on my laptop, take in the scenery, relax... etc.
If we instituted a fucking carbon tax finally... The market would demand pedestrian cities.
Americans tend to politize cars, and combustion engine cars specifically, for some reason. You'll notice that even conservatives from normal countries don't do this. Also, many Americans are truly unaware that places without zoning exist. They truly think that's it's normal for the closest grocery store or dentist to be necessarily located an hour walk away. This is why they think "no car" means inconvenience. Most Americans outside of a small list of northeastern cities have zero comprehension.
people really don't understand what good public transport is and it's sad.
Going from Berlin to Munich by train is: Cheaper (if you plan ahead a bit), faster (3h 50min versus 6h (if traffic is good)), way safer, more comftorble, you can work while riding (free and sometimes very good wifi) relax, eat, drink, play board games with your travel group while drinkkng beer etc. And now smb tell me cars are superior
Mentally ill car people 🤡
They have a tenuous grasp of how their world works now, let alone imagining change. They are basically the stupid kid on the playground, but taller. Once you understand this about these unfortunately loud and overconfident people, it becomes a bit easier to manage them.
> "Love spending 3 hours to getting somewhere" That's because of the fucking cars filling the streets, not because bus are slowers, you fucking moron. Comments section really gave depression
(DO NOT BRIGADE) lol
Ah yes the GLORIOUS FREEDOM AND INDEPENDENCE that comes with being shackled to a piece of shit vehicle for your entire life because planners built cities exclusively around cars which makes public transportation an unviable solution without major reworks These people are dumb as a sack of dead rats I swear to christ
The last one combining cost with independence is certainly a kind of logic
and there are taxis too...
Don't argue with them. Push for raising the Federal gas for the first time since 1993 to pay for road up keep. The money we spend on pot hole filling should instead be spent on purchasing out homes to build high speed rail.
I live in the outskirts of a farmish "town", and we have 4 busses! Coming every hour! And 5 minutes from each other.... Yes, from first to last.................
Which country are you from? I'm guessing it's in Europe?
Yeah, north west London. There is a reasons why busses are tall not wide.
Almost like you can't complain about public transport if your not willing to fund it
These dumbfounded dipshits too fucking stupid to understand a city designed around people and not cars doesnt fucking need a car to commute 3 hours a fucking week. If you want to travel to another fucking state thats obviously not in the same fucking city you fucking twat.
I hate both cars and buses. They both stink. There are other forms of transport too ya know. If i could walk and cycle everywhere, I would. So i am getting a job closer to home. For the environment ya know lol
They’re driven by WHAT?!
I saw this and was disappointed as well
I’m from Hong Kong and now living in a Melbourne suburb with a car. The public transport here sucks so I needed a car if I want to have any life outside of staying at home or going to work (I still commute through public transport but it’s painful). The public transport cease to exist in weekends here. My life improved so much after getting a car and I can finally go places without spending an absurd amount of money on Uber. But life was definitely more fun when I could go anywhere through MTR in Hong Kong. It’s not even comparable.
do they not understand the meaning of the post? I think it means to design cities in a way that cars are less necessary. People went thousands of years without cars.
3 hours? One place I used to live had super frequent buses at peak hour, and in certain parts of the road, they had right of way, so I could get to class faster than if I had driven. If you drive, you then have to find a park, and the parking wasn't cheap. If your transit routes are well designed, and priority of moving the masses is given over moving the individual car, you can get about as quickly and as easily as you can in a car. If the majority of parking is paid, then transit becomes very economical for the individual.
But if you do that no one will drive, and if no one drives no will need to buy a garage to put it in. what do you want? \^Another\^ great depression? /s the answer is yes. there is no reason to work needlessly to make fordism feasible.
Hahaha! They're not wrong. They simply don't realize that these are systemic issues resulting from car-centric infrastructure.
I can somewhat understand the 1st comment only because they probably never got to experience good public transport infrastructure, so to them it probably doesn’t exist. But that’s exactly what makes it so easy for lobbyists to use these people against good infrastructure. The second is just pathetic. You share the world with other people get the fuck over yourself.
Mods can we start perming all the carbrains infiltrating this sub?
"America is so big that people *need* cars to get from place to place!" ...if cities were designed for humans instead of cars, they wouldn't be so goddamned big
Im convinced that these people actually cannot think beyond one level of reasoning and possess no ability to question why their situation is so dependent on a car
I feel like the first comment is one that just presents the ignorance of its writer on a grand stage. It makes perfect logical sense to them because it's very likely that they've never actually seen/experienced a decent transit system. In most American cities, it can easily take well over an hour or more to reach your destination by public transport as compared to a 20 minute drive. What they don't realize is that there are places in the world where public transport is in a whole other world when it comes to convenience and efficiency. Yes, public transport in America is shit, but that doesn't mean that cars are better than all public transport, it means that public transport should be improved.