I was recently held up in absolute dead stop traffic. We were sitting on the tarmac with no movement for well over an hour, in the 80 degree sun, before I felt obliged to leave my car and go see if it was because of roadwork or an accident or what.
I joined a small crowd of onlookers after reaching the head, spectating a row of sit-in protesters. One driver had tried to get around but a few protesters moved tactically so that he couldn’t go any further without injuring somebody.
I didn’t wait around, although there were people phoning the police and some tempers beginning to flare. So I head back to my car. The dairy groceries that I picked up on the way back from work had begun to spoil.
I was late home by nearly three hours, so no time to unwind. Just enough to pack away some old leftovers before heading off to sleep and restart cycle all over, -1 hour or so of sleep.
Previously, I had no opinion whatsoever on whether cars=good or cars=bad. But after being held up in traffic, wasting money, wasting gas, losing sleep and perhaps a bit of my sanity I am now totally on board with the Fuck Cars movement. I couldn’t imagine a more convincing strategy to bring people over to your perspective. Excellent thinking. Good job.
I don’t live in a city. My self-interest is with cars. If you don’t have a car out here, good luck getting anywhere lol
It seems to me like you don’t actually know what this community is about and you’re just mad at the somewhat intentionally provocative title. You wouldn’t be the first.
We don’t want to take people’s cars away. We want good urban planning so that not using a car becomes a viable alternative. If done right this also improves the lifes of people who still need cars for various reasons. If you live in a rural area you’ll probably always need a car and that’s fine.
To be clear, you’re against public transport because you live somewhere with insufficient public transport and therefore cannot rely on the public transport that hasn’t been built? Would the problem of insufficient public transport not be solved by building public transport?
This is what I’ve seen called “the subtractive fallacy”.
People say “cars are bad, we should rely on them less”, and instead of envisioning what that would actually mean, you just assume that the future they advocate for is exactly the same as the present but without cars. Of course that would suck. Good thing no one wants that.
What we want is for you and everyone to have the choice of driving a car, or not. If we had good public transport alternatives everywhere, this would me less people driving cars which is a good thing for everyone else who still wants or needs to drives cars. “Fuck cars” because they have taken over too much space and resources that could be better used elsewhere for the benefit of literally everyone.
How is this so hard to understand?
Most level headed and well communicated take.
It is probably now that I should admit to having fabricated the story. I hope everyone is entertained.
Let’s be honest here, the only thing missing in your story to make it more obviously fake was “and then everyone got up and clapped”.
Ideally you would park your car outside of the city and then take public transit into the city. Cities should be dense, walkable communities connected by light rail and bike paths