Lol! Another piece of protection for bikers to buy, care for, and carry all so cars don't kill them. Let's look for more ways to put the onus on the group getting killed. No policy change for...
Lol! Another piece of protection for bikers to buy, care for, and carry all so cars don't kill them.
And unfortunately this is necessary, because even though 2023 saw a slight reduction in drivers striking cyclists and pedestrians, according to the most recent data from the Governor's Highway Safety Association, since 2019 pedestrian fatalities are still up 14 percent—and cyclist deaths are up 50 percent since 2010.
Let's look for more ways to put the onus on the group getting killed. No policy change for grill heigh maximums or standardized bumper heights. No changes to infrastructure that make it safer to bike or walk. No, let's carry around a device that puts a little blinking light on the dash of a car that has also bought the device.
That doesn't mean lidar and cameras have "failed," but because they rely on what the sensors can pick up, they cannot necessarily ID hazards (and alert drivers) as quickly as we need them to, particularly if that's a cyclist in your lane 300 feet down the road, just over the next rise. Yes, current sensing works well now with figuring out the pace of a traffic jam, and automatic emergency braking can step in to stop your car if you fail to. But for non-automotive obstacles, they're still limited.
Again, LOL, yes that means they have failed. If safety sensors are built to stop injuries and fatalities then limiting those just to cars is ridiculous. Just because companies have developed solutions for the simplest issue does not make them safe for our streets. Streets aren't just for cars and it's laughable that this is where we are. Highways, sure, but neighborhoods?
There's just one problem with C-V2X: Only Audi and the VW Group have officially and publicly talked about using it.
No surprise there.
I'm sorry for the language, it's targeted at the article not the poster. I'm just so sick of all these "safety developments" for cycling. We know what makes cyclists, and non-car based travel in general, safer and it's separated infrastructure and limits on car/truck speed, weight, and height. But we don't actually want to solve the issue, we'd prefer to slap another bandaid on a gaping wound because the alternative is spending actual dollars to make our streets work for everyone. But fuck me, I live in the US and that is an un-American thing to say.
Imagine a world where following up on this, Audi and the VW Group actually also published and stuck to maximum hood heights and vehicle weights and stopping distances! No, sorry, I’m getting a bit...
There's just one problem with C-V2X: Only Audi and the VW Group have officially and publicly talked about using it.
Imagine a world where following up on this, Audi and the VW Group actually also published and stuck to maximum hood heights and vehicle weights and stopping distances!
No, sorry, I’m getting a bit carried away there… the car companies don’t want actual safety for people outside their cars, they just want to cash in brownie points for pretending to care…
This is something of a pattern lately. When I talk about poorly aligned or overly bright headlights, people are quick to say that we should all be using matrix headlights. A technology that, to my...
This is something of a pattern lately. When I talk about poorly aligned or overly bright headlights, people are quick to say that we should all be using matrix headlights. A technology that, to my knowledge, is exclusive to Audi and VW vehicles and is not legal in the US.
Frankly I am tired of this mindset. Technology is not going to save us from anything. It’s almost always an imperfect stopgap solution. The thing that saves people safe working standards and the policy to enforce it. That doesn’t need us to wait for any kinks to be worked out, nor does it mean having one person collect a huge pile of money for being the only approved provider for the solution. It merely needs people to wake up and take action.
Except technology has saved us from a lot of things, especially when it comes to road safety. Three point seatbelts, airbags, ABS, crumple zones, LKA, automatic breaking have saved thousands upon...
Except technology has saved us from a lot of things, especially when it comes to road safety.
Three point seatbelts, airbags, ABS, crumple zones, LKA, automatic breaking have saved thousands upon thousands of lives.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't also focus on other ways to make streets safer, but there's no way you can pretend that technology hasn't made it safer to drive.
Like yes, technology isn't perfect, but that doesn't mean we can't pursue imperfect, but better technological solutions while also trying to improve safety in other ways.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't use technology to improve safety. I'm saying that we shouldn't pursue them at the expense of pursuing policies that we already know will be effective, and more...
I'm not saying that we shouldn't use technology to improve safety. I'm saying that we shouldn't pursue them at the expense of pursuing policies that we already know will be effective, and more than anything we shouldn't wait for a theoretical when we already know there are solutions that will work. Besides that, most of the things you mentioned are universal because they have government enforcement. Three point seatbelts don't do anything if you don't put them on when you drive, which is why police give tickets if you don't.
As cool as I think matrix headlights are in theory, and they're options on at least some Chinese EVs as well, they don't work perfectly. I think you're right in that we, or at least most...
As cool as I think matrix headlights are in theory, and they're options on at least some Chinese EVs as well, they don't work perfectly.
I think you're right in that we, or at least most corporations/media/governments, are stuck in the loop that we can make the individual devices better instead of refining the system. The second is harder but better and cheaper in the long term.
V2X communication is one of those areas in technology where there is chronically a lot of talk but not a lot of action. Earlier there was 802.11p https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11p which...
V2X communication is one of those areas in technology where there is chronically a lot of talk but not a lot of action. Earlier there was 802.11p
which is a simplified version of WiFi which deletes all the security. There is nothing (technically) to stop you from putting a transmitter in front of your house that makes it look like a demolition derby is going on which might get people to slow down, particularly if it triggers automatic braking.
After 20 years of no progress, Congress took away half the bandwidth allocated to that sort of thing.
Interested has moved to systems that lean on the cellular system
which of course gets the support of the cellular carriers but even if they are getting monthly subscription money they still are unlikely to extend the coverage of the wireless network to really cover where people drive. (Driving around upstate NY I find that the state has cell phone dead spots bigger than some European countries.)
One of the selling points of C-V2X is that it doesn't require a cell network. There's a device to device mode that doesn't require a carrier to exchange messages.
One of the selling points of C-V2X is that it doesn't require a cell network. There's a device to device mode that doesn't require a carrier to exchange messages.
I undestand and agree to your points, but.. imho while we are waiting for a perfect solution, why not implement partially good solution? If it helps at least some cyclist, its already good.
I undestand and agree to your points, but.. imho while we are waiting for a perfect solution, why not implement partially good solution? If it helps at least some cyclist, its already good.
“Waiting for the perfect solution” implies that we don’t already have better options than this, and simultaneously that any such solution would actually get implemented. The reality is that our...
“Waiting for the perfect solution” implies that we don’t already have better options than this, and simultaneously that any such solution would actually get implemented.
The reality is that our politicians do not care about cyclists or pedestrians.
It doesn't imply that we don't have better solutions, just that they're not yet implemented. I don't know why people in this thread are acting like it's a zero sum game, and we can either...
It doesn't imply that we don't have better solutions, just that they're not yet implemented.
I don't know why people in this thread are acting like it's a zero sum game, and we can either implement technology that may save some lives, OR persue safer street designs, and we can't do both things at the same time.
Even if there was zero chance that streets would never be designed to be safer for cyclists, it would still be worth pursuing technology that might make cycling (and driving) safer.
As an aside, it's incorrect the assume that solutions in the urban design space will never be implemented. Many, many cities are investing more heavily pedestrization, and bicycle infrastructure across the US, and cycling as a form of transportation is increasing.
Im consistently surprised by the anti-car comments on tildes. Maybe its the large proportion of EU commenters but there are consistent articles that are anti-car. Is there a subculture of...
Im consistently surprised by the anti-car comments on tildes. Maybe its the large proportion of EU commenters but there are consistent articles that are anti-car. Is there a subculture of automotive derision that Im not aware of?
There's a lot of reasons why one would be anti-car. The infrestructure required to support the mass adoption is unsustainable, makes cities warmer, and come at the expense of walkable...
There's a lot of reasons why one would be anti-car. The infrestructure required to support the mass adoption is unsustainable, makes cities warmer, and come at the expense of walkable neighborhoods; it's a major driver of climate change; the extra expenses act as an unofficial tax because it's necessary to own one to participate in society.... I could probably find more reasons why if I spent a bit more time thinking about it.
True, but what about all the pluses? Allows freedom to travel just about anywhere you can afford to buy gas for - a 1000 km a day if you want. You can camp in them (I do), you can transport MUCH...
