Cars fulfill a very self-indulgent narrative. ‘I get to decide where and when I travel’, makes people feel “free” snd “important” even when millions of them are silently coming to the same decisions-- like going downtown at 09:00 on weekdsys-- that allow huge efficiency plays.
Notice how many ads feature fantasies of open roads and trips to faraway attractions, not the real world of “I need to sit in rush hour traffic from 6:30 on to get to the Work Factory”
Maybe public transit needs to focus its message on the freedom from drudgery it offers-- you don’t have to be staring at the driver in front of you, scanning the traffic reports
Exactly! This is why I love micromobility and quality public transit so much. With micromobility like electric scooters or bikes, I can zip past traffic in the protected cycle lanes in my city. With the frequent metro service in my city, I know I can show up to the metro station at basically any time and know it’ll be a max 5-minute wait for the next train. And when I’m on the train, I can just chill and scroll on my phone or read a book instead of stressing about traffic. The freedom to think about something that isn’t traffic.
I’d say it is more about
convinceconvenience. You decide when you leave and you leave from your door. You don’t risk being late to work because you missed the train by 1 minute (baring queues, but you get the point).This can also be achieved by high frequency transit.
Yeah, if the train comes every five minutes, that’s going to be way more consistent than traffic over time.
Really depends where you live. In my town I also decide when I leave, and I don’t risk being late because I missed the train by one minute. I’ll just take the next one. More risk of being late because of car traffic.
The problem when people compare cars to public transport is that they compare the current state of public transport in their area. We need to compare what would happen if we were spending as much billions as we do on cars.
If I’m doing a short trip locally in the city, I get that convenience out of my bike. There are times I would have taken a taxi somewhere, but when the app told me how long it would take for my driver to arrive, I just end up cycling there (often rolling past some long lanes of traffic in the process). That process can be even better if a city is built with safe biking paths.
Unfortunately that’s super weather dependent and seasonal. Plus, some of us would be a sweaty mess by the time we biked to where we needed to go.
Bikes don’t have to be seasonal. Some Nordic countries have well maintained and plowed biking networks and they see significant use throughout the winter.
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 love trains
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.
This always reminds me of the movie, Roger Rabbit. I was a kid and the movie taught me a much deeper/darker lesson than it was meant to teach me at that age. It still irks me.
I used to watch roger rabbit as a kid for other reasons
I think I know exactly what you mean and I was in 3rd grade.
since wen this sub is full of carbrain? like bruh.
Yeah what is going on? Seems like every other comment is full on car-brain-cars-are-freedom insanity. No enough orange pilled people here. Is the opposite of the orange pill the sad grey pill?
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
Big Auto has been destroying any idea of high speed rails for decades. Our trains are complete trash because of car lobbyists.
B-but think of the iNdIvIdUaL!
Not every journey is possible with public transport. People will still need to lug equipment about in the electric future.
Public transportation in America is typically a magnet for crime.
I’ll take a hard pass on being trapped in a tube with my assailants.
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).
energy is a non-issue
Electric motors are between 95 and 98% efficient, while ICEs are in the 80’s on a good day.
You are aware that electric trains also use electric motors, just like electric cars do, right? And you are aware that electric cars rely on an electric battery while electric trains rely primarily on overhead electric power lines, are you?
That means cars require one extra component and an extra conversation of energy which trains don’t need. Every conversation of energy reduces efficiency of the final outcome. The more conversations, the less efficiency.
Trains use: power lines -> electric motor
Cars use: power lines -> electric battery -> electric motorFurthermore, bigger machines can be built to be more efficient than smaller ones. So bigger motors can use (electric) fuel more efficiently than smaller motors.
I was responding to your assertion about EVs not being much better than ICEs.
Trains aren’t 100% the answer, but cars should be the last answer. Still we should electrify cars.
yeah, electricity should just be used everywhere.
most other energy types can be easily and efficiently converted to it, and it makes it easy to increase efficiency.
