Gregory's ServerIs this too much to ask? Evidently it is. 😕
#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis
#ClimateAction #WarOnCars #BanCars
 101 comments
This is how other industrialized countries do it. They make cities walkable and such that you don’t have to drive to the market and other essential locations. We need to grow up. The value of self-reliance has devolved in our culture to physical and emotional isolation. Not good. @casjo2022 @admin People pay a lot of money to visit where I live but the locals won't even walk or bike around our lovely multi use trail around our lovely lake with its beautiful trail. @casjo2022 @admin my husband grew up in the postwar valleys of South Wales, and there was a train down to Cardiff at ~15 minute intervals, meaning it was never a big deal if a chat with a neighbour meant you missed it and had to wait for the next one. Then they built motorways on the other side of the valleys from the railways, and then rail service intervals lengthened to what is now less than hourly. So now everyone relies on cars. @admin @casjo2022 @breadandcircuses If Americans can drive, they will. I live in a similar kind of town and I am one of the few who doesn't use a car for short trips. Most of us in live in a 15 minute city from biking perspective but you would never know it. We are determined to self destruct for what we see as convenience.  @breadandcircuses As someone who lives in a small Bavarian village, with literally 2 busses a day, I'd absolutely be in favour of proper public transport.   @breadandcircuses Fun fact, most cities were redesigned for cars, because they kept killing folk. Then they made up the term Jaywalking to shame pedestrians onto the sidewalks that we now have to fight over space with a’hole bicyclists, that can’t decide on which set of rules they want to follow, and e-scooters and other wheel based transportation.   Try Paris. You can get from Paris to Marseille by choo-choo in ~3h. Centre city to centre city. You couldn't do that by jet. What's more, if you can book ahead and leave early/late, prices go as low as ~20eur. Should we blame Henry Ford and the oil barons? Or does the fault go back further than them? @Shachihoko Some deep thinkers say that agriculture (~10,000 BCE) was humanity's first and greatest mistake.   @breadandcircuses I wonder if self-driving cars might *be* the public transit of the future in settings where a train doesn't make sense. No privately owned vehicles at all. Just millions of electric cars on call that can take you safely to your destination alone or in a group. Self-driving Uber.  @farbel @breadandcircuses So, no personal auto ownership…just take you where you want to go when you need to. They don’t sit in your driveway doing nothing, or in a work parking lot. But somehow they’re all maintained to safe standards,the size you need to carry whatever when you need it. No big SUVs with one rider. You just pay by time, distance and size/payload,comfort level. corporations could tie in with creative scheduling software. Like Zipcar on a mega scale @farbel @breadandcircuses Some might say it’s a “car to each according to their needs, paid according to their ability” but that’s maybe a little too much Karl Marx meets Henry Ford. (oil and water?) @breadandcircuses my dream is to live in a city where cars are effectively banned. everything is built around public transportation and walking.  @breadandcircuses I want public transport where I’m not squeezed in like a sardine (claustrophobic)  @breadandcircuses I live in the U.S. and I miss my home country in Europe mostly because of their incredible train and metro system.  @breadandcircuses @breadandcircuses I couldn’t agree more but the answer to our automotive dilemma still evades us; largely due to the governments reliance on profit from older funded technologies which receive higher dividends. Nudge, nudge, wink!🤝🤝🤝  @breadandcircuses Not everyone lives in a city. All those millions of people in towns and villages will always need private transport of some kind, unless one would rather try to forcibly depopulate the countryside like some modern-day version of the Highland Clearances. @hughster @chrisblake @breadandcircuses Yes, I forgot to say, that's the other option: we forcibly drive the rural population back into the pre-industrial age, where the people are mostly subsistence farmers and extremely poor, have few prospects of decent education or success compared to those in cities, and many never leave the place they were born. That's why most Central American countries are not considered developed. Is that really your vision of the future? @hughster Wow, there's a lot to unpack here. I don't understand in what sense communities that have routine access to things like buses, heavy goods vehicles, usually radios and TVs, often some computers, and increasingly even shared internet access are "pre-industrial". If people have regular opportunities to travel to large cities by bus or other public transportation, then it's obviously not the case that they would never have the option to leave the towns they grew up in. @breadandcircuses I've personally known people who grew up in small Central American or South Asian villages, went to university, worked in a city or even overseas for some years before moving back home, speak 3 or more languages, and are some of the most worldly, broad-minded, and well-educated people I've ever met. All without ever owning or regularly driving a car. Obviously there are many rural places where people don't have cars and also happen to be living in grinding poverty, but that's not what I was talking about. There are plenty of people in the world who lead rural lives without cars while also enjoying all the things they need and then some, because their societies are set up to facilitate that. They provide examples of how that's possible, which we in the "first world" should be trying a lot harder to learn from. You're basically presenting a false dilemma in which the only options compatible with non-urban living are a high-impact car culture vs. abject poverty with almost no modern technology at all. There's a lot of space available in between those extremes. It all just seems unthinkably exotic to many of us in the "first world" because our societies for the most part no longer *allow* us any of those other options. @chrisblake Yes, in any poor communities there'll be unrepresentative exceptions, a minority lucky enough to escape their circumstances and do well despite the odds. That isn't an argument in favour of the environment. Which central American and south Asian countries are we talking about specifically? @hughster The people I mainly had in mind are from Belize and Nepal. Note, though, that I never said the people I was referring to grew up in and had to "escape" poverty; that was an assumption you made. I just said they grew up in villages and didn't have cars. The former came from a family that would probably be considered middle-income