True, but what about all the pluses? Allows freedom to travel just about anywhere you can afford to buy gas for - a 1000 km a day if you want. You can camp in them (I do), you can transport MUCH more than a bike or ever could, you can use them as a mobile office, they allow whole families to travel together, they offer privacy and shelter from the environment, they're far more convenient than most public transport, you can play music/talk on the phone privately, you can pull a huge variety of trailers from campers, boats, moving trailers, utility trailers to other vehicles... I honestly could not live my life without a car and its pluses FAR outweigh its negatives. I just find it strange that something that has revolutionized our society and become ubiquitous so just about every household owns at least one actually garners derision. Its an amazing and valuable technological marvel.
If I recall correctly, you live in an extremely rural area and public transportation would be pretty useless to you. But if you live in a city then it's pretty easy to see why these things don't...
If I recall correctly, you live in an extremely rural area and public transportation would be pretty useless to you. But if you live in a city then it's pretty easy to see why these things don't outweigh the negatives. You talk about convenience, but car infrastructure means that things become extremely inconvenient. A grocery store, for instance, won't be in walking distance so you'll need to have a car to shop for food. You need the shelter of your car because the area is not really designed to be comfortable for pedestrians - you're walking out on a sidewalk next to the cars and far away from any buildings or trees that would produce shade.
A lot of the things that you mention are quite easily doable on public transport, and I have no idea why you would think it weren't possible, like transporting families. You can also go anywhere you want with public transportation, though you may need a private carrier if you are trying to go someplace unusual. Some of those use case scenarios are fairly rare, like the need to pull a trailer, and in all cases none of them actually would require you to actually own the vehicle - some of them you don't even need to drive them yourself! We aren't talking about a world entirely devoid of road vehicles.
I find it strange that you find it strange to have this opinion. You said it yourself, there is a lot of anti-car content here on Tildes. Have you actually read any of them? There are some extremely convincing arguments. Here in the US (and probably Canada as well) road infrastructure is quite literally unsustainable - there's too much road to be realistically maintained, and there is a constant demand for more of it. Building a world around cars has caused massive financial and ecological penalties that are only going to get worse if we don't make changes.
I do live rurally now but I lived and worked in a city of 1.6M while my kids were young and growing up. I just dont see how it is feasible with kids. The level of hassle to me is incomprehensible....
I do live rurally now but I lived and worked in a city of 1.6M while my kids were young and growing up. I just dont see how it is feasible with kids. The level of hassle to me is incomprehensible.
A typical couple of days:
8 AM - drive three kids to school (because I worked there too) They were too young to walk so public transit would be the only other option.
3 PM - drive one kid to soccer practice at a field that was across the city - 25 min drive by car, but it would be well over an hour by bus with 3 transfers because the soccer pitch was in an industrial area. Would be difficult to make it to practice by bus.
5 PM - Drive home for supper, then at 6 pm drive another child to piano practice at her teacher's house - 15 min drive but again, could be done by bus, but it would take two transfers plus about 45 min. In winter by the time this is over, it would be dark so there's no way that Id allow the child to travel on the bus alone at night, so that means I would also have to sit with her at her practice for an hour. Instead I take the car to the grocery store three blocks away and getting some shopping done or go have coffee with a friend and am back to pick her up.
7 PM - one of the kids gets invited over for the night at a friends house, again 10 min drive away, but its night so I wouldnt let them take the bus alone, and it would take three times as long as driving. I hop in the car, take her over and back in short order. No problem. If it was only a bus, Id just say they couldnt go.
Next day, I pick her up, bring her home and all five of us head over to our church which was literally across town because that was our denominational affiliation with a 20 minute drive. Bus service on Sun morning is only every half hour so we'd have to leave much earlier, go stand at a bus stop, dressed in our Sunday clothes and wait in the cold of winter for a bus. OR we could just get in our warm car and drive right over.
After church some friends invite us out for lunch at a restaurant and of course we only have to get in the car and follow them there, instead of trying to figure out how to take a bus to the restaurant.
I mean COULD it be done? Yes, if you absolutely didnt and couldnt own a car I suppose it could be, but what a royal pain in the butt to try and coordinate life with a family with no car. And what an incredible waste of time, waiting for buses, or even Ubers or taxis, when you could just get in your own vehicle and go.
I think its feasible only if a person does not value their time or convenience or warmth but no, it doesnt make any sense to me, to give up all of that.
I think I may have missed an important distinction. The anti-car crowd does not simply want to get rid of cars, they want to build a world in which they are unnecessary. Nobody is trying to...
I think I may have missed an important distinction. The anti-car crowd does not simply want to get rid of cars, they want to build a world in which they are unnecessary. Nobody is trying to advocate to live in the way you are describing; they are advocating making changes to the way cities are put together to drastically reduce the amount of hurdles and inconveniences involved.
But I still dont get how a highly evolved public transportation system would supercede personal transportation? Have you never experienced the joy of just getting in a vehicle and just going for a...
But I still dont get how a highly evolved public transportation system would supercede personal transportation? Have you never experienced the joy of just getting in a vehicle and just going for a drive with no particular destination in mind? Getting lost in the country and just taking whatever road looks most interesting? We do this on vacations and have come across the most interesting places and people this way. Thats just not possible when youre with multiple people on a bus, tram, train, or even an Uber.
Why would anyone choose lack of personal freedom to travel and wanderlust for 'efficient' travel? It boggles my mind. To me, since I was 16 driving a vehicle has meant freedom to roam, explore, discover and see new places with ease and no restriction. That's highly valuable, no?
If I am to be perfectly frank, my first reaction to this was that you were making up what you said in your last response. Driving is a miserable experience. I have to drive to work three days a...
If I am to be perfectly frank, my first reaction to this was that you were making up what you said in your last response.
Driving is a miserable experience. I have to drive to work three days a week, and the drive to and from it is the most stressful part of the experience, by far. it takes 2-4 hours of my day, during which I deal with a constant stream of stop-and-go traffic that I can't tune out or risk getting in an accident, especially because seemingly 1 out of 5 drivers is going to do something extremely irresponsible and/or illegal which is even more likely to get me in a crash.
Getting into a car and going nowhere in particular is a fruitless venture. What am I going to find, some slightly different exteriors on buildings? Getting lost in the country is frankly laughable to me, because "the country" here is not only miles away, it's desert. It's a bit hard to get lost in when it's long expanses of mostly flat land with the same flora and fauna for as long as the eyes can see. The best thing I can expect to see is a park, and I won't find that by chance; I actually have to seek them out on a map or else I will never find them on the labyrinth that is our streets.
On the other hand, if the city was designed around walkability, we could get something like the experience you describe simply by walking. You can take a bus down a couple of stops to someplace new and simply walk around and find nice coffee shops, bookstores, or whatever. And once again, if you want to leave the city and visit rural locales, you would still have the option of driving.
The societal need to own a car in a city is a prison. You can't opt out of it. It is the opposite of freedom.
Ah, I see we live in very different places, which is perhaps why we have such different views of driving 'aimlessly'. Within a few hours drive of my house I could be at several lakes, or the Rocky...
Ah, I see we live in very different places, which is perhaps why we have such different views of driving 'aimlessly'. Within a few hours drive of my house I could be at several lakes, or the Rocky Mountains and viewing all kinds of wildlife or better yet, stopping in at one of the most beautiful lakes in the world, Lake Louise, or taking our dune buggy out to the sand dunes, or visiting one of two incredible national parks, or going tobogganing on a ski hill...
But its the serendipitous things that we love so much about 'aimless' driving - like coming across a free street concert that gets everyone up and dancing, or stumbling into an antiques store where we found an amazing rocking chair on sale for $50, or meeting a couple who were bicycling across America who stayed at our campsite for night while they regaled us with their travel tales... just so many good experiences and none of them planned - which is why I guess Im in love with the open road,
When I lived in Europe, I felt that freedom. To walk or bike anywhere in my city. To hop on a train to an entirely different culture and country when I wanted it, in just a couple of hours....
When I lived in Europe, I felt that freedom. To walk or bike anywhere in my city. To hop on a train to an entirely different culture and country when I wanted it, in just a couple of hours. Walking and biking are basically free. Public transit for longer travel was fast and reasonably priced, and even better, I could read a book, work, or nap as I traveled.