(power production and consumption are separated in electrical cars, so by making your power stations more efficient you make all of the cars that use them greener)deleted by creator
EV’s are so much more efficient that even running from electricity produced by coal, they are significantly better than ICE (internal combustion engine) cars. Just the electricity used to refine enough fuel to drive 100mi would be enough to drive an average EV more than 60mi. (This detail gets conveniently left out when comparing ICE cars to EVs).
We still need to decarbonise the grid, and as that happens, all electric cars (regardless of age) will become less polluting too. Having an unclean grid is not an excuse to keep using ICE vehicles.
Batteries used gives you150 ebikes for every e-car
Removed by mod
and there isn’t one near me.
That’s exactly the problem that this community wants to fix.
You can’t put railways everywhere.
But that’s a certain level of naivete. I’ve lived in Europe and in the Western US, and for people who have lived in urban or suburban situations their whole lives, they simply can’t comprehend the vast tracts of land that exist in most of the US. Public transport isn’t viable when your nearest neighbor is at least five acres away.
Please. I have gone to Italy and seen far vaster landscapes in the mountainous areas than I’ve ever been cognizant of in the United States. And yes, I saw these locations from the window of a bus taking the highway system. The key thing is, people are not going to those far-out locations frequently. Actual transit problem-solving relates to the broad majority of the use cases people have, not about abstractly going to a pin thrown on a map.
Well yes, if you live in the middle of nowhere with literally no one else nearby, then public transport obviously doesn’t make sense. But that’s not where most people live.
A large part of the population in the US doesn’t have access to public transport not because it wouldn’t be viable, but because car-centric infrastructure was built instead. And often better designed cities were bulldozed to make room for it.
I was also going to recommend the Not Just Bikes video @Katana314@lemmy.world linked, definitely check it out!
True, but a lot of US real estate, even in big cities, started out agricultural. Those underpinnings are still affecting them today, given that they are less than 300 years old. They just don’t have the history of being piled on top of each other that Europe has. The original American inhabitants didn’t have the infrastructure Europe has had since the Romans, even if their population HAD been so concentrated.
The U.S population density is less than half that of Europe, even today.
Trains could have intercity connections. Walk/bus to the train, ride the train, walk/bus to your destination.
I have metro+train and it already wears me out so much that alI arrive at the office tired. I can’t imagine how I would survive through 3 different transit options twice a day
I do the same and if anything, it just helps me wake up or wind down after a long day. Out of pure curiosity, how does it wear you out?
I don’t know, I could not even imagine the transit switch to be not overwhelming, it’s just way too many changes for me in a short span of time, like too many tasks. go down, wait for metro, try to not miss the stop, get up on escalator, go to platform, wait there, it’s just sucking out energy out of me, if I spent all that time just sitting on the train yes I unwind and I love it but dragging my laptop around and standing and waiting and having to concentrate instead of getting into the flow is disruptive for me. Plus I feel like underground is super dark and dirty and on the bus I get nauseous from so many braking and stopping and all the vibrating from the road
I’m sure you’re aware part of that anxiety can come from the unfamiliarity. I’m surprised it doesn’t end up being compared to the stress of merging from an on-ramp in a car, or watching crosswalks for pedestrians, or even just backing out of a driveway in some people’s cases.
Sure buddy, spend a few hours hopping public transport each day is so much fun.
Cars are superior in every single way, it’s paupers that cry out of jealousy we’re seeing here.
They know cars aren’t the problem, there are industries out there that spew out the equivalent of millions of cars but they don’t bitch about that.
hmmm, do I want to sit in a train, flip my laptop open and do some work, then walk through a park to the office for today… Or do I want to sit in traffic and do nothing…
Tough choice there
no, I absolutely do not want to work on my way to work
Work time starts when I open the laptop. I’m not volunteering that time, since i’m not completely insane. It makes a huge difference whether my workday starts in the office, or in the train.
I’m gonna be real, I’d 100% rather sit in traffic. It’s somewhat relaxing to me.
I hate this trend that we need to be working all the time, even during our commute.
To each their own. I prefer 2 hours of working in the train and 6 in the office to traveling for 2 hours and working 8 hours in the office
it’s paupers that cry out of jealousy we’re seeing here.
Found Andrew Tate’s account
Ugh, vegans.
