Because many of us live in places where you must use a car, there are no alternatives
In such places electric public transport is nothing but a pipe dream
I dunno what country you are from, but here in the US of A, the monopolies that own all the train infrastructure make sure to keep trains as public transportation as cost prohibitive as possible.
This always reminds me of the movie, Roger Rabbit. I was a kid and the movie taught me a much deeper/darker lesson than it was meant to teach me at that age. It still irks me.
I used to watch roger rabbit as a kid for other reasons
I think I know exactly what you mean and I was in 3rd grade.
since wen this sub is full of carbrain? like bruh.
I am amazed as well. Did they just sub every community with the word ‘car’ in it?
no idea but its just sad. even the reddit version is beter.
Making up slurs like “carbrain” for people who think differently than your echo chamber is fuckin’ lame as shit. You look gross from the outside, FYI. Found this post by sorting my “All” feed by Hot, not a member of your echo chamber.
Carbrain can be pretty succinctly defined as thinking this tiny little online community is the echo chamber, and not your entire car-default existence in your car-default country with your car-default parents neighbors teachers transit networks and policies
OK sure, you’re the majority. Let me know when you succeed in remodeling all the metropolitan areas of America with your great influence.
Until then, I’ll be happily driving around to wherever I please in my cars or on my motorcycle.
Yeah, I’m not sure you read that correctly, but you did switch from ‘oh no I’m being bullied’ to ‘haha nobody cares nerd’ so maybe you did figure it out. Anyway, nobody cares that you have a car, it wasn’t even your choice to get one.
haha nobody cares nerd
I would just settle for sidewalks, where I live in the USA it’s just streets with no sidewalks everywhere. I used to live one mile from where I worked and I could barely even bike there because of crazy car drivers and nowhere to go if someone wasn’t paying attention. Rural America is going to be car dependent for a long, long time.
I agree that cars still have their place for trips where transit isn’t practical. I’ve used Economy Rent A Car phone number for that kind of flexibility, and their page is useful for checking rental details, reservations, cancellations, payments, returns, and insurance info in one place.
Trains aren’t 100% the answer, but cars should be the last answer. Still we should electrify cars.
Electric cars don’t solve a lot of the root problems of cars. They still require massive amounts of energy to move thousands of pounds of steel. They also still rely on sprawling roads and parking lots.
Absolutely. And the benefit trains have over cars is that you can reduce the amount of other stuff per person needed to get people moving.
For a local train of mine that seats 93 people with empty weight of 54 metric tons, that comes out to ~0.58 tons/person.
My sedan weighs in at about 1.5 metric tons empty, and since I’m the only one that uses it, my weight footprint is ~1.5 tons/person.
Forget about fuel economy too. Trains don’t have traffic (most of the time) to deal with, meaning they can accelerate to coasting speeds and spend most of the ride at best-efficiency. Cars are subject to traffic conditions, meaning efficiency can be as-designed by the manufacturer, or it can be much, much worse on a per trip basis if you contribute to the daily rush hours on freeways.
There is also much less friction on rails compared to rubber on roadways. If demand increases the length of the train can be increased or more trains added. This helps prevent the cycle of needing more lanes (rail lines in this case).
How many trains run from my garage to the convenience store at anytime I want? Or from my garage to work at anytime between 8 and 9 am and then home at whatever time I want to leave? What about the trains that run to my mother’s house or my sister’s house in different cities? What about the one that goes to the snowboarding resort I like it in the boonies, or for that matter, the one in the middle of the mountains? I will never live in an apartment with other people for many different reasons, and it gets both miserably hot and dangerously cold where I live. There are plenty of other things to fix before going after vehicles, especially electric vehicles. Making me operate on some strict schedule with trains and buses it other public transportation takes away my freedom to do what I want, and I will fight tooth and nail to make sure that’s not taken from me, especially when both can coexist.
My city has metro lines that run every 3 to 5 minutes all day every day, and riding the metro affords me the freedom to do something, anything besides keeping my eyes on the road. I agree that adhering to the schedule of a train that comes every hour (or half-hour) sucks, but it doesn’t have to be that way. My city is also building an automated light metro that will run every 2.5 minutes.