Ever since coming back to the USA, the car feels like a goddamn ball and chain. These days you're paying at least $10k for something that doesn't require obscene amounts of work. Expensive to maintain -- easily thousands of dollars in gas, oil, tire changes, belt replacements, filters, etc per year. Needs space to store. God help you if you're a renter and want to maintain two sets of tires. And why do I have one (shared with my spouse, thankfully)? Because we literally NEED one to participate in society. There's no choice. I can't visit my parents, or get groceries, or get a bite to eat, or access a park, in most parts of the USA without one. Even in major cities (other than NYC) you will constantly butt up against car-dominated travel; back when I lived in Denver, it seemed like half the people I met lived so far out in the suburbs that there was no way to meet up with them after work before transit stopped working. And in most cases they lived within 20 miles of me. And that's just personal costs: between road construction, accidents, and other societal impacts of cars, an awful lot of your tax dollars subsidize other people's car use.
And as a frequent bicycle rider and pedestrian, people in giant modern SUVs are constantly misbehaving, driving dangerously and distracted by cellphones, and make our world a noisier, smellier, hotter, uglier place. Just the other day, a 'nicehole' tried to wave me across 4 lanes of traffic at a DO NOT WALK signal. No other cars stopped. When I didn't jump out into traffic, she gave me the finger. I've been screamed at and had objects thrown at me just for riding my bicycle down a residential street (that I lived on at the time!).
Cars kinda suck. And they turn people into assholes. I much prefer walking, biking, and public transit.
Have you never experienced the joy of just walking out of your house with no particular destination? Getting lost and just taking whatever paths look most interesting? You might be able to do that...
Have you never experienced the joy of just walking out of your house with no particular destination? Getting lost and just taking whatever paths look most interesting? You might be able to do that in a rural area, but where I grew up that was not really possible, or at least, it was extremely dangerous and unpleasant, and that was due to car-centric infrastructure.
I live in a walkable city and can do that whenever I want now, and if I wanted to do that in a car, I could easily rent one. You don't need to own a car, or support infrastructure that demands the use of cars, to do all of the things that you enjoy doing with them.
I hear people say they could just rent a car, but even my best car rental experiences is nerve wracking. Do they have the car I want in stock? How long do I have to stand at this counter to get...
I hear people say they could just rent a car, but even my best car rental experiences is nerve wracking. Do they have the car I want in stock? How long do I have to stand at this counter to get signed out? Did the agent see the scratches on the door that I now see and am I going to get charged for that? If I dont fill it up enough will they charge me that exorbitant gas fee? Plus how do I GET to the car rental place? Someone has to drive me there and back since its not even on bus route - all of that just takes the joy and spontaneity out of just "going for a drive".
Thursday night I needed to go into town to get some parts and decided to take my old classic car and on the way I remembered that at a local drive in burger joint, there is a casual gathering of car enthusiasts. So I swung by, did a little drive through, saw some great hot rods and classic cars, picked up a treat for my wife and motored home with the top off and the wind in my face... a thoroughly enjoyable drive that would never happen if I had to go rent a car. I do live 20 km out of town but I would have driven even if I did live in town.
There are a lot of ways to make car rental experiences better that don't require massive infrastructure investments. Meanwhile the way cities are designed makes just walking a nerve wracking...
There are a lot of ways to make car rental experiences better that don't require massive infrastructure investments. Meanwhile the way cities are designed makes just walking a nerve wracking experience. The questions are less varied, it's mostly just "is that car going to hit me?" Over and over again, but that's still quite stressful.
Again, no one is trying to take away your old classic car and the joy you get from it. We just want to be able to get around without one. We want the bus routes to go to those car rental places. We want to be able to walk around and feel the breeze on our faces without panicking that it's a draft from a car that's about to kill us.
It seems like part of your confusion is not understanding that not everyone likes driving. I don't, becauseI'm not good at it. My reflexes aren't good, my instincts are usually wrong, and I get anxious easily. I did the best I could when I had to drive, but it's safer for me and the people around me if I don't have to. I'm not paying attention to the wind on my face, I'm trying to watch all the cars around me to make sure I don't hit them. Every time I park next to a car that has any kind of damage, I panic that maybe I somehow did that while I was parking even if it's geometrically impossible, and wonder if I should leave a note just in case. I don't care about the aesthetic of cars and would be bored to tears at an old car show. I'm sure there are plenty of things that people like that don't spark any interest in you. Now imagine if society was designed around you being unable to work, go to school, get groceries, go to the doctor, see friends, or have any kind of independence if you didn't do that thing. You'd probably want a society where it was safe for you to do things another way, right?
I want to give you an example of what I'm talking about to make it clear why driving is often not a pleasure, and comes at the expense of a walkable environment. This was the last place I lived...
I want to give you an example of what I'm talking about to make it clear why driving is often not a pleasure, and comes at the expense of a walkable environment. This was the last place I lived before I left the US. That road is supposed to be 40 mph (~65 kmph) but people would often go 60mph (~100kmph) down it. Drivers in that area are very aggressive, and most of the drivers were in very large trucks and SUVs. The nearest grocery store was about a 20 minute drive due to a few long stoplights, but if you speed to catch the green lights you can cut that in half. It would be about a half hour walk, which is already pretty uncomfortable in the hot Florida sun with no shade, but the cars speeding along it makes it too dangerous to even consider. You'll notice there's only sidewalk on one side of the road, and no crosswalks. While I was staying there, someone swerved off of that road and hit our car that was parked in the driveway, totaling it. If a person had been standing in that driveway, they would have been lucky to only be hospitalized.
It was extremely unpleasant to drive there - stressful, dangerous, and wandering would only take you to cookie-cutter neighborhoods, the beach, or to the highway which could take you all up and down the coast if you had several hours but nowhere interesting as a spontaneous jaunt. I like the beach as much as anyone, but when you know that it's half an hour in one direction and three in the other, regardless of which roads you take, it sort of kills the surprise. Traffic was always terrible, the wind usually smelled like yucky swamp air, and god help you if your AC broke. It was even more unpleasant to walk there. Beyond unpleasant, it was terrifying.
Yeah, that paints a different picture than what I have imagined. At least the sidewalk is a few feet away from the road, but the lack of a curb certainly makes it less safe for pedestrians if a...
Yeah, that paints a different picture than what I have imagined. At least the sidewalk is a few feet away from the road, but the lack of a curb certainly makes it less safe for pedestrians if a car were to swerve off the road at those speeds.
From all your examples there, it sounds like your public transport options were always substandard (and also only buses?) and not well supported. I’m currently living in Melbourne Australia which...
From all your examples there, it sounds like your public transport options were always substandard (and also only buses?) and not well supported. I’m currently living in Melbourne Australia which has a large metro train network great for long distances, which connects and synchronises to the bus network to get you to where you need to be, and if your destinations are within about 10-15km of the city centre there’s also a frequent tram service. Unless I’m travelling to and from particularly obscure areas, it’s usually only one or two connections.
On weekdays around peak service (anything that gets you into the city by 9am, or leaves the city around 5pm) trains are every 3-4 minutes, and they’re usually packed. I know people do drive into the CBD for work, but it’s much more common to drive to their suburban station and take the train in.
Don’t get me wrong, we still own a car, and it still gets plenty of use. But for most situations, it’s just much more convenient to take public transport. And I think that’s because here, public transport over the decades has had financial support and infrastructure development, whereas it sounds like a lot of North American cities have most of the funds that could have gone into public transport go into car-centric development over the decades instead.
The frustration isn't at the existence of cars, it's at infrastructure that is designed to necessitate them. Cars would still have all of those benefits if they were something that most people did...
The frustration isn't at the existence of cars, it's at infrastructure that is designed to necessitate them. Cars would still have all of those benefits if they were something that most people did not need to own and were either rented or possibly shared as a community for the rare times that you do need to do one of those things.
I honestly could not live my life without a car
Having lived the first 30 years of my life requiring a car, and now living in a place where I don't, and seeing how much my quality of life has improved is exactly why I dislike cars so much.
