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One addition to this is also winter upkeep, which is very relevant in Finland.
People like to talk about “winter cycling”, because it’s somehow so much different from “every other season cycling”. Mainly it comes down to winter upkeep; snow plowing and such. Then some people complain how nobody rides in the winter and they shouldn’t use too much budget for it.
It would be fun to see people talk about “winter driving”. How much we actually spend making driving possible during the winter.
Where I live in the US that’s in the millions, hundreds of millions even. Also, if that budget dries up then they don’t plow shit. They’ll usually get an emergency fund but it takes a few days, while it’s snowing…
It’s not just spending money. In my city, we’re poisoning the groundwater with road salt to support winter driving. One well near me has sodium levels in the water high enough that the water utility has issued a no-drink advisory for people with hypertension.
Can confirm.
My car has been “on loan” to my parents for a year. I’m lucky to live in an area with decent public trans, but my sense of freedom is definitely vastly diminished.
Buy a bike, and often that sense of freedom comes back.
Still getting around, still able to use public transit at its best, but also able to fill in the other parts of trips with a form of low-stress exercise.
I get the feeling you’re not from the US. In the vast majority of US cities, bike infrastructure is either non-existent, or so limited/unprotected that it’s still dangerous to use.
Let me try to give a good comparison. Telling people to switch to biking in US cities is like telling someone to switch to biking on the Autobahn. It’s impractical, it’s dangerous, and often it’s even illegal. You might think that’s hyperbole, but I promise it’s not. For many major cities, 40 MPH (65 KPH) is considered a low speed, found on side-streets and other non-major roads; in neighborhoods, where kids play, it drops down to 30 MPH. On highways, you’re looking at 50 MPH minimum, sometimes up to 75 MPH, and these are inner-city highways.
Americans don’t choose not to bike out of laziness, but because, in most places, biking as a form of transportation will get you killed.
I am American, but I’m lucky enough to live in a city where bikes are relatively practical.
…i have slight beef with that.
- We made cars more complicated than they need to be due to electronic systems and all that. I don’t say that we should simply go back, that’s dumb. But I cannot help but wonder if a line of simple, less advanced ICE cars promoted on their ease of maintenance wouldn’t get popular with, for example, rural folks. After all, being able to fix the beast yourself would lover your costs a lot.
- Walkable cities are great, I know cause I live in one. My city (or town?) has around 7 km length (at least the parts that matter). Distance an average person can go in ~70, maybe 80 minutes by foot. But if I wanted to hit the relatively nearby lake or beach, getting there by foot is another story. And yeah, bikes exists and make it easier but if I need to hit another city that is 60km from here…yeah.
- Author also forgot that these companies won’t fail, because these are not “one and only” of each in the world. Each contry, hell, each county has multiple of them. It’s highly unrealistic for them to all fail at the same time.
We didn’t make cars more complicated because “of the electronics” or “because we had to”.
Car companies make cars more complicated because they make huge amounts of money from warranties, maintenance that you can’t do yourself for some reason, and of course the leases.
Cars being as complicated and impossible to work on as they are today is because line must go up. Everything else is propaganda.
maintenance that you can’t do yourself for some reason
Also helps hide shoddy low quality parts.
The condensers on 2017-2021 Honda Civics are basically guaranteed to fail. There’s a warranty, but the only people who can open up the AC are the dealerships, who have been trained to find some speck of dust to justify denying the warranty.
It really fucking sucks - I’d love the option of being able to make some money on doordash, but the “reliable” Honda Civic I bought gets up to 100+ F with the air on full blast.
That’s…effectively what they said. The added electronics make it infeasible for normal people to maintain their own vehicles. They never speculated on why the electronics were added.
The way you came at them makes it seem like they’re provided a scapegoat when they didn’t.
Edit: I regret stepping into an arena against a pedant with an axe to grind.
But “electronics” don’t mean “impossible to repair yourself”. And to be clear, I’m not expecting someone to become a shade tree mechanic. Remember, “right to repair” also includes the ability to go to a 3rd party repair service.
But requiring your mechanic to buy $15k+ in licensing per year, making specialized (and proprietary) fasteners, taking months to get replacement parts to the mechanic, or not honoring warranty because you went out of network are not things that are intrinsic with an electronic system.
- Also implied that other methods of transportation are devoid of failure points.
