#Cars Ruin Cities

[scopophilic1997]

scopOphilic_micromessaging_1030 - scopOphilic1997 presents a new micro-messaging series: small, subtle, and often unintentional messages we send and receive verbally and non-verbally.

[carhatred]

Walker noticed that people tend to have a giant blindspot when it comes to certain behaviors associated with driving, whether it’s speeding, carbon emissions, traffic crashes, or any other of the vast litany of negative external effects that result from a culture that caters to automobile drivers.

“One of the things you notice if you spend your career trying to get people to drive less is people don’t like driving less,” Walker said in an interview. “We said, well, let’s try and measure this. Let’s just demonstrate the extent to which the population as a whole will make excuses, will give special freedom to the context of driving.”

(...) People were less tolerant of bad behavior that didn’t involve a car and vastly more tolerant of similar-sounding behaviors that involved driving. For Walker, this disconnect is where motonormativity comes into play. “We wanted to demonstrate that when you talk about driving, people are not applying their normal values,” he said.

(...) That’s because, for most people, driving is a convenience. And because it’s easy, we tend to assume it’s part of the natural order to drive. That’s why there’s so much hostility around cycling and alternate forms of transportation: because, for many people, it challenges the natural order of driving. “Not only do people do what the world makes easy, but because it feels easy, people conclude that it’s right,” Walker said. 

[dyscomancer]

Introducing the new 2024 Ford Pedestrian Obliterator. This new pickup truck is 8 times the size of the average sedan, gets a half mile to the gallon, and has a truck bed no bigger than any other pickup made in the last 50 years.

Comes complete with LED headlights capable of shining at drivers in front of you at 200 octillion lumens. The perfect truck for annoying dudes who don't actually haul anything, guaranteed to grind any pesky driveway-dwelling toddler outside of your field of vision into a fine red paste!

[mxwhore]

this is so fucking exhausting lmao

[autumnalhalcyon]

.

[kidrat]

'he wouldn't say that' but it's he (baz pitch) wouldn't study there (university in london)

[figuerockfaeth]

I NEED TO MOVE OUT NOOWWWWWWW

[baconcolacan]

Hey so uhhh…..guess who had their electricity cut for the whole day

[threadatl]

Property lines in Mechanicsville reveal the damage of freeways & parking

This is the Mechanicsville neighborhood in Atlanta.

The yellow boxes are property lines where houses, businesses, schools, and churches used to exist before the interstate highways were built -- before much of the land became parking lots and road lanes.

You can find this on the City of Atlanta's GIS mapping portal at gis.atlantaga.gov

The lesson to take away: large parts of the city were decimated by cars. Not just the highways themselves, but the land beside them too. This means that we have a lot of work to do with our urbanism in order to overcome the lingering damage.

And when we say "by cars," we mean that the decimation was done by leaders and planners who valued car-flow and storage more than they valued the residents and store owners of pre-freeway Mechanicsville (along with many other neighborhoods that were equally affected).

You could also replace "by cars" with "by racism," since the freeways were often placed intentionally to hit Black neighborhoods the hardest.

Our work load is heavy, in terms of repairing this ugly situation through improved urban design and policy. We shouldn't forget that.

[kaoharu]

hmhmm actually ykw rant in tags kinda

[ssaalexblake]

well, the problem of having had a huge box of books for donation in the garage for 2 years but nowhere to donate them to has handily been solved by the fact that that stupidly long period of rain a few of weeks ago kind of flooded the floor where they were kept and like 90% of them have mould now :/ 

not how i’d have liked this to end (i hate chucking books) but it’s not like i can Not chuck them now

[unhonestlymirror]

Кияни вимагають реконструювати «одну з найгірших вулиць міста»

ПЛАЧУ, РОКИ ЙДУТЬ, АЛЕ МОЯ ВУЛИЦЯ ВСЕ ЩЕ В ТОПІ НОВИН, НЕВАЖЛИВО: МАЙДАН, ВІЙНА, ІНОПЛАНЄТЯНЄ

Одна з небагатьох стабільних речей в цьому світі.

Я б навіть вже й нічого не робила, хай стоїть як стоїть.

[rucow]

had a horrible experience just now and im trying to calm down :') might watch LND or something just to distract myself from having a panic attack

[uwanosorade]

its so unfair we dont just have trains. like i am grateful that i can afford to pay for a car but i would definitely say i experience my car much more as a burden than as a source of freedom

[snoozingbear]

NEW PROFILE PIC what is it I’m excited

HI YES it’s this (very zoomed in) picture of elliott smith smoking a cig and crossing the street

i <3 the blue tones of it it feels wintery

[doubletamponne]

Dont ask me what I was doing scrolling through the comment section of a fucking LinkedIn post at 3 a.m., but recently a cyclist was straight-up murdered by a driver -- the automobilist was driving on a bike lane, ran over the foot of a cyclist, who punched the car in order to alert him. When the driver backed off and stopped, the cyclist went up to the driver to protest, upon which the driver turned the car towards him and ran him over. The author of the post mostly deplored the fact that 48h hours later, the ministry of Transportation had yet to make a statement (he has since met with representatives from various cycling collectives), while TV and radio discourse tended heavily towards blaming cyclists. The comments were a delightful mix of :

Honing in on the first sentence "Paul was murdered by a man driving an SUV" to either brandish la présomption d'innocence or jump to defend SUVs -- and honestly the people in the comments comparing this to US gun discourse don't seem far off, whether it's "the SUV didn't kill anyone, a madman did, and he would've done it all the same with a Twingo", "stop appropriating tragedies for the sake of an ecolo-bobo agenda", "umm, actually, there's no such thing as an SUV" or "I'm a housewife and mother, I need an SUV to drop my children to school BC that's all you can buy today, and *I* never wanted to run over anyone!", occasionally with people pointing out that sure, any car has the potential to be deadly, but SUVs are deadlier in a variety of ways, their much-touted safety features being only for the benefit of the driver and passengers

Bonus round: blaming the outcry against motorists and SUV drivers in particular on a culture of victimhood that depicts cyclists as poor innocent angels against the big bad SUVs

That very same cyclist-blaming, complete with anecdotes of badly behaved cyclists sometimes severely injuring friends or relatives of the commenters, which I don't mean to downplay, but I'm not sure how they relate to a cyclist being run over by someone driving in a bike lane. Also sometimes throwing in stuff about electric scooters. And people who identify as pedestrians taking the side of drivers???

"Sure, Scandinavian countries have robust biking infrastructure and a strong biking culture but they're culturally homogenous"

Since this happened in Paris, blaming it on Anne Hidalgo's anti-car dictatorship. There's one lady in particular who commented about a hundred times that back in her day, everyone was respectful of each other and the code de la route.

For that matter, denying the notion of vehicular violence and saying it's only a matter of lack of "respect" from all sides

The cherry on top: pointing out that the cyclist was a pro-bike activist as a manner of saying that he kinda had it coming.