The anti-car thing was something that I didn't love about Reddit (how /r/fuckcars would leak into other subreddits) and I'm not thrilled seeing it here either. Obviously everyone is entitled to...
The anti-car thing was something that I didn't love about Reddit (how /r/fuckcars would leak into other subreddits) and I'm not thrilled seeing it here either. Obviously everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but anti-car culture is verrrry much the minority in the US (which is why they will never see the changes they want around vehicle speed or size limitations in the US). I've never met someone in real life that hates cars more than the vocal minority here does.
Personal transportation provides a level of freedom that very few people are willing to give up, except for those who actually want to live in a dense urban environment and hardly leave it.
That's all well and good, but the fact of the matter is that climate change is going to force people to get used to cars, certainly new cars, being a luxury item, and that means a lot more people...
That's all well and good, but the fact of the matter is that climate change is going to force people to get used to cars, certainly new cars, being a luxury item, and that means a lot more people that can't afford that basic personal transportation. You forget that America runs off a wageslave class, because downtowns are full of businesses that want to be cheap, and thus all of the people that do the real work in cities all drive in from out of town, often from quite a ways away. What happens when gas price inflation becomes so extreme that it literally stops making economic sense to go to work? How do you propose these downtowns deal with this in the short term other than encouraging ebike use? And how do you make ebikes safe without also having reasonable restrictions on automobiles?
I think we have a while before we move to that extreme. Before, we might move to households going back to having one car that they share instead of every family member having one or more personal...
I think we have a while before we move to that extreme. Before, we might move to households going back to having one car that they share instead of every family member having one or more personal vehicles. Maybe people will need to change from gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs to economic sedans. There are many steps between our current state and ebike being the only option. And I disagree that climate change will be the catalyst that moves American society in that direction.
To be clear, I'm not disagreeing with climate change happening or the effect of vehicles on it, just that it will be what moves the majority of people from cars to ebikes.
I think it will come down to simple economics. Used car prices are sliding, but the actual cost of owning a car is increasing and has been for some time. This is just economic reality, and there...
I think it will come down to simple economics. Used car prices are sliding, but the actual cost of owning a car is increasing and has been for some time. This is just economic reality, and there are no signs of this changing, the cost of everything based on petroleum products is going to continue to sharply increase as we start hitting peak oil. People won't be able to afford maintenance, so yes they'll downsize to one car. But the flip side of that is that if you want to support those one-fewer-car households better? The best way to do it is to support alternative modes of transportation, like ebikes, public transit, increased density so that walking is feasible, etc. Otherwise our society will simply stop working in many places, because nobody will work for the slave wages if they can't commute in from somewhere cheaper.
I should note I mean these are things I expect in the coming years, maybe more on the order of decades. It will take a lot of time and work, but it's just smarter economically to make transportation costs a lower proportion of people's budget. But we also have to do it, because climate change is actually really bad, so the more work we do on it now the better. Hence the kind of desperate tone you get on topics like this online, this is a problem where the work will have to be done inevitably at some point, and the longer you wait the more work needs to be done to make the correction.
Economics aren't worked out in a bubble, though. There are many, many things that people will be willing to give up before their cars. It will certainly be decades before either people give up...
Economics aren't worked out in a bubble, though. There are many, many things that people will be willing to give up before their cars. It will certainly be decades before either people give up personal transportation and public transportation picks up steam outside of cities. This would also involve major infrastructure changes which also tend to take on the order of decades to realize.
I understand the desperate tone, but it's just going to lead to disappointment. The idea of the needle being moved on this with any urgency in the short-term just isn't realistic. Hence, these stopgap solutions were seeing per the original article.
I agree with your points here. I wonder if it was the same way for horses? The advent of cars made them the technological aggressors (I just made that up but it sounds good, lol!) and the ones...
I agree with your points here. I wonder if it was the same way for horses? The advent of cars made them the technological aggressors (I just made that up but it sounds good, lol!) and the ones that changed how everyone else had to interpret the rules of the road. If only horses has stood up for themselves against the horseless carriage!
Also, if cars reliably know their location to that level of precision...why are we not using GPS speed governors? Whenever I've heard this suggested, people always bring up the limited accuracy of...
Also, if cars reliably know their location to that level of precision...why are we not using GPS speed governors?
Whenever I've heard this suggested, people always bring up the limited accuracy of GPS. They endlessly recant stories of when GPS led them astray. But conventional consumer-level GPS isn't the be-and-end-all of location-determination technology. There are a lot of other options out there.
If a car can broadcast its position precise enough to be useful as a means of safely avoiding it, the car knows its position precise enough to have a speed governor installed.
Cars should simply not be able to exceed the posted speed limit. If the speed limits in an area are too low, enforcing them mechanically will encourage people to contact their lawmakers and force them to raise the speed limits on the roads.
And for the unicorn-rare hypothetical scenario of "what if I need to rush my loved one to the hospital?" There's an easy solution for that. Have a big red button on the dash. Have it literally under a pain of glass you have to break to access. When activated, it disables the governor for 24 hours. It also sends a signal to local law enforcement. Activating it without a legitimate emergency will be a misdemeanor criminal offense. If you activate it, you'll have to go in front of a judge and explain what the emergency was. If you had a legit emergency, no problem. If you didn't, well I hope you like taking the bus, as your driving privileges are revoked for a year and your car now belongs to the state.
I'd be pretty uncomfortable with that level of centralized control in charge of my main means of transportation. If your solution was guaranteed to always work 100% of the time, then I wouldn't...
I'd be pretty uncomfortable with that level of centralized control in charge of my main means of transportation.
If your solution was guaranteed to always work 100% of the time, then I wouldn't have as much problem with it in theory, but we live in the real world.
Abuses of power happen, system outages happen, cyber attacks happen. Having my, and everyone else's main form of transportation centrally controlled by some system somewhere that is potentially subject to all of those things isn't something I, or probably most people would be ok with signing up for.
You're uncomfortable because you're not used to it. The thing about a strong public transit system is that when the majority of people people actually depend on it, if there are problems, there...
You're uncomfortable because you're not used to it.
The thing about a strong public transit system is that when the majority of people people actually depend on it, if there are problems, there are going to be a lot of people incensed and forcing people to act. So it's a lot harder for a single person to abuse the system, common outages will have workable alternatives or bypasses, and they are well funded enough to spend money on security so cyber attacks will be less likely - and once again, will likely have some kind of fix or bypass implemented quickly.
Expecting something to work 100% of the time is an unreasonable request. Your car isn't 100% reliable either, both mechanically and in terms of driver ability.
Every e-bike sold has to be sold with a governor on it. Everyone who relies on a bicycle or e-bike is subject to mechanically enforced speed limits. People who rely on public transit lose a great...
Every e-bike sold has to be sold with a governor on it. Everyone who relies on a bicycle or e-bike is subject to mechanically enforced speed limits. People who rely on public transit lose a great deal more freedom of their schedule than GPS governors on cars would impose.
Having my, and everyone else's main form of transportation centrally controlled by some system somewhere that is potentially subject to all of those things isn't something I, or probably most people would be ok with signing up for.
I really need to push back on this. We already accept centralized control for anyone under a certain income level. Anyone who has to rely on public transit has a far greater level of control placed on them. Why are those wealthy enough to afford a car worthy of not having a single restriction placed on their movement? And we're just talking about something that forces car owners to comply with the law. Also, system outages and cyber attacks can already ruin your car commute. Toll systems are subject to this. And imagine if all the stoplights in a city stop working at once. And if someone can hack your GPS governor, why can't they just hack your engine and brick your entire car?
These honestly seem like quite fantastical scenarios, scenarios that already apply to today's computer-rich cars.
We place a lot of restrictions on cars' movements. Speed limits are a thing. Traffic lights are a thing. And the reason we accept centralized control on public transit seems pretty obvious to me....
We place a lot of restrictions on cars' movements. Speed limits are a thing. Traffic lights are a thing.
And the reason we accept centralized control on public transit seems pretty obvious to me. They're owned by an outside authority, which is the whole reason they're public, and not private transit. Centralized control is intrinsic to the entire concept.
It's not intrinsic to private transit. Forcing it in adds an entirely new failure mode to a very complicated system.
