Fuck Cars
This community exists as a sister community/copycat community to the r/fuckcars subreddit.
This community exists for the following reasons:
- to raise awareness around the dangers, inefficiencies and injustice that can come from car dependence.
- to allow a place to discuss and promote more healthy transport methods and ways of living.
You can find the Matrix chat room for this community here.
Rules
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Be nice to each other. Being aggressive or inflammatory towards other users will get you banned. Name calling or obvious trolling falls under that. Hate cars, hate the system, but not people. While some drivers definitely deserve some hate, most of them didn't choose car-centric life out of free will.
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No bigotry or hate. Racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, chauvinism, fat-shaming, body-shaming, stigmatization of people experiencing homeless or substance users, etc. are not tolerated. Don't use slurs. You can laugh at someone's fragile masculinity without associating it with their body. The correlation between car-culture and body weight is not an excuse for fat-shaming.
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Stay on-topic. Submissions should be on-topic to the externalities of car culture in urban development and communities globally. Posting about alternatives to cars and car culture is fine. Don't post literal car fucking.
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No traffic violence. Do not post depictions of traffic violence. NSFW or NSFL posts are not allowed. Gawking at crashes is not allowed. Be respectful to people who are a victim of traffic violence or otherwise traumatized by it. News articles about crashes and statistics about traffic violence are allowed. Glorifying traffic violence will get you banned.
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No reposts. Before sharing, check if your post isn't a repost. Reposts that add something new are fine. Reposts that are sharing content from somewhere else are fine too.
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No misinformation. Masks and vaccines save lives during a pandemic, climate change is real and anthropogenic - and denial of these and other established facts will get you banned. False or highly speculative titles will get your post deleted.
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No harassment. Posts that (may) cause harassment, dogpiling or brigading, intentionally or not, will be removed. Please do not post screenshots containing uncensored usernames. Actual harassment, dogpiling or brigading is a bannable offence.
Please report posts and comments that violate our rules.
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A truck carrying freight ≠ a person driving home groceries. Groceries that typically fill up a car's trunk just for 2-3 people; a bicycle isn't carrying that. You'd need a rickshaw-like cart hooked onto it. They do exist though, for passengers, so making one for personal cargo loads is doable.
I wouldn't want to do any of that in winter, though. Snow, ice, and sub-zero wind-chill (plus the further cooling effect while moving) are not when anyone should ever be on a bicycle.
Also, driving to a larger grocery store is non-negotiable for us because they're the ones who stock the lower-demand allergy-safe foods. Guess how much a corn allergy sucks in America, on top of others. While most allergies and medical conditions are rarer than not, they are a huge problem.
Didn't get me started on commuting - and youn literally can't remote-work a labor job. Imagine having to make a 30+ minute car commute on a bicycle on top of a 9+ hour day.
So while yes, fuck cars, bicycles are not anywhere close to a magic bullet. Our entire civilization needs a comprehensive bottom-up overhaul that addresses every problem simultaneously, since most of them are interconnected.
Person who lives a car-centric life think human experience everywhere is the same.
Groceries, in particular, are more of an effect than a cause. Lots of people live without cars in New York City, or London, or Paris, or Toronto, or Tokyo, and they manage to eat. The reason you need to buy 7 days worth of food for two people all at once is because you live in a field far away from everything. "Getting Groceries" becomes a special trip, because, while driving, leaving the highway, stopping and parking are inconvenient.
As a pedestrian in a city, I was going to walk past 5 food stores on my way between work and home anyway, and it's really not problem to walk in and buy only what I ran out of yesterday, or some special item I wanted for tonight's dinner. It's simple to shop for 5 or 10 minutes, five times a week, rather than one hour once a week, and never need more than a single bag of groceries at a time. And rather than being inconvenient, it's actually great because I'm only buying what I need right now, the things I'm going to use as soon as I get home, so it's very simple.
Allergies could be tricky, yeah. If you're lucky the local shop, by nature of being smaller and more local, actually knows you and knows you need this stuff and stocks it because they know you'll buy it from them. But that's not a guarantee, for sure. That having been said, if the only people driving were people with corn allergies, the roads would be a much safer place!