Sure wish I lived in a walkable city though 😢
But I cannot help but wonder if a line of simple, less advanced ICE cars promoted on their ease of maintenance wouldn’t get popular with, for example, rural folks. After all, being able to fix the beast yourself would lover your costs a lot
No car company will make a car which is maintainable by a common man because it affects their bottom line. We can dream of alternate concepts (open-source car design/metal 3D printing) but government regulations and lobbying will kill such concepts. We have to focus on the current scenario.
But if I wanted to hit the relatively nearby lake or beach, getting there by foot is another story
The majority of the anti-car people are not saying “destroy all cars. Nobody should have cars”. We are just saying “please don’t make our entire lives car-dependent. Please design cities/governments/social life in such a way so that it’s accessible to non-car folks.”
I also have a car, but I only use it for going to places which are not reachable by public transport. For traveling to work, I use public transport 5 days a week. Cars should be (IMO) a recreational mode of transport.
Author also forgot that these companies won’t fail, because these are not “one and only” of each in the world
I agree with you; they won’t fail. However, they surely can make our lives hell if they want to. This is a power that I don’t want them to have over me.
I grew up with great public transit, and having access to a bicycle, (NYC.) In my 20s I realized that attempting to own and maintain a car would be so expensive that I would not be able to save money for the future. I ride my bike everywhere. If I want to go somewhere more than 50 miles away, or where transit doesn’t go, I rent a car. I rent a car maybe 2x a year tops. Depending on how long I’m renting the car I probably spend $400 a year on rentals + insurance. My last bike I had for 20 years. Cost me $1400 brand new, spread that cost out over 20 years, owning the bike cost me $70 a year. It was easy to repair myself, and the tools to repair it were inexpensive to purchase. Fuck cars indeed.
true but America hates public transportation
Me, 15 miles from town, independently waiting for the bus to arrive (it’s a hour long ride, and only comes twice a week):
Owning or renting a home has the same requirements of dependency on multiple companies. Sure, in a city or large town or even some.small towns we could live without cars if we built the infrastructure.
But there will always be rural areas where cars make sense. Insurance would be a lot cheaper without all the city folk driving…
In Japan they have rail lines that seamlessly integrate with the metro system of large cities.
And even if cars for rural users is necessary, their driving experience will be much smoother if all the other people have good access to transit.
Japan is an extremely small and dense country with actually very little rural areas, so I’m not sure if that really answers the other person’s questions.
The main island has a land area of about the 13th largest state, Utah. But Utah has about 35 people/sq mile, compared to Japan with almost 1200 people/sq mile.
America is really rural and rural areas are really far apart from each other. Growing up my nearest neighbor was about a 10 min drive down the road. And I wasn’t even that rural, I went to a normal school with a normal school bus.
Once again, this is a silly argument, which this tautology makes obvious: Most Americans live where most Americans live. A full third of the U.S. land area is USFS or BLM land on which nobody lives, and the sparsely-populated areas of the rest are just that: sparsely-populated. Utah has only 3.3 million inhabitants, which is 0.9% of the national population. But even they’re not rural! Most Utahns live in a handful of metro areas; the Salt Lake City region has areas with population density over 5,000 people per square mile.
The United States is overwhelmingly urban, and the number of people who live in really rural areas is basically a rounding error.
Sure but this comment chain is specifically talking about rural people. And none of that changes that whats considered “rural” in Japan, would barely be considered “suburbs” in the US.
Yes, the US should absolutely be investing in mass transit and inter-city rail. But using Japan or other European countries as “an example of how it should be done!” is just dismissive of the actual size of the US and shows me that you haven’t thought about it any more than just “trains = good; cars = bad”, and is outright disrespectful of the population that you will need to serve.
Something like 10% of the population lives in towns under 10k. That’s not what I would consider “a rounding error”.
Yes, that would be the best outcome and comparable to early US settlement where most towns had rail to connect each other and most people even in small towns didn’t maintain their own horses. Of course travel back then required a lot more planning, which is why automobiles were able to successfully promote themselves as providing independence because they do. They do provide independence, and I can attest that as a kid when cars were easy to maintain they did provide independence in rural areas and still do!
They don’t provide indeoendence in congested cities suffering from urban sprawl and loss of mass transit, which is where the comic is accurate.
In rural areas everyone uses either bikes or railways.
How do I get to and then around Michigan’s Upper Peninsula? I don’t want to go be in cities like at all? What’s the plan for that?