If we talked more about building quality trains places, and building good bike infrastructure for micromobility like bikes and e-scooters, train + micromobility would feel far more free than being caged in traffic. In my city, that’s how it currently is for me. Metro + my electric scooter makes me feel crazy free within the city. Only thing I wish is they would build even more trains, including to the nearby mountains so I could easily go hiking and camping, too.
Scooters and bikes are not viable when it’s literally freezing outside, especially with bad weather conditions. Unless there is transportation literally right out of my door, I would sooner keep my eyes on the road and drive myself. Trains and buses don’t stop at the gas station on my way into work to grab my drink for the day, and if they do, they aren’t waiting for me. If I need to run some errands, like go to the doctor or run to the hardware store, that is significantly less convenient with public transportation. I just got 4 bags of softener salt the other day that totaled 160 lbs. Not a chance I would try to lug that on a bike or carry it on and off a bus or train. I’m not saying I wouldn’t use it sometimes, and have in cities like Minneapolis and New York, but I was visiting and either didn’t have a car or wasn’t in condition to drive so worked around it. Again, they can coexist , but fighting electric vehicles of all things is a dumb fight.
I live in Canada. I rode my scooter to work all winter (including in -14 celsius weather) without issue thanks to good bike infrastructure that gets plowed promptly. Quite a few cyclists in my city do the same, as it’s actually not nearly as bad as you might imagine it, provided your city actually cares about bike infrastructure. It was actually pretty fun.
For more, there are cargo ebikes or even just renting a car for the occasions that you do need to carry heavy stuff. And for most average people, we don’t lug around 160 lbs on a daily basis.
My point in all of this is not that we should make a car-free society. It’s that our focus on “oh, let’s just switch to EVs and change absolutely nothing else in society!” is misguided. Sure, there are certain things cars can do that won’t be replaced, at least not any time soon, but plenty of places in the world already thrive with much fewer cars and much more micomobility and public transit.
People here are saying a lot that cars are convenient because there’s more roads… like… let public transport run on those roads? People seem to literally be unable to realize that things are the way they are now solely because you refuse to believe they can be in any other way and don’t solve problems because “it’s not practical”. Short termed thinking runs too much
there’s more roads
Which, by the way, would not be there like without a government making it so. And if those governments went “nah” to the idea of a stroad and any highway expansion beyond 6 lanes, and threw it all into railways in the '70s, the USA may have had a bullet train network today that’d make Germany jealous.
It’s the path of least resistance. If public transport was more effiencent and faster, people would opt for that.
But then you’re also dealing with the weather, or some people like the privacy or they enjoy driving their own car. Or not having to worry about time tables and waiting.
All these factor in, and that’s why many prefer cars.
and that’s what I’m talking about, selfishness and short termed thinking
I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Public transport do run on the roads, too. It’s not “private car only”.
never said it’s private car only, but i did use wrong wording, sorry. what i meant was, those are the same roads public transport runs on, so the “cars can go anywhere” point kinda falls unless we’re talking offroading. mildly inconveniencing, but that’s just a tradeoff, it’s the entire point of fuckcars
The problem with public transport is that it only goes on pre-planned routes. If you want to go elsewhere, you can’t without a car. And replacing all nature with rails and asphalt is a very bad idea.
you don’t need to replace anything, the roads are already there. and if you wanna go somewhere super specific, just walk, keep in mind that if transport is more invested into, it will barely be different from car travel. the mild convenience created by cars isn’t worth the clutter that 10 times the volume of automobiles will create. also parking is already a problem now.
The problem isn’t the roads, but needing to create a route that touches every single road. Public transportation can’t really do customization, it’s a one size fits all deal.
I don’t want to be stuck on and overpacked train or bus, dependant on train or bus schedules and like the freedom to go where I want.
Maybe cry about cruise ships and industrial shipping that spews out the equivalent of millions of cars?
False. More cars = more traffic = longer travel time at a lower capacity than what public transport could achieve. Also, if you enjoy driving so much, you’d very much want everyone else not being on your road, right?
I’m not sharing a cart with retards that bring food onto the train, obnoxious breeders and their offspring. Not to mention shitty infrastructure, lack of airconditioning and having to adhere to whatever schedule they pull out of their ass.
Fuck public transport.
I am all for more public transportation in this country, but it wouldn’t help me personally. I live outside of city limits- the closest bus line is two miles away. My work is even further outside city limits, a 10-minute drive south of me down a four-lane highway, past farm fields and into an industrial park.
