Fuck Cars

9633 readers

461 users here now

A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!

Rules

1. Be Civil

You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.

2. No hate speech

Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.

3. Don't harass people

Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.

4. Stay on topic

This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.

5. No reposts

Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.

Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.

Posting Guidelines

In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:

[meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
[article] for news articles
[blog] for any blog-style content
[video] for video resources
[academic] for academic studies and sources
[discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
[meme] for memes
[image] for any non-meme images
[misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories

Recommended communities:

[email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

187

How is it that Germany and Japan can maintain good urban planning despite being home to some of the largest car companies? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

78 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Ever since ditching car culture and joining the urbanist cause (on the internet at least but that has to change), I've noticed that some countries always top the list when it comes to good urbanism. The first and most oblivious one tends to be The Netherlands but Germany and Japan also come pretty close. But that's strange considering that both countries have huge car industries. Germany is (arguably) the birthplace of the car (Benz Patent-Motorwagen) and is home to Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and BMW. Japan is home to Toyota, Honda, Nissan and among others. How is it that these countries have been able to keep the auto lobby at bay and continue investing in their infrastructure?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Haha yes, the car is the German's favorite child, and complaining their favorite pastime.

That being said, I think there's more factors to it. Keep in mind that most German cities were in ruins after WWII, and plenty of buildings have been demolished to make room for cars.

The difference in electoral systems might play a role, where a green party could slowly, but steadily gain influence.

Railway infrastructure was already quite dense before mass motorization.

A lot of money has been spend to get through traffic out of town centers.

There's probably more to it ...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Railway infrastructure was already quite dense before mass motorization.

the US used to be quite well connected via rail