And GPS failing isn't farfetched at all. The one on my phone fails multiple times a week. I've watched Uber drivers warp to another block on the app before. GPS jammers are very easy to build and already exist. GPS signals are also very easy to spoof.
The reason why people can hack your GPS governer and not your ECU is because your ECU is not connected to a wireless network. GPS intrinsically relies on a wireless network, and for a system that's being to described to be in any way workable, it would need to be able to apply regular updates to its database via terrestrial wireless networks too.
All of those things add immense complexity and vulnerability to the core functionality of what every car does for a living.
This is a local, offline system instead of a centralised system that relies on external inputs (e.g. gps). Personally I'd be more ok with something like that than the gps limiters described above.
Every e-bike sold has to be sold with a governor on it. Everyone who relies on a bicycle or e-bike is subject to mechanically enforced speed limits.
This is a local, offline system instead of a centralised system that relies on external inputs (e.g. gps).
Personally I'd be more ok with something like that than the gps limiters described above.
OK, so, does peak-hour traffic not cause traffic jams where you live? Cars are the easiest form of transport to jam up.
Having my, and everyone else's main form of transportation centrally controlled by some system somewhere that is potentially subject to all of those things isn't something I, or probably most people would be ok with signing up for.
OK, so, does peak-hour traffic not cause traffic jams where you live? Cars are the easiest form of transport to jam up.
It does, but that's predictable, can be planned around, and isn't the result of a single organization having control of a system. Having a GPS signal able to directly control the speed of my car...
It does, but that's predictable, can be planned around, and isn't the result of a single organization having control of a system. Having a GPS signal able to directly control the speed of my car is none of those things if something goes wrong. It's an additional failure mode that relies on a ton of external infrastructure with many, many potential points of failure.
From a technical standpoint, you're right that this is clearly very achievable. I think most opposition to the suggestion (and why I oppose it) is due more to the discomfort of having the...
From a technical standpoint, you're right that this is clearly very achievable. I think most opposition to the suggestion (and why I oppose it) is due more to the discomfort of having the government so directly control your actions. This is a radical exaggeration, but please bear with me - it feels a little bit like having to walk around in handcuffs so that you don't punch anybody.
I appreciate that this is clearly an emotional issue but I'm not sure how you're looking for me to respond to this. Maybe you're not.
Yet drivers expect that not the slightest restriction or inconvenience be placed on them. They often cry and moan if they don't have free parking feet from their final destination. They often expect entire cities to be built around car travel at the expense of every other form of transport. They often look down on pedestrians and cyclists as sub-human animals.
I appreciate that this is clearly an emotional issue but I'm not sure how you're looking for me to respond to this. Maybe you're not.
There's no way I'm getting something like this for my bike. I've got lights, a bright helmet, and I abide by the road rules. I shouldn't have to buy more stuff just to be safe. Driving a 2 ton car...
There's no way I'm getting something like this for my bike. I've got lights, a bright helmet, and I abide by the road rules. I shouldn't have to buy more stuff just to be safe.
Driving a 2 ton car is simply dangerous, and that fact needs to be taken seriously. The number one way to make biking safer is to build better bike infrastructure.
Other countries manage fine, just search for how much Paris has changed in the past 5 years for cyclists.
Sometimes I agree that technology can be incredibly beneficial to humanity. Other times it just doesn't feel like it. This is one of those things. A bicycle in essence can be made entirely out of...
Sometimes I agree that technology can be incredibly beneficial to humanity. Other times it just doesn't feel like it. This is one of those things. A bicycle in essence can be made entirely out of metal parts and some plastics and be cost-effective and cheap for anyone who wishes to move themselves in a faster fashion.
To then add technology to not fix a problem (, cars) but to also raise the cost of the user, cyclists and support a tech industry that has to come up with solutions and earn their pay to support a problem (again, cars).
New technology is cool and all but I don't think this will really solve anything. What would really help is having better protections around bike infrastructure and re-work the road network to...
New technology is cool and all but I don't think this will really solve anything. What would really help is having better protections around bike infrastructure and re-work the road network to slow people down. No amount of high-visibility jackets, flashing lights, sensors, and more is going to help in my opinion. It's just going to increase costs.
Lol! Another piece of protection for bikers to buy, care for, and carry all so cars don't kill them.
Let's look for more ways to put the onus on the group getting killed. No policy change for grill heigh maximums or standardized bumper heights. No changes to infrastructure that make it safer to bike or walk. No, let's carry around a device that puts a little blinking light on the dash of a car that has also bought the device.
Again, LOL, yes that means they have failed. If safety sensors are built to stop injuries and fatalities then limiting those just to cars is ridiculous. Just because companies have developed solutions for the simplest issue does not make them safe for our streets. Streets aren't just for cars and it's laughable that this is where we are. Highways, sure, but neighborhoods?
No surprise there.
I'm sorry for the language, it's targeted at the article not the poster. I'm just so sick of all these "safety developments" for cycling. We know what makes cyclists, and non-car based travel in general, safer and it's separated infrastructure and limits on car/truck speed, weight, and height. But we don't actually want to solve the issue, we'd prefer to slap another bandaid on a gaping wound because the alternative is spending actual dollars to make our streets work for everyone. But fuck me, I live in the US and that is an un-American thing to say.
To those interested in actual solutions, check out Strong Towns, Complete Street Infrastructure, or any of the great posts u/scroll_lock has posted.
Imagine a world where following up on this, Audi and the VW Group actually also published and stuck to maximum hood heights and vehicle weights and stopping distances!
No, sorry, I’m getting a bit carried away there… the car companies don’t want actual safety for people outside their cars, they just want to cash in brownie points for pretending to care…
This is something of a pattern lately. When I talk about poorly aligned or overly bright headlights, people are quick to say that we should all be using matrix headlights. A technology that, to my knowledge, is exclusive to Audi and VW vehicles and is not legal in the US.
Frankly I am tired of this mindset. Technology is not going to save us from anything. It’s almost always an imperfect stopgap solution. The thing that saves people safe working standards and the policy to enforce it. That doesn’t need us to wait for any kinks to be worked out, nor does it mean having one person collect a huge pile of money for being the only approved provider for the solution. It merely needs people to wake up and take action.
Except technology has saved us from a lot of things, especially when it comes to road safety.
Three point seatbelts, airbags, ABS, crumple zones, LKA, automatic breaking have saved thousands upon thousands of lives.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't also focus on other ways to make streets safer, but there's no way you can pretend that technology hasn't made it safer to drive.
Like yes, technology isn't perfect, but that doesn't mean we can't pursue imperfect, but better technological solutions while also trying to improve safety in other ways.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't use technology to improve safety. I'm saying that we shouldn't pursue them at the expense of pursuing policies that we already know will be effective, and more than anything we shouldn't wait for a theoretical when we already know there are solutions that will work. Besides that, most of the things you mentioned are universal because they have government enforcement. Three point seatbelts don't do anything if you don't put them on when you drive, which is why police give tickets if you don't.
As cool as I think matrix headlights are in theory, and they're options on at least some Chinese EVs as well, they don't work perfectly.
I think you're right in that we, or at least most corporations/media/governments, are stuck in the loop that we can make the individual devices better instead of refining the system. The second is harder but better and cheaper in the long term.
V2X communication is one of those areas in technology where there is chronically a lot of talk but not a lot of action. Earlier there was 802.11p
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11p
which is a simplified version of WiFi which deletes all the security. There is nothing (technically) to stop you from putting a transmitter in front of your house that makes it look like a demolition derby is going on which might get people to slow down, particularly if it triggers automatic braking.
After 20 years of no progress, Congress took away half the bandwidth allocated to that sort of thing.
Interested has moved to systems that lean on the cellular system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_V2X
which of course gets the support of the cellular carriers but even if they are getting monthly subscription money they still are unlikely to extend the coverage of the wireless network to really cover where people drive. (Driving around upstate NY I find that the state has cell phone dead spots bigger than some European countries.)
One of the selling points of C-V2X is that it doesn't require a cell network. There's a device to device mode that doesn't require a carrier to exchange messages.
My understanding though is that it still uses the cellular network for authentication.