Those industries don’t pump out their emissions in my city for me to breathe in, nor do they threaten to maim or kill me on a regular basis.
can go anywhere
As long as there’s road, no serious traffic, and fuel stations along with rest stops.
which is practically everywhere
You must be new at this
You don’t need a road.
This is your brain or advertisements :)
In reality:
I am all for more public transportation in this country, but it wouldn’t help me personally. I live outside of city limits- the closest bus line is two miles away. My work is even further outside city limits, a 10-minute drive south of me down a four-lane highway, past farm fields and into an industrial park.
There’s just no way public transportation is going to help me there. And even if I didn’t have to do it down a highway, there’s no way I’m riding a bike there in the middle of winter.
So do please make public transport more available and expansive. Just know that it still won’t be a universal solution. Individual transport is needed by some of us.
I plan to get an electric (not a Tesla) for my next car. I currently drive a hybrid.
“More public transport wouldn’t help me, because there’s no transit access here” seems tautological but ok.
Countries with similar layouts but working public transit would simply build a train line into your industrial park and place bus stops a reasonable distance away from where you live.
At what point is it too rural for that to make sense? I’m surrounded by cornfields.
You tell me; your community was likely first built by having a train line drawn out to it in the frontier era, and later had the tracks scuttled due to obsolescence and overt state support for the motor vehicle alternative.
Rural rail has been done and is still done in pretty much every country that’s not the USA. If you’re a farmer, there’s a lot of rationale to having rail built out to whatever market terminal you sell your product at. It’s not unheard of for farmers to build out small private rail lines across the farm to transport goods, equipment, themselves, etc.
I don’t know a country as spread out as the U.S. that has practical rail in all rural areas. Certainly not Canada or China or India.
Canada is carbrained like the US, but China and India actually have extremely profuse rail networks.
China and India have vast rural areas with no trains.
The U.S. The U.S. was that country. The country was built by train.
Oh, and 80% of the population lives in cities!
And that 80% of the population should have robust public transit.
Then there’s the rest of us who don’t live in cities. The train never went out to farmer’s fields in the hopes of picking up people here and there who happened to live between them. That’s nonsense.
Lots of people in fuck cars communities are black and white about it. They’re very unwilling to even discuss compromise. They’ll say the city needs to build a subway system under all the farmland.
can you point me to that? because i spend a lot of time in these communities and have never actually seen that
Especially since so many US cities are designed around cars.
They were redesigned for cars. Mistakes of the past can be fixed.
I love good public transport. It’s great to not have to worry about parking or having to drive. Good cities, like many in Europe and New York in the US, a car isn’t really required.
But out in the countryside, a car is a must. Electric cars are massively better for the environment and way cheaper to run (like tenth the cost with a night rate).
Also, no offense here but saying NYC or European cities are good is a perspective I would not agree with. I do not want to live in a high rise apartment and there are a lot of people who do not want that.
European and NYC people are used to it, but that doesn’t make it good.
Having that many people in one place is actually not good. Some of them never experience being in nature. Living conditions aren’t great. It’s cramped and expensive.
All of this so they can say that using public transportation is good? That’s ridiculous.
Edit: Downvote me all you want. This is the truth. Cities are not good.
Depends on the city. Sure, some are high rise, which isn’t for some, but they aren’t all like that. London for example is relatively flat but has an excellent public transport system. Same with Paris and Brussels. Essen seamer good while I was there. Utrecht was great. Amsterdam too (but it’s just grim due to all the drug tourists). Most European cities are walkable and have at least a basic level of usable public transport.
NY was the only American city I’ve been to which had a decent transport system I used. Seattle I saw trams but was on business with Texan sales people, trams with out the question. Austin buses felt very much like what only poor people used and walking the 2 miles from the apartment to the office, involved some fence holes and minor trespassing to be even possible. Mostly nice river walk though.
All cities should have decent public transport and be walkable. Car based urban sprawl has got to go. Older, pre-car, cities are often the nicest.
Edit : Wuppertal, that was my German favourite. It’s like an alternative timeline city. Love its "floating tram.
![[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}