I often see people in the comments acting like having a fast or loud car immediately makes your dick smaller or that you have ED. And people talk about owning a car as if they’ve never gone above 40 MPH and are terrified to do so.
For context I live in a city with actually ok mass transit, don’t own a car, and prefer to bike/take the train whenever possible. Trains, trolleys, bikes, and feet are the best forms of transportation imo.
That being said, body shaming or making fun of people with physical or mental issues (that may be no fault of their own) is just shitty. It makes this community look shitty. I hate reading comments about “loud car small dick this” or “fast car ED that”. It’s unnecessary. You can shit on asshole drivers without having to stoop that low. Secondly, some women enjoy cars as well; be more creative.
Finally, don’t act like cars can’t be fun. I’m all for phasing out the automobile and revolutionizing transport by returning to the ways of olde, but cars are fun. I understand some of you are grandparents and don’t like someone revving their straight pipes mustang down your block on a Saturday morning. That’s completely reasonable. But my god does this community act like you can’t have fun in a car. I absolutely enjoy loud and fast and powerful cars, because that’s an incredible work of engineering and it simply can be fun. Going fast can be fun. Being in a car that purrs like a lion can be fun. Going offroading or drifting or racing or anything in a car can be fun.
We won’t convince people to see our side by shitting on the things they enjoy. We convince people to try and see things from our point of view by actually looking through their perspective first, and acknowledging that while cars can be fun they are not sustainable.
ETA: Some people seem to think I think public roads should still be for cars. Never did I say that. I think the appropriate place for cars is the track. I would love to convert all the roads in my city to a mixture of bike and pedestrian lanes with trolleys running down the median. But cars can be fun and a track day can absolutely be a great time.
I used to think like you, but this summer I visited Europe where a Volkswagen golf was a very average sized car. The parking spots were smaller, the road lanes were 9ft wide instead of 12 to 20ft wide, pedestrian crossings were often only 16ft long (vs trying to cross an 8 lane stroad 100ft wide). The country in question was very car dependant, and yet they had an automotive fatality rate that was less than 10% of my state’s average. It blew my mind how much of a difference that made. For the first time in years I could relax and walk around cars without fearing for my life.
That trip taught me that car size does matter. Big cars kill people at higher rates and they force all the roads and parking spots to become bigger in turn. It also creates an arms race where people buy bigger and bigger vehicles to be safe from the other oversized vehicles. Larger cars also waste more fuel and cause more damage to our roads.
Also, the part about all cars each taking up 1 parking spot isn’t true. cars are so big these days they often take up two parking spots because the vehicles are too big for the drivers to consistently park within their lines or if you park too close to a gaint SUV / pickup then the owner will wait for you and scream in your face (this has happened to me more than once so now I don’t park next to tank sized pickups anymore because I don’t want to be assaulted or shot)
So I fully and strongly reject the idea that small cars are in any way just as harmful to cities as tank sized pickups and SUVs.
I challenge you to post the name of the city in Europe you visited, and then look up its population density and transportation mode share.
Reykjavík. Population density is 451 people per km2 and transportation mode share is only 5% public transit. It has around the same population density of the US city I live in and yet only 10% of the traffic fatalities. Cars are still a problem there, undeniably, but it is proof that car dependency doesn’t have to be as dystopian and hellish as it has become in the US. The size of cars matters. The price of gas matters. The way we design roads and the size of each lane matters.
Reykjavik – and Iceland in general – is tiny in terms of population: less than 250k in the entire metro area. Of course cars are going to work less-bad there than in any place with a decently-big population! It’s not comparable.
In terms of American metro areas, it would be all the way down at 196th on the list – right below Prescott, AZ.
Wake me up when you can credibly claim that some European city that’s actually big can be car-dependent and magically somehow work because everybody’s driving VW Golfs or whatever.
As a trained traffic engineer, I will inform you that that just isn’t true. In reality, lanes in the US are typically 9-12 feet wide, and NACTO recommends against anything greater than 11.
The only places you’re going to plausibly find widths greater than 12 feet are 1-lane freeway ramps and streets with unmarked on-street parking (which means it’s really two lanes, not one).
This is a function of the number of lanes – i.e., the number of cars, not the size of the cars.
No, they do not “often” take up two parking spots. You can go look at any random parking lot to see how nonsense that claim is. Alternating patterns of filled and empty spaces are just not a thing that happens anywhere.