War on Cars

If you can find a better car, bike it:

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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01135-1

Atlanta had a plague of electric scooters, like many places. They banned them. Congestion then increased by 10%.

The real secret is docked bikes/scooters and subsidies to help expand private ownership of bikes and scooters, coupled with bike lanes.

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Another clip to add to the “Simpsons Predicts the Future” pile.

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While eliminating cars should be the goal, as we know transitioning to electric is not enough to bring down the overall negative impacts of cars.

Yet more reasons to limit what kinds of vehicles are allowed to be manufactured in the first place.

Or have it that, you can manufacture absolutely any kind of vehicle imaginable, but that doesn’t necessarily permit you to use it on the roads.

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Indeed. Electric cars, at best, only partially alleviate just one of the ways in which car dominance damages our entire society.

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Austria will begin to confiscate the cars of drivers that are excessively speeding:

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/speed-far-above-limit-well-take-your-car-austria-says-2022-12-05/

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Car logic permeates the language we use, says Kager. “We speak of vulnerable road users, but they’ve only been vulnerable since the advent of fast traffic with big, heavy vehicles. Why don’t we call those fast, heavy vehicles dangerous road users?”

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In a similar vein since before I was even anti-car I’ve loved drivers slipping on hills at this time of year. So very Icarus:

Obviously I love these videos even more now. Anyone got more?

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That is amazing and perfect.

Just came across this all too perfect illustration of how cars and conservatism are so closely intertwined.

Basically in NYC we have tolls on several roads. The tolls used to be enforced by booths with gates and toll workers. Nowadays you pay with E-ZPass. If you don’t have the pass, it photographs the license plate and invoices whoever the car is registered to.

We also have cameras that are used to enforce speeding and sometimes red light violations.

Some drivers have decided to use various measures to visually obscure their license plates to dodge tolls and avoid tickets. Many of these drivers are themselves cops. We know this because you can go to any NYPD precinct and look at the illegally parked privately owned vehicles around the station. A good percentage of them will have license plate obscuring “technology” of some sort. I’ve witnessed this first hand at multiple precincts.

The others that have it are most often fart cars and other dangerously modified vehicles belonging to aggressive drivers. Unsurprisingly, quite a few of these are also cops!

Some good and brave people have take it upon themselves to do something about this. When they see obscured plates, they unobscure them. At least one person has suffered greatly at the hands of a violent nut driver who attacked them.

If you look in the thread I linked you can see based on the upvotes that the people of NYC know what’s right.

But there are still several heavily downvoted comments that amount to “mind your own business” and “what’s the harm?” These are comments from right wing people, maybe even cops themselves.

I point out in my comment how these same people believe that someone jumping the turnstile on the subway should face severe consequences. A crime of $2.75. Meanwhile they think it’s perfectly ok to dodge a toll on the GWB, which is $16, or avoid a speeding ticket which could be hundreds of dollars.

It’s nothing new. We know conservatives really believe in classism, racism, etc. That their only consistent principle is that nobody should tell them what to do, but they should be able to tell others what to do.

But the connection here with cars is stark. The connection between automotive dominance and conservatism can not be denied. If we can make our society no longer dominated by cars, fascism will also be largely defeated.

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