I undestand and agree to your points, but.. imho while we are waiting for a perfect solution, why not implement partially good solution? If it helps at least some cyclist, its already good.
“Waiting for the perfect solution” implies that we don’t already have better options than this, and simultaneously that any such solution would actually get implemented.
The reality is that our politicians do not care about cyclists or pedestrians.
It doesn't imply that we don't have better solutions, just that they're not yet implemented.
I don't know why people in this thread are acting like it's a zero sum game, and we can either implement technology that may save some lives, OR persue safer street designs, and we can't do both things at the same time.
Even if there was zero chance that streets would never be designed to be safer for cyclists, it would still be worth pursuing technology that might make cycling (and driving) safer.
As an aside, it's incorrect the assume that solutions in the urban design space will never be implemented. Many, many cities are investing more heavily pedestrization, and bicycle infrastructure across the US, and cycling as a form of transportation is increasing.
Im consistently surprised by the anti-car comments on tildes. Maybe its the large proportion of EU commenters but there are consistent articles that are anti-car. Is there a subculture of automotive derision that Im not aware of?
There's a lot of reasons why one would be anti-car. The infrestructure required to support the mass adoption is unsustainable, makes cities warmer, and come at the expense of walkable neighborhoods; it's a major driver of climate change; the extra expenses act as an unofficial tax because it's necessary to own one to participate in society.... I could probably find more reasons why if I spent a bit more time thinking about it.
True, but what about all the pluses? Allows freedom to travel just about anywhere you can afford to buy gas for - a 1000 km a day if you want. You can camp in them (I do), you can transport MUCH more than a bike or ever could, you can use them as a mobile office, they allow whole families to travel together, they offer privacy and shelter from the environment, they're far more convenient than most public transport, you can play music/talk on the phone privately, you can pull a huge variety of trailers from campers, boats, moving trailers, utility trailers to other vehicles... I honestly could not live my life without a car and its pluses FAR outweigh its negatives. I just find it strange that something that has revolutionized our society and become ubiquitous so just about every household owns at least one actually garners derision. Its an amazing and valuable technological marvel.
If I recall correctly, you live in an extremely rural area and public transportation would be pretty useless to you. But if you live in a city then it's pretty easy to see why these things don't outweigh the negatives. You talk about convenience, but car infrastructure means that things become extremely inconvenient. A grocery store, for instance, won't be in walking distance so you'll need to have a car to shop for food. You need the shelter of your car because the area is not really designed to be comfortable for pedestrians - you're walking out on a sidewalk next to the cars and far away from any buildings or trees that would produce shade.
A lot of the things that you mention are quite easily doable on public transport, and I have no idea why you would think it weren't possible, like transporting families. You can also go anywhere you want with public transportation, though you may need a private carrier if you are trying to go someplace unusual. Some of those use case scenarios are fairly rare, like the need to pull a trailer, and in all cases none of them actually would require you to actually own the vehicle - some of them you don't even need to drive them yourself! We aren't talking about a world entirely devoid of road vehicles.
I find it strange that you find it strange to have this opinion. You said it yourself, there is a lot of anti-car content here on Tildes. Have you actually read any of them? There are some extremely convincing arguments. Here in the US (and probably Canada as well) road infrastructure is quite literally unsustainable - there's too much road to be realistically maintained, and there is a constant demand for more of it. Building a world around cars has caused massive financial and ecological penalties that are only going to get worse if we don't make changes.
I do live rurally now but I lived and worked in a city of 1.6M while my kids were young and growing up. I just dont see how it is feasible with kids. The level of hassle to me is incomprehensible.
A typical couple of days:
8 AM - drive three kids to school (because I worked there too) They were too young to walk so public transit would be the only other option.
3 PM - drive one kid to soccer practice at a field that was across the city - 25 min drive by car, but it would be well over an hour by bus with 3 transfers because the soccer pitch was in an industrial area. Would be difficult to make it to practice by bus.
5 PM - Drive home for supper, then at 6 pm drive another child to piano practice at her teacher's house - 15 min drive but again, could be done by bus, but it would take two transfers plus about 45 min. In winter by the time this is over, it would be dark so there's no way that Id allow the child to travel on the bus alone at night, so that means I would also have to sit with her at her practice for an hour. Instead I take the car to the grocery store three blocks away and getting some shopping done or go have coffee with a friend and am back to pick her up.
7 PM - one of the kids gets invited over for the night at a friends house, again 10 min drive away, but its night so I wouldnt let them take the bus alone, and it would take three times as long as driving. I hop in the car, take her over and back in short order. No problem. If it was only a bus, Id just say they couldnt go.
Next day, I pick her up, bring her home and all five of us head over to our church which was literally across town because that was our denominational affiliation with a 20 minute drive. Bus service on Sun morning is only every half hour so we'd have to leave much earlier, go stand at a bus stop, dressed in our Sunday clothes and wait in the cold of winter for a bus. OR we could just get in our warm car and drive right over.
After church some friends invite us out for lunch at a restaurant and of course we only have to get in the car and follow them there, instead of trying to figure out how to take a bus to the restaurant.
I mean COULD it be done? Yes, if you absolutely didnt and couldnt own a car I suppose it could be, but what a royal pain in the butt to try and coordinate life with a family with no car. And what an incredible waste of time, waiting for buses, or even Ubers or taxis, when you could just get in your own vehicle and go.
I think its feasible only if a person does not value their time or convenience or warmth but no, it doesnt make any sense to me, to give up all of that.
I think I may have missed an important distinction. The anti-car crowd does not simply want to get rid of cars, they want to build a world in which they are unnecessary. Nobody is trying to advocate to live in the way you are describing; they are advocating making changes to the way cities are put together to drastically reduce the amount of hurdles and inconveniences involved.
But I still dont get how a highly evolved public transportation system would supercede personal transportation? Have you never experienced the joy of just getting in a vehicle and just going for a drive with no particular destination in mind? Getting lost in the country and just taking whatever road looks most interesting? We do this on vacations and have come across the most interesting places and people this way. Thats just not possible when youre with multiple people on a bus, tram, train, or even an Uber.
Why would anyone choose lack of personal freedom to travel and wanderlust for 'efficient' travel? It boggles my mind. To me, since I was 16 driving a vehicle has meant freedom to roam, explore, discover and see new places with ease and no restriction. That's highly valuable, no?
If I am to be perfectly frank, my first reaction to this was that you were making up what you said in your last response.
Driving is a miserable experience. I have to drive to work three days a week, and the drive to and from it is the most stressful part of the experience, by far. it takes 2-4 hours of my day, during which I deal with a constant stream of stop-and-go traffic that I can't tune out or risk getting in an accident, especially because seemingly 1 out of 5 drivers is going to do something extremely irresponsible and/or illegal which is even more likely to get me in a crash.
Getting into a car and going nowhere in particular is a fruitless venture. What am I going to find, some slightly different exteriors on buildings? Getting lost in the country is frankly laughable to me, because "the country" here is not only miles away, it's desert. It's a bit hard to get lost in when it's long expanses of mostly flat land with the same flora and fauna for as long as the eyes can see. The best thing I can expect to see is a park, and I won't find that by chance; I actually have to seek them out on a map or else I will never find them on the labyrinth that is our streets.
On the other hand, if the city was designed around walkability, we could get something like the experience you describe simply by walking. You can take a bus down a couple of stops to someplace new and simply walk around and find nice coffee shops, bookstores, or whatever. And once again, if you want to leave the city and visit rural locales, you would still have the option of driving.
The societal need to own a car in a city is a prison. You can't opt out of it. It is the opposite of freedom.
Ah, I see we live in very different places, which is perhaps why we have such different views of driving 'aimlessly'. Within a few hours drive of my house I could be at several lakes, or the Rocky Mountains and viewing all kinds of wildlife or better yet, stopping in at one of the most beautiful lakes in the world, Lake Louise, or taking our dune buggy out to the sand dunes, or visiting one of two incredible national parks, or going tobogganing on a ski hill...
