So don’t take this the wrong way, but I do like cars. I am also against car dependency. I just wanted to make this post here to start a discussion about the benefits of lower speed limits in cities and towns, investment in effective public transit and non car-centric infrastructure, and other “anti-car” policies for car people. My goal with this post is to list the benefits of these policies for car people as I see it, and to hear other opinions on this topic.
- Stroads suck. I am a car person and would rather bike on a well-designed street than drive on a stroad.
- Congestion - I like to drive. Most people I know would rather not and would take other forms of transit if there were viable alternatives. If people who just want to go from a to b had viable alternatives, roads would be free for the people who want or need to be in cars.
- Safety - I don’t want to kill pedestrians. I don’t want to wreck my car. I’m fine with driving fast on a country road where I can see for miles and know that there is nothing in front of me to hit. If I do crash, it was my fault, and it doesn’t endanger others. However, cities should have lower speed limits to keep pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers safe.
- Traffic flow - Where I live, there is a 45 mph speed limit down one of the main roads, but I rarely reach 45 during peak usage times because of traffic. Lower speeds would make traffic flow more manageable and allow car traffic through at a higher average speed.
I feel like the name “Fuck Cars” presents a false dichotomy between well thought out urban design and cars. Good urban design opposes car dependency (which I am against) not cars themselves. With that, I would like to leave you with a few questions: What role should cars play in an ideal world? How would or do you talk to car enthusiasts about this stuff? Do you hate cars or car dependency?
Also because this is fuck cars, fuck some cars. Fuck cars with shitty modified exhausts in built up areas. Fuck cars that run catless exhausts. Fuck big ass trucks and SUVs that run over children to dodge environmental regulations. Especially fuck squatted trucks. Fuck the car manufacturers who lobby to create car dependency and manufacture the child-crushing SUVs.
Oh hey I feel kinda similarly, except I don’t have a car and don’t plan on having one bc that’s an insane amount of spending for something I thankfully don’t need at all.
From that perspective: I think ideally most private car use would be rental cars. We aren’t going to connect every rural place via public transport overnight, and if you need to transport more than people cars make perfect sense for the job anyway.
People in rural areas might still realistically need cars for a long time to come, and I also dislike completely preventing people in cities from owning cars, partially because I totally get that driving cars can be fun and other hobbies have their own carbon footprint. But, as expensive as being a car enthusiast already is, it probably has to get more expensive as cars become purely a luxury. The costs to the individual should reflect the burden they put on society as a whole.
Other than better city planning to simply reduce people even wanting to use cars, I think other good measures (than just increasing taxes) to achieve this could be parking space requirements like japan has. Beyond that I think we really just need a cultural shift away from “everyone has a car obviously” which I’m starting to verrryyy slowly see at least.
Ideally in the long term utopian future I’d want highways to mostly be abandoned, with long distance freight being done by rail and only local distribution by road vehicles. The main use of highways would then be those choosing cars as their hobby and private transport of goods, e.g. for moving. Within cities road vehicle use would only be for transporting goods (and ofc emergency services). But even if we put everything we have towards that I don’t think I’d live long enough to see it lol