this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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Fuck Cars
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But its Texas, we have space. Isn't the point that its too many lanes/cars, not the space?
Too much space taken up by non-places means more distance between places, increasing dependence on cars, requiring more lanes, which take up space.
Whats the alternative? Walking? Its 100+ degrees 3 months out of the year and humid as fuck.
The alternative was not to feed into propoganda and let the car industry convince us to only build car infrastructure. We're fucked now without major time and work. Trains, buses, and final mile helpers like bikes and walkways together would have moved our millions more efficiently. Now we get to sit in our gridlock, with people who believe the earth is flat operating another four ton beast three feet away from us. Happy travels.
Reduce 27 lanes to 4 lanes with bus priority lanes and put people on a bus. Thats 27 cars with 5 people in roughly 2 buses with ~50 people.
Then you'd be riding with the sort that have to ride the bus. I personaly like not being stabbed or pissed on.
The sort of people that ride the bus and train is most of the population in the EU and a lot of other countries.
Nice dogwhistle fuckface
If you do it right, you share the bus with the sort that takes the bus because it's more convenient than getting stuck in traffic and having to look for a parking spot
On every country on the planet, only the poor take public transit. Do you see rich people anywhere take buses?
I'm a software engineer and own a car. I take the bus downtown because I hate trying to find a parking spot and dealing with other drivers.
I'm a doctor and I bike and take the bus. But neither of us really count as "the rich", we're still working class. Personally I see nothing about the rich to emulate, so I don't really see the point.
Biking, buses, trains, underground tunnels.
I sometimes have biked to work in the summer not far from where that picture was taken and I live like 15 miles away. Its even more comfortable if you use an ebike. Unfortunately, I get that's not an option for everyone (personally have been off the bike due to an injury this summer).
Not everyone is a masochist. A lot of people find Houston heat intolerable.
So lets cover it in only asphalt that absorbs that heat and continuously vomits it back up over the course of the entire night. All this shit is self defeating, and a major cause of the situation we find ourselves in. Car infrastructure also encourages longer distances between destinations. Roads eat up more space than alternatives, and cars themselves are large vehicles. This, along with the increasing speeds of cars encourages society to spread out. Without it our cities would be more human-centric.
I hate the heat too. I much prefer it under 60 to over 70. But when you're moving at a good pace and you don't have to travel 15 miles because of miles of space wasted by cars, its not bad. Also, buses/trains should have AC. If you have a well-designed bus system, you aren't waiting for buses much, if at all.
Isn't the whole point of dense urban development so that you can avoid going outside for too long?
Even in the US, Las Vegas showed how to connect independent complexes together without forcing people to go outside.
http://www.tundria.com/trams/USA/Houston-1935.php
And few people rode them as cars became more popular
Car ownership was untenable for most people until the mid-1970s, and since then the government has been funding extreme pro-car ownership policies. Houstonians rode the bus.