• pedz@lemmy.ca
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    1 day ago

    Nothing surprising to the people in this community. It’s crazy to see how people are very much sold to the idea of cars, even if they don’t like to drive one.

    Recently I was in the comments of an autonomous vehicles community about how some car manufacturer chose Waymo’s “self driving” tech over Tesla’s, and one popular and revealing comment went like “I can’t wait for self driving cars, I’m so tired of driving!”

    To me this is pretty sad, but apparently it’s better to invest billions in a technology to have multi-tons vehicles wasting energy driving one person around, rather than invest in public transit. Some people hate driving but still can’t see anything wrong with this excessive car culture.

    • grue@lemmy.worldOPM
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      12 hours ago

      Some people hate driving but still can’t see anything wrong with this excessive car culture.

      To support your point:

      According to this, that might be as high as almost 1/3 of drivers. To be fair I guessed it would be higher before I looked it up, but that’s still a lot.

      And most importantly, it’s a much higher percentage than the percentage of the population the zoning code allows to live in multifamily housing (which can be as low as 10% in some metro areas), which I’m using as a proxy for walkable communities even though they don’t necessarily line up perfectly.

      Point is, in a lot of cases the law requires constructing the built environment in a way that forces people to drive even when they don’t want to.

    • lauha@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      Car industry has incentive to be against public transit because every public transit made is removed from their potential profit.

  • Sanctus@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Yeah its a fucken awful experience all around. Cars are different outside of cities and especially in rurual areas. But its a recipe for disaster in cities.

    • grue@lemmy.worldOPM
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      13 hours ago

      The key point to remember is that 80% of the US population is urban. The other 20% are totally justified in having a car-centric lifestyle, but they’re also a relatively negligible percentage and thus not part of the problem to begin with.

      It’s all the folks in the suburbs who like to pretend they’re rural when they’re not who are the bulk of the problem.