ask patrick

But it means rebuilding cities. We should absolutely do it, but entirely reworking how everyone gets around is gonna take a while even best case scenario. But that's why we should get started now!

Legalized bribery.

From my interpretation, this meme suggests we should just stop building cars. The fact we are buying so many cars is just a testament on how bad public transportation is. Even with traffic I still manage to get 1 hour and half faster than public transportation by train + subway.

I wish the solution was as simples as a resource redirection, but unfortunately it would require some city planning and possibly rebuilding around public transportation. Not gonna happen, I guess.

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I hate driving because of everything you just said!

As long as you can use it to walk/reduced mobility on, no. That allows everyone to use it.

Corporate owned for profit. Simple

It's pretty disingenuous to claim that your city founded in 1300 has tight streets and isn't car-friendly because people in 1300 were really big on public transport.

And the answer is that cities grow descriptively rather than prescriptively. They generally add what is in demand/what they need piecemeal, and most US cities really grew in the 20th century.

That's why NYC, for example, has significantly better public transport than most of the nation - it's one of the oldest cities

This is also why moving to mass transit is a hard sell. It's expensive and there is less demonstrated need and more forethought behind the switchover.

There’s an few distinctions about American culture as it relates to car culture.

• America had/has a lot of land

• Much of this is/was vastly underdeveloped right outside of urban hubs, unlike Europe/related which benefits from a tighter interconnected network of cities that more immediately benefit from mass transit systems

• In the US post-WWII middle class and privileged were often sold an idea of peaceful suburban lifestyles away from urbanized areas

• Car manufacturers marketed this successfully as a way to encourage families away from city life and thus build a more solid reliance on their vehicles

• City planning was therefore often built around a suburban-city sprawl rather than a cohesive urban community designed around efficiency

Like, why would you ever build a city differently in the first place?

Exactly. Unfortunately, in Australia, we tend to borrow stupid ideas from the US to make money and have sprawling suburbs with zero amenity.

For instance, we had a new suburbian development within 20km from the CBD with the promise of schools, community centres etc. in the early 2000s. When all the houses were bought and built, suddenly there's no money for amenities so they just sold the land to developers who then put more houses in. Now the only way to get anything you need is by car because there's no train or buses because it was supposed to be accessible by bike/walking but now isn't. And not to mention gridlock of vehicles looking to get out of the suburbs for food etc. out of the one intersection provided.

I would love 15min cities without cars for my country but the attitude to cars here is similar to the attitude about guns in the US.

Just to be clear, my point (aside from that being rural sucks for transportation+there was only 1 option in this situation) is that the problem is infrastructure and planning rather than the vehicles themselves.

EDIT: And yeah, I don't know why they didn't split the job up into at least 2. [A to B] and [B to C] rather than [A-C] (and more sections could've probably been done when it comes to the resurfacing). Seems as if this were a sudden change after delays too.

This woman clearly has one aggressively neurotypical child. Not 3 neurodivergent ones.

Have you tried sucking my buttery grundle?

Or just a silly monty python fish. How anyone could be against public transportation is so beyond me

I also have a degree in economics (and computer science, fwiw). We agree that the incentive structures in the United States are fucked up. I was just answering the question in the meme with regards to manufacturing decisions and how/why they’re made. Discontinuing our perverse car-centric subsidy schemes would be a great way to steer demand and supply away from cars.

Under-founds public transportation until all that's left is a old dirty bus going in along a useless route every 6 hours. Builds massive highways, parking lots and roads that make it "easy" to drive and impossible to walk or cycle, cuts gas taxes. WOAH GUYS, people are buying cars because they love them! We should give them more funding and keep de-funding transit projects

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This is a problem with some poorly executed pedestrianisation/walkable area conversions IMO.

I like it since it means more car free spaces for me and my 🚲, but those without a bike aren't going to wait around a hour for a bus, they'll hop in their car and drive to an alternative location. They might not even be familiar with bike paths and routes to get there, especially if they're not comfortable riding on the road.

When car-first infrastructure is ripped out, people need to be introduced to alternatives and the alternatives need to be attractive, otherwise the status-quo will shift elsewhere

To be faaaaaair, there are certain politicians who claim that "people like health insurance", but those 'people' might be politicians who get big donations from the private healthcare firms.

So, you love cars and some culturally orbiting aspects of it, but you don’t like the application of it?

It just feels like everyone’s societal attachment to cars is a little more nuanced than “let’s get rid of them all” then, yeah?

Yet here we are, and people still enthusiastically buy cars and love having personal transport.

You may be shocked to hear this, but the world is a far bigger place than inside your head.