Fuck Cars
This community exists as a sister community/copycat community to the r/fuckcars subreddit.
This community exists for the following reasons:
- to raise awareness around the dangers, inefficiencies and injustice that can come from car dependence.
- to allow a place to discuss and promote more healthy transport methods and ways of living.
You can find the Matrix chat room for this community here.
Rules
-
Be nice to each other. Being aggressive or inflammatory towards other users will get you banned. Name calling or obvious trolling falls under that. Hate cars, hate the system, but not people. While some drivers definitely deserve some hate, most of them didn't choose car-centric life out of free will.
-
No bigotry or hate. Racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, chauvinism, fat-shaming, body-shaming, stigmatization of people experiencing homeless or substance users, etc. are not tolerated. Don't use slurs. You can laugh at someone's fragile masculinity without associating it with their body. The correlation between car-culture and body weight is not an excuse for fat-shaming.
-
Stay on-topic. Submissions should be on-topic to the externalities of car culture in urban development and communities globally. Posting about alternatives to cars and car culture is fine. Don't post literal car fucking.
-
No traffic violence. Do not post depictions of traffic violence. NSFW or NSFL posts are not allowed. Gawking at crashes is not allowed. Be respectful to people who are a victim of traffic violence or otherwise traumatized by it. News articles about crashes and statistics about traffic violence are allowed. Glorifying traffic violence will get you banned.
-
No reposts. Before sharing, check if your post isn't a repost. Reposts that add something new are fine. Reposts that are sharing content from somewhere else are fine too.
-
No misinformation. Masks and vaccines save lives during a pandemic, climate change is real and anthropogenic - and denial of these and other established facts will get you banned. False or highly speculative titles will get your post deleted.
-
No harassment. Posts that (may) cause harassment, dogpiling or brigading, intentionally or not, will be removed. Please do not post screenshots containing uncensored usernames. Actual harassment, dogpiling or brigading is a bannable offence.
Please report posts and comments that violate our rules.
view the rest of the comments
I've used a combination of coalition building, finding allies on the city council, and reaching out to neighborhood leaders.
Much of it has been reaching out to government officials, having conversations, and identifying where decision making is done within the various transit agencies.
So far, most of the resistance to actual progress is just kind of weird noise (complaints & general "I can't see how having transit would help") from misc citizens and realtors who don't want to have changes to their development plans in the city, even if adding in the transit would make regions around it boom. The city council members are surprisingly responsive to even a small number of vocal people. I don't think they hear from many coherent arguments in any given year. Showing up with data, an even reasonable idea of what can be done, and evidence that you've got a coalition of interested groups seems to get traction.
It also helps that we recently voted out a ton of conservative assholes and replaced them with a younger progressive city council. Yes, I worked on campaigns to help make that happen.
We've also been getting allies on various transit advisory committees, mostly citizen advisory committees. Then making sure there's a similar message along with data that supports our goals.
We do also gather up other cities' long term transit plan documents because they often have some great ideas and examples of what a city can build out given some interest in the public's success.
I know that I'm also on track to be tapped to help write up materials for federal level proposals in the future. Grant writing isn't much fun, but it's how you get the money for a $100 mil project.
Yeah, I'm sure there's plenty of material for a whole posting in its own right! This isn't a simple problem to solve. It's a combination of government systems, managing individual's needs, reaching out to lots of groups, and a real vision to get people dedicated to. You've got to have something people really want to have the buy in for years of work to make it happen.
Thanks for the response! Yeah, it's a massive undertaking and seems like getting started and rallying groups is half the battle.
Looking forward to a future post(s) on the topic ;)
Hopefully we'll have updates. It's always a big unknown, especially when it's not your day job.