A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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My brother is a car guy. He's also an ardent cyclist and is more environmentally conscious than the vast majority of westerners.
Sometimes people are more than just one thing, and if a car spends 99.9% of it's time in the garage in bits it's not a major factor in pollution or traffic problems.
To echo a few other comments, i would consider myself a car guy, but i badly want trains and public transit. I like cars and driving as a hobby, not as a requirement for daily life
Eh, car guys are often easier to persuade that public transport and walkability policies are useful.
They would prefer not to have to share the road with normies.
Yeah, car guys in my experience consistently think (maybe correctly) that everyone else on the road but them is a total moron. You don't like those pesky cyclists sharing the road with you? Neither do most of us cyclists; let's get them on separated paths. Don't like morons who can't drive? Make it so they don't have to. Don't like traffic? Take the other space-inefficient cars off the road.
I think car people recognize that just positively reinforcing micromobility and public transit can improve their experience.
Agreed. As a car guy, I genuinely hate how most roads are setup in the US. We could be doing so much better to keep drivers focused and safe, but they just copy-paste more giant grids into hellscapes because it doesn’t require any thought or creativity.
And the advances they make like lane keeping and auto cruise control just make people even less aware of what they’re doing.
They’re not building cars to be driven anymore. They’re building them to sit in traffic.
I rarely use cruise control and the closest thing to traction control I have is a limited slip differential. All analog dials and a basic-ass double DIN radio that just functions as Bluetooth for the rare call.
I want my input to go straight to the wheels and I would rather die by my own hand than let a company’s negligence do it for me.
That's actually another really good point: North American stroads have to be so fucking tedious for people who actually want to get something out of their cars. It's the same shit everywhere so there's nothing to see, you go just fast enough for your $100,000 car to be totaled if someone sneezes at you but not enough for it to be fun, you're constantly in danger thanks to the poor design, and it's you and a goddamn thousand people trying to get to Paunch Burger.
Imagine you had a high-end gaming PC and the only way to use it was to play cheap asset flips. I'm not saying we make roads into racetracks when the normies are gone; rather, I'm saying holy shit, the roads in well-designed urban places are so much more interesting and beautiful to drive in.
Whenever I see a really nice car stuck in traffic my heart breaks a little. It deserves better than creeping along because some idiot can’t zipper merge.
I don’t think they’re all morons. Some are just not good at driving. I’m not good at a lot of things, but most of them aren’t forced on me as the only way to survive in society.
Total separation of pedestrians and cyclists from cars isn't feasible unless we're willing to close large parts of cities from vehicle traffic. Will people support this? I certainly do but in the USA this is widely regarded as an unrealistic solution.
As car guy, its true.
I also advocate for smalller vehicles.
One of my buddies is a car guy and he recently moved to a denser city and would bike to work pretty often. Driving is supposed to be a pleasure for car guys and most of them won't scratch that itch on a stroad or clogged highway.
Exactly. I love biking so much but driving my Miata top down along the coast is also enjoyable
Hello, I’m that car guy.
car guys also want less cars on the road.
I consider myself a car guy, but I want to drive because I want to, not because it's the only option.
Also a car guy. If there was decent public transport to work that got me there in a similar time to taking a car, I'd take the public transport.
I want my car to be for my enjoyment, as well as a tool to get to different places, but not as a tool that takes me to work
(using a car to get to work would still be fine if you worked in a more rural area with less public transport availability, but I also believe that pickup trucks shouldn't be daily vehicles and would be much more useful on a rent-when-needed system)
I'd rather ride with an organization that doesn't have Twitter Gold, but we take what we can get, I guess...
Real talk, I remember when Amtrak was fraternizing with the Trump admin, and even considering putting ICE at their train stations. Not to mention the embarrassing launch of their new trains that were supposed to be faster, but wound up going about as well as Tesla's convention loop in Las Vegas. In other words, it did not go faster or revolutionize travel.
I can't necessarily blame Amtrak for a lot of their speed and timing issues. They're at the whims of the freight carriers in many sections of shared track.
Legally passenger trains have priority. But reality means loopholes. Like making the freight trains too long to fit onto side tracks, forcing the passenger trains there instead causing delays.
Wendover has a pretty good video about this and other aspects of 50 year old transportation laws.
The Trump stuff is a different beast, but even then with something that's heavily reliant on federal funding, not annoying the dictator in chief is more of a requirement to continue to exist at all.
It’s crazy how much it effects your psychology living in a walkable city. It really helps me feel so much more connected to my community