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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The current status quo in most of the US and Canada is that in large areas nothing but large single family houses are allowed to be built, which forces people into spending thousands a year on their cars to get anywhere. The alternative being proposed is building areas that can have a mix of housing types and uses, so people can live without needing a car to get anywhere, not to stop being from having cars and going places.
I assume your mention of Shanghai is referring to their COVID lockdowns, which I also think were too severe, but as far as I am aware have completely ended. This was also in response to a virus, and has nothing to do with urban design.
My mention of Shanghai was how they have a horrible ruling class, that has implemented a Social Credit Score. Do or say something they don't like? No more taking the train out of the city. People become bound to the zone they are designated. Sounds a little dystopian no?
The large single houses thing is not true either, I live in Canada and my neighborhood has big corps sweeping through buying properties and building cookie cutter condos in place of the houses. Many don't even have parking
There's a lot you could criticise about the Chinese government, and yet you choose more conspiracy theories. The social credit score in the way that you speak of it comes from a misunderstanding of a vaguely worded Chinese policy document, which lead to various pilot projects by some companies, cities and ministries which have all been conflated into one thing. Here's a good video which goes over the whole thing which I'm sure you won't watch but will still have many opinions about.
The issue you describe in Canada is part of the problem that I describe. Here's a zoning map of Vancouver for example:
In all of the yellow areas, only single family homes and duplexes can be built, which have very low densities. This means anytime there is space where something more dense can be built, the most dense thing possible is built. If there was less restrictive zoning which allowed more mixed uses across the area, what's known as missing middle housing, that is all of the other housing types in between single family homes and large condo towers, could be built.
Thank you for enlightening me on the Social Credit Score, it's good to know it's only court ordered in cases where people aren't allowed to take the train or fly. That's still not great though. I work under some (overly nepotistic) execs for a corp and they use similar vague style tactics. It's honestly both a weapon and a shield that leaves the players powerless and the game masters with too much control. I wouldn't want a country run this way.
I also think of people like Xu Xiaodong who had his score reduced to "D" until he paid $40,000USD for calling a fake martial artist a fraud ಠ_ಠ. The courts in China are another discussion though. I'm just saying there is too much room for weaponization in scenarios like this. If it can be exploited, it will.
The missing middle housing stuff does look interesting, and I see your point with it. If it doesn't impede peoples sunlight or take away yards/gardens while mixing buildings like that, it might be a good solution that we could agree on.