#car brain

[infamousbrad]

[allhell-brakeloose]

Stolen from bluesky

[i-want-cheese]

We are on a small island with good public transportation and perfect weather. Your pro-car arguments are invalid.

[robotmechagirl]

Why is it both safer and easier to get in my car and cross the road than it is to walk across it?!?!? What the hell America? 🇺🇸

[bansuvs]

3/4 of drivers think they are "better than average" drivers. Interesting bit of psychology but really dangerous on the roads.

[dipstick-university]

it is actually incredibly fucked up to require people be encased in three thousand pounds of machinery to be in public. I should be able to exist on my street, in the dark, without fearing for my life. I should be able to do so even if I am blind or deaf or using a walker. I should be able to walk to the local grocer without darting across six lanes of traffic. My children should be able to ride their bike in public spaces without the fear of becoming a smear on someone's bumper. There is no excuse for how rampant car culture has become in north american urban areas. Make it make sense.

[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. 

[auroroboros1]

car dependancy is a death cult.

[i-want-cheese]

Inching your car forward while pedestrians use the crosswalk is akin to pointing a loaded gun at them.

[carhatred]

Unsurprisingly, most Americans frown upon antisocial behavior. Stealing people’s stuff, bending food safety rules, or smoking in large crowds tend to generate a lot of stern reactions.

But get behind the wheel of a car, and all that disapproval tends to melt away.

That’s because a lot of us suffer from a malady called “car brain” — though Ian Walker, a professor of environmental psychology at Swansea University in Wales, prefers to call it “motonormativity.” This is the term coined by Walker and his team to describe the “cultural inability to think objectively and dispassionately” about how we use cars.

[thelesbianthespianposts]

imagine: you get your memories back after years of amnesia to find out your whole species is dead and earth doesn’t exist anymore. that the only thing left of your culture is your weird ex and his busted honda civic that barely even works that he stole from the government when he was 13. And he’s been taking members of an alien species for trips in his honda civic and they’re all like “woah it’s so cool” and you get upset because it’s NOT COOL it’s a honda civic, the turn signals don’t even work “wow it can go up hills” yeah OF COURSE IT CAN GO UP HILLS EVERY CAR COULD DO THAT. but they’ve never seen a car before so everything it does is the coolest thing ever. And your ex’s only tool is a fucking screwdriver which is somehow also cool to this dumbass alien species even though it’s a fucking screwdriver so you just look like an idiot screaming about how none of this is even cool it’s actually really shitty but your whole planet is gone so you can’t even prove it but also you’ve had a constant drumming sounding in your head since you were 10 slowly driving you insane. I would become evil too.

[quert-ii]

i feel like what this article deliberately excludes when they say GAS IS $6.48 IN THE NETHERLANDS!!!!!! is the context to WHY gas costs so much in the netherlands (and europe more generally)

the governments of these countries deliberately tax gas bc they're trying to push more ppl away from gas-powered, low capacity vehicles into high capacity or non motorized vehicles. like europe has a MUCH more robust public transit system then the US and it SHOWS in CNN's reporting

idk if the carbrain got to the CNN writer or the network is funded by Big Car but it WAS the first thing to come up for me when i searched "gas prices in europe" sooooo...

[dekaydk]

And this is one of the smaller ones.

In Houston, one road at its widest point has twenty-two lanes. (This includes frontage lanes, which are a standard feature of Texas highways.) After its most recent widening, traffic is now worse than before, spurring calls for a further increase in lanes.

ive never liked the phrase "manmade horrors beyond your comprehension" but i cant think of a better way to describe texas roads

biblically accurate highway