But its the serendipitous things that we love so much about 'aimless' driving - like coming across a free street concert that gets everyone up and dancing, or stumbling into an antiques store where we found an amazing rocking chair on sale for $50, or meeting a couple who were bicycling across America who stayed at our campsite for night while they regaled us with their travel tales... just so many good experiences and none of them planned - which is why I guess Im in love with the open road,
When I lived in Europe, I felt that freedom. To walk or bike anywhere in my city. To hop on a train to an entirely different culture and country when I wanted it, in just a couple of hours. Walking and biking are basically free. Public transit for longer travel was fast and reasonably priced, and even better, I could read a book, work, or nap as I traveled.
Ever since coming back to the USA, the car feels like a goddamn ball and chain. These days you're paying at least $10k for something that doesn't require obscene amounts of work. Expensive to maintain -- easily thousands of dollars in gas, oil, tire changes, belt replacements, filters, etc per year. Needs space to store. God help you if you're a renter and want to maintain two sets of tires. And why do I have one (shared with my spouse, thankfully)? Because we literally NEED one to participate in society. There's no choice. I can't visit my parents, or get groceries, or get a bite to eat, or access a park, in most parts of the USA without one. Even in major cities (other than NYC) you will constantly butt up against car-dominated travel; back when I lived in Denver, it seemed like half the people I met lived so far out in the suburbs that there was no way to meet up with them after work before transit stopped working. And in most cases they lived within 20 miles of me. And that's just personal costs: between road construction, accidents, and other societal impacts of cars, an awful lot of your tax dollars subsidize other people's car use.
And as a frequent bicycle rider and pedestrian, people in giant modern SUVs are constantly misbehaving, driving dangerously and distracted by cellphones, and make our world a noisier, smellier, hotter, uglier place. Just the other day, a 'nicehole' tried to wave me across 4 lanes of traffic at a DO NOT WALK signal. No other cars stopped. When I didn't jump out into traffic, she gave me the finger. I've been screamed at and had objects thrown at me just for riding my bicycle down a residential street (that I lived on at the time!).
Cars kinda suck. And they turn people into assholes. I much prefer walking, biking, and public transit.
Have you never experienced the joy of just walking out of your house with no particular destination? Getting lost and just taking whatever paths look most interesting? You might be able to do that in a rural area, but where I grew up that was not really possible, or at least, it was extremely dangerous and unpleasant, and that was due to car-centric infrastructure.
I live in a walkable city and can do that whenever I want now, and if I wanted to do that in a car, I could easily rent one. You don't need to own a car, or support infrastructure that demands the use of cars, to do all of the things that you enjoy doing with them.
I hear people say they could just rent a car, but even my best car rental experiences is nerve wracking. Do they have the car I want in stock? How long do I have to stand at this counter to get signed out? Did the agent see the scratches on the door that I now see and am I going to get charged for that? If I dont fill it up enough will they charge me that exorbitant gas fee? Plus how do I GET to the car rental place? Someone has to drive me there and back since its not even on bus route - all of that just takes the joy and spontaneity out of just "going for a drive".
Thursday night I needed to go into town to get some parts and decided to take my old classic car and on the way I remembered that at a local drive in burger joint, there is a casual gathering of car enthusiasts. So I swung by, did a little drive through, saw some great hot rods and classic cars, picked up a treat for my wife and motored home with the top off and the wind in my face... a thoroughly enjoyable drive that would never happen if I had to go rent a car. I do live 20 km out of town but I would have driven even if I did live in town.
There are a lot of ways to make car rental experiences better that don't require massive infrastructure investments. Meanwhile the way cities are designed makes just walking a nerve wracking experience. The questions are less varied, it's mostly just "is that car going to hit me?" Over and over again, but that's still quite stressful.
Again, no one is trying to take away your old classic car and the joy you get from it. We just want to be able to get around without one. We want the bus routes to go to those car rental places. We want to be able to walk around and feel the breeze on our faces without panicking that it's a draft from a car that's about to kill us.
It seems like part of your confusion is not understanding that not everyone likes driving. I don't, becauseI'm not good at it. My reflexes aren't good, my instincts are usually wrong, and I get anxious easily. I did the best I could when I had to drive, but it's safer for me and the people around me if I don't have to. I'm not paying attention to the wind on my face, I'm trying to watch all the cars around me to make sure I don't hit them. Every time I park next to a car that has any kind of damage, I panic that maybe I somehow did that while I was parking even if it's geometrically impossible, and wonder if I should leave a note just in case. I don't care about the aesthetic of cars and would be bored to tears at an old car show. I'm sure there are plenty of things that people like that don't spark any interest in you. Now imagine if society was designed around you being unable to work, go to school, get groceries, go to the doctor, see friends, or have any kind of independence if you didn't do that thing. You'd probably want a society where it was safe for you to do things another way, right?
I want to give you an example of what I'm talking about to make it clear why driving is often not a pleasure, and comes at the expense of a walkable environment. This was the last place I lived before I left the US. That road is supposed to be 40 mph (~65 kmph) but people would often go 60mph (~100kmph) down it. Drivers in that area are very aggressive, and most of the drivers were in very large trucks and SUVs. The nearest grocery store was about a 20 minute drive due to a few long stoplights, but if you speed to catch the green lights you can cut that in half. It would be about a half hour walk, which is already pretty uncomfortable in the hot Florida sun with no shade, but the cars speeding along it makes it too dangerous to even consider. You'll notice there's only sidewalk on one side of the road, and no crosswalks. While I was staying there, someone swerved off of that road and hit our car that was parked in the driveway, totaling it. If a person had been standing in that driveway, they would have been lucky to only be hospitalized.
It was extremely unpleasant to drive there - stressful, dangerous, and wandering would only take you to cookie-cutter neighborhoods, the beach, or to the highway which could take you all up and down the coast if you had several hours but nowhere interesting as a spontaneous jaunt. I like the beach as much as anyone, but when you know that it's half an hour in one direction and three in the other, regardless of which roads you take, it sort of kills the surprise. Traffic was always terrible, the wind usually smelled like yucky swamp air, and god help you if your AC broke. It was even more unpleasant to walk there. Beyond unpleasant, it was terrifying.
Yeah, that paints a different picture than what I have imagined. At least the sidewalk is a few feet away from the road, but the lack of a curb certainly makes it less safe for pedestrians if a car were to swerve off the road at those speeds.
From all your examples there, it sounds like your public transport options were always substandard (and also only buses?) and not well supported. I’m currently living in Melbourne Australia which has a large metro train network great for long distances, which connects and synchronises to the bus network to get you to where you need to be, and if your destinations are within about 10-15km of the city centre there’s also a frequent tram service. Unless I’m travelling to and from particularly obscure areas, it’s usually only one or two connections.
On weekdays around peak service (anything that gets you into the city by 9am, or leaves the city around 5pm) trains are every 3-4 minutes, and they’re usually packed. I know people do drive into the CBD for work, but it’s much more common to drive to their suburban station and take the train in.
Don’t get me wrong, we still own a car, and it still gets plenty of use. But for most situations, it’s just much more convenient to take public transport. And I think that’s because here, public transport over the decades has had financial support and infrastructure development, whereas it sounds like a lot of North American cities have most of the funds that could have gone into public transport go into car-centric development over the decades instead.
The frustration isn't at the existence of cars, it's at infrastructure that is designed to necessitate them. Cars would still have all of those benefits if they were something that most people did not need to own and were either rented or possibly shared as a community for the rare times that you do need to do one of those things.
Having lived the first 30 years of my life requiring a car, and now living in a place where I don't, and seeing how much my quality of life has improved is exactly why I dislike cars so much.
The anti-car thing was something that I didn't love about Reddit (how /r/fuckcars would leak into other subreddits) and I'm not thrilled seeing it here either. Obviously everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but anti-car culture is verrrry much the minority in the US (which is why they will never see the changes they want around vehicle speed or size limitations in the US). I've never met someone in real life that hates cars more than the vocal minority here does.
Personal transportation provides a level of freedom that very few people are willing to give up, except for those who actually want to live in a dense urban environment and hardly leave it.
That's all well and good, but the fact of the matter is that climate change is going to force people to get used to cars, certainly new cars, being a luxury item, and that means a lot more people that can't afford that basic personal transportation. You forget that America runs off a wageslave class, because downtowns are full of businesses that want to be cheap, and thus all of the people that do the real work in cities all drive in from out of town, often from quite a ways away. What happens when gas price inflation becomes so extreme that it literally stops making economic sense to go to work? How do you propose these downtowns deal with this in the short term other than encouraging ebike use? And how do you make ebikes safe without also having reasonable restrictions on automobiles?