There’s just no way public transportation is going to help me there. And even if I didn’t have to do it down a highway, there’s no way I’m riding a bike there in the middle of winter.
So do please make public transport more available and expansive. Just know that it still won’t be a universal solution. Individual transport is needed by some of us.
I plan to get an electric (not a Tesla) for my next car. I currently drive a hybrid.
“More public transport wouldn’t help me, because there’s no transit access here” seems tautological but ok.
Countries with similar layouts but working public transit would simply build a train line into your industrial park and place bus stops a reasonable distance away from where you live.
At what point is it too rural for that to make sense? I’m surrounded by cornfields.
You tell me; your community was likely first built by having a train line drawn out to it in the frontier era, and later had the tracks scuttled due to obsolescence and overt state support for the motor vehicle alternative.
Rural rail has been done and is still done in pretty much every country that’s not the USA. If you’re a farmer, there’s a lot of rationale to having rail built out to whatever market terminal you sell your product at. It’s not unheard of for farmers to build out small private rail lines across the farm to transport goods, equipment, themselves, etc.
I don’t know a country as spread out as the U.S. that has practical rail in all rural areas. Certainly not Canada or China or India.
Canada is carbrained like the US, but China and India actually have extremely profuse rail networks.
China and India have vast rural areas with no trains.
Lots of people in fuck cars communities are black and white about it. They’re very unwilling to even discuss compromise. They’ll say the city needs to build a subway system under all the farmland.
can you point me to that? because i spend a lot of time in these communities and have never actually seen that
Cars can pick me up 10 feet from my front door(my car). No train tracks within 5 miles of me. I would love if their were tracks closer.
Yeah, that’s what the post is about.
Because they give people a lot more freedom than trains — if you own a car. If you don’t own a car but live in a society where everybody else has one you are kinda screwed.
I can go out drinking, text, work, chat, and sleep on my commute without being arrested or viciously murdering someone. Sounds like I have more freedom here.
I know it is not necessarily your opinion, but cars don’t give freedom to people - even if you own one. You pay so much for your car, the society pays a lot for the infrastructure, this infrastructure takes away the freedom from people (especially children) to live and move outside, when you drive you can (should) do nothing else, it’s reputation as individual way of transport blocks expansion of public transit, … every aspect of a car is taking freedom away from you. A car that gives people freedom is a marketing strategy and the opposite is true.
I’m all in favour of trains. I only take the train to work, and it’s so convenient I even take my kids to the city via train, to entertainment or shopping. However, even though I live inside the capital city in a Western European country, the train we take is powered by diesel. The government has been talking about electrifying the track for years, and the current estimate is that it will take another decade or more to get it done. There’s a single electrified rail line in the entire country, and based on the electrification progress it will take several decades to electrify the rest (if ever). Based on this experience, I’d venture to say that electric cars are far easier to deploy than electrify train lines.
Even on diesel trains they are far far far more energy efficient than cars. Current estimate is that it takes 3.7 liters of fuel to transport 1 tonne of cargo for 100km. That’s incredibly more efficient than any car can get. Not to mention cars carry around on average 1.3 persons inside.
Train infrastructure is also significantly more scalable. You can add another train car for passengers at the price of one passenger car and you have increased capacity of that train immediately. Same goes to downsizing. Rails can be easily adapted to have overhead wires. Train wheels are metal as are tracks which means significantly cheaper maintenance and slower wear than asphalt and rubber.
It’s nothing to do with ease of deployment. It’s all about selfishness of people and their inability to or lack of willpower to change. Even if people switched to motorcycles, which are still ICEs it would still be a lot cleaner for the environment since it would effectively eliminate traffic jams and reduce road maintenance significantly. Not to mention not needing to move 1 tonne of metal for no more than 1 passenger.
because in lots of countries there is effectively no public transport culture existing, and car companies take advantage of that. it’s really just about car culture and taking advantage of people in my opinion
In some countries it’s also more efficient to drive.
that’s just because public transportation wasn’t made to be as efficient
![[meme] Trains are 100000x easier to electrify and automate than cars, so why does everyone keep talking about electric and driverless cars?](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/11c37658-7c32-4cc2-b12c-6ced348bd09d.png){kind=link}