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.
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
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).
Trains aren’t 100% the answer, but cars should be the last answer. Still we should electrify cars.
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.
Because people want a means to travel independently, as in they are in control and not riding with strangers.
/s
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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.
Because trains aren’t economically viable for the vast majority of the US, and where they are economically they are the topic of conversation.
As far as why the conversation would center around the US, that’s just the regular American-centric tilt english conversations generally lean towards. Most of Europe has their shit together in some topics like this (public transportation, for instance) and the US is a huge consumer of automobiles and no one if building mass transit between the middle of nowhere to the other middle of nowhere where we could ‘efficiently’ move individually insignificant numbers of people at a time.
You ever try taking your new mattress and bed frame on a train?
Always hated that argument for big cars. You buy a new bed/mattress/big furniture like once a year. Delivery is maybe 50 bucks. The extra cost of a car big enough to transport that stuff is in the thousands. Somehow everyone gets upset when confronted with delivery fees while being perfectly fine with dishing out cash for a car. Redo the fucking math.
I think that’s a bit of an oversimplification of the argument
I use my car to transport my bike, surfboard, skis, dog, lawnmower, buy furniture, buy lumber etc for projects, and more. It just can’t be beat in terms of convenience. For repairs around the house, gardening, etc, it’s a must-have.
A 1998 CR-V does all that and it cost me $2500. Bomb-proof b20b also, I love it. I don’t think you can beat that in terms of convenience.
I’m all for trains and buses (electric busses would be great!) but the utility wanes when lots of people bring stuff. I used to have a 45 minute bus commute, and the bus had racks for bikes. I’d bring my bike to do the 5 mile trip to and from bus stops at both ends. But lots of people wanted to do that, and you’d have to be early in line to get your bike on the bus, otherwise you had to wait for the next one. I can’t imagine people trying to bring 2x4s or potted plants on the bus! Or their pets, another issue altogether.
So you’ll buy an electric car for some 20k+ once that car breaks down to haul your frequent furniture and lumber purchases?
Because the discussion isn’t about ‘I have a car and won’t exchange it for a train’ but ‘moving transportation onto trains instead of electric cars would be a lot more beneficial as the future of transportation’
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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.
In cities, yeah. Outside cities, impossible
But I’d love to rent autonomous electric cars to move
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}