I think we have a while before we move to that extreme. Before, we might move to households going back to having one car that they share instead of every family member having one or more personal vehicles. Maybe people will need to change from gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs to economic sedans. There are many steps between our current state and ebike being the only option. And I disagree that climate change will be the catalyst that moves American society in that direction.
To be clear, I'm not disagreeing with climate change happening or the effect of vehicles on it, just that it will be what moves the majority of people from cars to ebikes.
I think it will come down to simple economics. Used car prices are sliding, but the actual cost of owning a car is increasing and has been for some time. This is just economic reality, and there are no signs of this changing, the cost of everything based on petroleum products is going to continue to sharply increase as we start hitting peak oil. People won't be able to afford maintenance, so yes they'll downsize to one car. But the flip side of that is that if you want to support those one-fewer-car households better? The best way to do it is to support alternative modes of transportation, like ebikes, public transit, increased density so that walking is feasible, etc. Otherwise our society will simply stop working in many places, because nobody will work for the slave wages if they can't commute in from somewhere cheaper.
I should note I mean these are things I expect in the coming years, maybe more on the order of decades. It will take a lot of time and work, but it's just smarter economically to make transportation costs a lower proportion of people's budget. But we also have to do it, because climate change is actually really bad, so the more work we do on it now the better. Hence the kind of desperate tone you get on topics like this online, this is a problem where the work will have to be done inevitably at some point, and the longer you wait the more work needs to be done to make the correction.
Economics aren't worked out in a bubble, though. There are many, many things that people will be willing to give up before their cars. It will certainly be decades before either people give up personal transportation and public transportation picks up steam outside of cities. This would also involve major infrastructure changes which also tend to take on the order of decades to realize.
I understand the desperate tone, but it's just going to lead to disappointment. The idea of the needle being moved on this with any urgency in the short-term just isn't realistic. Hence, these stopgap solutions were seeing per the original article.
I agree with your points here. I wonder if it was the same way for horses? The advent of cars made them the technological aggressors (I just made that up but it sounds good, lol!) and the ones that changed how everyone else had to interpret the rules of the road. If only horses has stood up for themselves against the horseless carriage!
Also, if cars reliably know their location to that level of precision...why are we not using GPS speed governors?
Whenever I've heard this suggested, people always bring up the limited accuracy of GPS. They endlessly recant stories of when GPS led them astray. But conventional consumer-level GPS isn't the be-and-end-all of location-determination technology. There are a lot of other options out there.
If a car can broadcast its position precise enough to be useful as a means of safely avoiding it, the car knows its position precise enough to have a speed governor installed.
Cars should simply not be able to exceed the posted speed limit. If the speed limits in an area are too low, enforcing them mechanically will encourage people to contact their lawmakers and force them to raise the speed limits on the roads.
And for the unicorn-rare hypothetical scenario of "what if I need to rush my loved one to the hospital?" There's an easy solution for that. Have a big red button on the dash. Have it literally under a pain of glass you have to break to access. When activated, it disables the governor for 24 hours. It also sends a signal to local law enforcement. Activating it without a legitimate emergency will be a misdemeanor criminal offense. If you activate it, you'll have to go in front of a judge and explain what the emergency was. If you had a legit emergency, no problem. If you didn't, well I hope you like taking the bus, as your driving privileges are revoked for a year and your car now belongs to the state.
I'd be pretty uncomfortable with that level of centralized control in charge of my main means of transportation.
If your solution was guaranteed to always work 100% of the time, then I wouldn't have as much problem with it in theory, but we live in the real world.
Abuses of power happen, system outages happen, cyber attacks happen. Having my, and everyone else's main form of transportation centrally controlled by some system somewhere that is potentially subject to all of those things isn't something I, or probably most people would be ok with signing up for.
You're uncomfortable because you're not used to it.
The thing about a strong public transit system is that when the majority of people people actually depend on it, if there are problems, there are going to be a lot of people incensed and forcing people to act. So it's a lot harder for a single person to abuse the system, common outages will have workable alternatives or bypasses, and they are well funded enough to spend money on security so cyber attacks will be less likely - and once again, will likely have some kind of fix or bypass implemented quickly.
Expecting something to work 100% of the time is an unreasonable request. Your car isn't 100% reliable either, both mechanically and in terms of driver ability.
Every e-bike sold has to be sold with a governor on it. Everyone who relies on a bicycle or e-bike is subject to mechanically enforced speed limits. People who rely on public transit lose a great deal more freedom of their schedule than GPS governors on cars would impose.
I really need to push back on this. We already accept centralized control for anyone under a certain income level. Anyone who has to rely on public transit has a far greater level of control placed on them. Why are those wealthy enough to afford a car worthy of not having a single restriction placed on their movement? And we're just talking about something that forces car owners to comply with the law. Also, system outages and cyber attacks can already ruin your car commute. Toll systems are subject to this. And imagine if all the stoplights in a city stop working at once. And if someone can hack your GPS governor, why can't they just hack your engine and brick your entire car?
These honestly seem like quite fantastical scenarios, scenarios that already apply to today's computer-rich cars.
We place a lot of restrictions on cars' movements. Speed limits are a thing. Traffic lights are a thing.
And the reason we accept centralized control on public transit seems pretty obvious to me. They're owned by an outside authority, which is the whole reason they're public, and not private transit. Centralized control is intrinsic to the entire concept.
It's not intrinsic to private transit. Forcing it in adds an entirely new failure mode to a very complicated system.
And GPS failing isn't farfetched at all. The one on my phone fails multiple times a week. I've watched Uber drivers warp to another block on the app before. GPS jammers are very easy to build and already exist. GPS signals are also very easy to spoof.
The reason why people can hack your GPS governer and not your ECU is because your ECU is not connected to a wireless network. GPS intrinsically relies on a wireless network, and for a system that's being to described to be in any way workable, it would need to be able to apply regular updates to its database via terrestrial wireless networks too.
All of those things add immense complexity and vulnerability to the core functionality of what every car does for a living.
This is a local, offline system instead of a centralised system that relies on external inputs (e.g. gps).
Personally I'd be more ok with something like that than the gps limiters described above.
OK, so, does peak-hour traffic not cause traffic jams where you live? Cars are the easiest form of transport to jam up.
It does, but that's predictable, can be planned around, and isn't the result of a single organization having control of a system. Having a GPS signal able to directly control the speed of my car is none of those things if something goes wrong. It's an additional failure mode that relies on a ton of external infrastructure with many, many potential points of failure.
From a technical standpoint, you're right that this is clearly very achievable. I think most opposition to the suggestion (and why I oppose it) is due more to the discomfort of having the government so directly control your actions. This is a radical exaggeration, but please bear with me - it feels a little bit like having to walk around in handcuffs so that you don't punch anybody.
I appreciate that this is clearly an emotional issue but I'm not sure how you're looking for me to respond to this. Maybe you're not.
There's no way I'm getting something like this for my bike. I've got lights, a bright helmet, and I abide by the road rules. I shouldn't have to buy more stuff just to be safe.
Driving a 2 ton car is simply dangerous, and that fact needs to be taken seriously. The number one way to make biking safer is to build better bike infrastructure.
Other countries manage fine, just search for how much Paris has changed in the past 5 years for cyclists.
Sometimes I agree that technology can be incredibly beneficial to humanity. Other times it just doesn't feel like it. This is one of those things. A bicycle in essence can be made entirely out of metal parts and some plastics and be cost-effective and cheap for anyone who wishes to move themselves in a faster fashion.
To then add technology to not fix a problem (, cars) but to also raise the cost of the user, cyclists and support a tech industry that has to come up with solutions and earn their pay to support a problem (again, cars).
New technology is cool and all but I don't think this will really solve anything. What would really help is having better protections around bike infrastructure and re-work the road network to slow people down. No amount of high-visibility jackets, flashing lights, sensors, and more is going to help in my opinion. It's just going to increase costs.