this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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Go look at small towns in Europe and the fucking trains they have. Then weep when your city 100 times the size has worse public transportation than them.
You don't need to live in a big fucking city for public transportation, you just need a government that fucking cares.
Once upon a time, the US was the birthplace of the labor movement, fighting for labor rights like the 40 hour week and overtime pay. And now, the US is one of the most anti-labor countries in the developed world. When cars were first introduced, there were anti-car protests in US cities. It took decades of brainwashing by the car industry for Americans to feel that cars "make them American".
Culture can change. It starts when people recognize how bad it is to depend on cars and demand better options.
Beware of any history that makes the current state of affairs seem inevitable. There are always countervailing forces.
There are dozens of articles if you do a search online, but here is one article from Bloomberg.
Anti-car protests were successful in places like New York City and Vancouver, Canada, which is why they are some of the only places in North America without highways cutting through them. San Francisco also had major protests, but highways were forced through anyways.
I am so sorry for the loss of your reading comprehension. That must be very hard on you.
I wrote that there were anti-car protests in the US, and there were. I didn’t say “like those the Dutch staged.”
People might laugh or discount your comment, and you might've made it in jest, but that's probably one of the biggest hurdles that the anti-car crowd refuses to take seriously. Americans love cars, and a lot of Americans for sure love gigantic monstrosity tricked out cars. We have songs about trucks, guns, and Jesus, and you can bet your ass those things are the same level of special for a lot of people.
I personally would love to see viable public transportation, but you're going to have to change culture which isn't as easy as, "We built some nice trains and buses! Now everyone use those instead!" You're going to have to convince the gun toting, Jesus loving, jacked up Ford F-450 Super Duty owners to give up a huge piece of their personality. And from what I can tell that hasn't been working out so great with guns. Maybe we can write a nice country songs about riding trains and buses? We used to have a few of those.
I would love to hear a country song about running a train through rural America.
You just described folk music.
I can’t tell if you’re joking, but train songs used to be a huge rural working class genre.
That's the difference. The government doesn't have the desire, or the people don't vote in favor. In some cases, they don't even have the money.
Hi I live in a small European town and still need a car. It's not the gotcha you think it is. The busses and trains are neat for young healthy people with one backpack. Turns out I don't go out and need one back pack of stuff.
I'm moving back to the US because of the massive labor shortage and that shutting down your economy on Sundays is discriminatory towards non Christians.
The train doesn't alleviate a ton of other car needs in daily life.
Oh also my packages and my garbage don't get delivered or taken away reliably in large part because the roads are too narrow. Fuck this. I end up needing to drive anyway.
I would rather have good car infrastructure than the ability to back pack around. It massively influences my quality of life. If I need a car once a week I'm going to use my car more than that and I have a lot more options once I'm doing so.
Edit : just got told I need to go to the next town over to get a covid test. I can either hang out at the bus stop or train station for an hour sick af, then walk a bunch, to get a test. Or I could drive.
The fact you're comparing small European towns built off rail stops to sprawling American cities with 100x the population says more than enough about your argument
The fact you don't realize basically every American city was once a rail stop says enough about your intelligence.