You use a car.
Do not mistake cars being appropriate for the 20% of population that’s rural for them being appropriate for the 80% of population that’s urban, 'cause they’re not.
Isn’t anyone else disturbed by the concept of independence being a problem for this person?
I’d like more public transportation in America, but I’m not really interested in anything else they have to say.
The concept of independence can be a problem because it tends to manifest in a “I’m a lone ranger that doesn’t need anyone” mentality.
If you’re someone who generally just wants to live alone off-grid in a cabin in the woods and interact with people once a year that’s fine.
If you’re massively dependent on your neighbors and international trade and are in a self-destructive anger spiral about it because the realities of living in society damage your sense of self-worth, which has been tied to the fiction that everyone is an island, it’s an issue.
So if you value independence over community and you’re an asshole, then that’s a problem.
On the other hand, if you value community over independence and you’re an asshole: also a problem.
We can extrapolate further and say that if you drink water and are an asshole: also not good. I don’t think drinking water is the problem in that case.
No, because your premise is incorrect. This person is completely in support of the concept of independence, but simply rejects the notion that car-dependency provides it. Real independence is achieved by removing the dependency on cars.
You didn’t read the second line?
“Now the whole idea of independence is a messy social construct with a bunch of issues that I won’t get into right now.”
I don’t see how anyone could interpret that as anything other than a blanket statement about independence.
I searched up the artist to find more evidence and saw that I wasn’t the only one who thought that, because they posted a follow-up attempting to clarify that specific line. The clarification just reiterates the point of the original comic and doesn’t try to explain why that phrasing was used or what it could have meant.
So maybe they just phrased it poorly, but I’m not the only one who took issue with it.
Acknowledging that a concept is complicated is different from being opposed to it. You deciding to interpret the statement the latter way instead of the former is your own problem, not theirs.
They literally say:
“Now the whole idea of independence is a messy social construct with a bunch of issues that I won’t get into right now.”
(Emphasis mine). They are not just saying, “it’s complicated.” They literally use the word “issues.”
Yeah. And “issues” means “issues,” which is not the same as “bad.”
“Issues” in this context means “problems”, and problems are bad.
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How is claiming that independence is a complicated, nuanced concept problematic?
It sounds like you are interpreting it as if they are saying it doesn’t exist or something similar which is not at all what they said.
Thank you for wording it so eloquently.
I learned quickly the car took away my freedom. I needed a car to get a job.
I was suddenly forced to have a job to pay an auto loan. By the time I paid the loan I needed a new car as the first broke down.
Then I needed my job to pay for the 2nd car. If I lived closer to the city with public transport I likely would have never gotten a car in the first place.
With a car, you can fix it yourself if you are determined enough. However, if you’re using public transport, the same arguments apply + now things are enirely out of your control. There’s no way in hell the public transport company will let you tinker with their broken stuff. The insurance company can pull out of them at any time for any reason. The company can go bankrupt, etc.
i feel like independance and not having to rely on someone would work better as an argument for the car.
Consider a bicycle. Very low maintenance, simple to fix, no need for fuel, unlimited range. Complete independence, with the sole exception of winter maintenance of paths, but that’s also a problem for cars and public transport.
This would 100% fix the comic for me
In the past 25 years I’ve used public transport, I think the bus broke down once while I was aboard, and I think it ended up in the newspaper. I think it’s a good thing public transport folks spend a lot of time maintaining the vehicles and especially on regular preventive maintenance.
I can barely fix my bicycle, so I don’t want to tinker with the bus company’s broken stuff. I trust that stuff to the certified mechanics they employ. Doubly so for trains, that’s for some serious mechanics only.
No matter how determined I was to work on my car, it didn’t matter. That shit sucks, is hard to do, especially if you don’t have previous experience.
Also, cars today aren’t roomy 1990’s (or before) engines. They pack it so tight in there, with the need to specialized tools and knowledge.
Cars have become increasingly hard to work on oneself. Especially as computers and mechanical engines have been fused together.
I’d rather have my bike with a lane, or a sidewalk, lined with trees, than have stroads with rubber dust, smog, and noise, uninhabitable to pedestrians.
I guess you’re right. Personally, I’ve done some maintainance on my car as well as some basic repair, but I can understand that it’s not for everyone.
And yeah, as the other commentor pointed out bikes seem like a better symbol.