by her home country's standards and apparently had a reasonably comfortable upbringing there, but was not affluent by "first world" standards. But that just illustrates my point, which I think you're still missing. In many parts of the world, even rural people who are reasonably well off economically typically don't own cars because regardless of where they live, it's unusual that private car ownership actually makes more economic sense than using things like buses. It's just hard for us to see that because our governments use very heavy subsidies to aggressively distort the market in favor of private cars. In other words, if my villager friend had tried to purchase, fuel, and maintain her own car, that likely would have driven her into poverty. Instead, using more convivial modes of transportation helped her to leverage what we would probably consider quite modest means to pursue experiences and opportunities she wanted. I say you're missing my point because you still seem to be conflating poverty with rural non-car-ownership, and my point is that those are two different things. Obviously a very poor villager will not have their own car, but the converse doesn't follow; living in a rural community without one's own car doesn't intrinsically drive people into poverty. If anything, when there are more efficient shared alternatives in place it can often help keep them out of it. I'll end by sharing that if anyone reading this is unfamiliar with these points and would like to learn more, a good place to start is Ivan Illich's short book "Energy and Equity", which presents some very interesting observations about the economics of different transportation modes. Illich was kind of a seminal (and pretty devastating) critic of conventional "human development" discourse along these lines, informed largely by his own experiences living in rural Central and South America.  @chrisblake It's part of the First World "saviour" complex to believe that everyone in the Third World is living in poverty. There's millions who grow up and go to school in villages and small towns, further their education in larger towns or cities, and then return to their regions. Since they haven't transplanted to the First World and been "saved" by access to cutting-edge trends, they somehow don't exist. @chrisblake @hughster @breadandcircuses It should be perfectly possible to live in a town or village and get around to do one's routine necessities without owning a car. Millions did, and millions more are even still nostalgic for that lifestyle. @hamishb @chrisblake @hughster @breadandcircuses impossible, only jobs are way away in towns or cities where people want late or early opening, often the only one on the bus going to work, most shiftwork carework etc there is no bus, no can = no job @maiamaia I'm certainly not disputing that in most wealthier countries we currently have a complicated and tangled up mess of economic policies and cultural factors that make non-urban car-free living highly impractical for many people. I'm not saying all of us can just stop driving tomorrow without any larger changes in our economies and cultures. My point is that there are current, real-world proofs of concept that show it doesn't have to be this way if we collectively want to change.  @hamishb @chrisblake @hughster @breadandcircuses @hamishb @chrisblake No, millions *didn't*! Before Cars came along most rural areas were significantly underdeveloped and sparsely populated. The entire reason rural towns and villages have exploded in population and grown in prosperity over the last century is cars. @hughster @hamishb @chrisblake ever hear of trains? Trains did that long before cars. Ditch cars and make rail better. @afterconnery @hamishb @chrisblake They didn't, and they never can. Even before Beeching trains only went to towns, and only past the occasional village on the way. And the routes didn't take you in every direction you might want to go. (They certainly don't now.) Good luck trying to build railways to every village with today's prices... @hughster @hamishb @chrisblake That's funny because trains did that where I'm from. And canals did it before trains. It stopped when auto companies bought out and then gutted other forms of transportation. It may be different where you're from, but your history is different than mine. Try not to universalize your history upon everyone else. @hughster Here is an example from near where i live. This one ended up as a bust, but they were being built everywhere at the time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitewater_Canal Also the Cardinal Greenway, rails to trail path, goes from Richmond to Muncie and there are various towns along the way. A hundred years ago people would take weekend trips from Richmond to these small towns by rail. @afterconnery It doesn't look like that canal went to an awful lot of villages. And for those lucky enough to have been on the route who wanted to go to other places on the route, what would the journey times have been for passengers in the towpath era? @hughster @chrisblake "Underdeveloped" reflects an urban, industrialized perspective. Populations sufficed for a thriving agrarian economy, & people used trains, local buses & taxi services & mutual aid. "Development" since then reflects exurban sprawl ("country living with city amenities"), a luxury we can no longer afford. @hamishb "Underdeveloped" means what it says: people were poor, they had little access to good education and work and leisure opportunities, health outcomes were bad, precious few services and amenities were available, etc. You're imagining a rose-tinted version of the past that never existed. Have you ever actually lived in the countryside? @hughster Old towns all over where I live in Ontario have centres full of solid commercial building and fine houses. They were quite prosperous. There were regional train services and milk-run buses regularly. @hughster Or, OK, how about you say what "development" means to you, because that's where we began? Is it car dependent lifestyles? If you're talking about settlements that are both so tiny and so remote that they can't feasibly have any type of transit service but you also can't feasibly ride a (possibly electric) bicycle to the nearest town that does (or could) have public transit links, my position is that people should be encouraged to move (with economic assistance if needed) to settlements that are not so remote from the rest of society. Unless they actually prefer a very remote, almost purely subsistence-based lifestyle, in which case I respect that, but they also need to be willing to accept the implications of it. As @hamishb pointed out, it is never going to be biophysically sustainable for significant numbers of people to have quick and convenient access to both rural and urban extremes at the same time. That's a peculiarly "first world" extravagance we indeed cannot afford. @hamishb ☝️ Living the dream in Victoria, Canada Village Life is good #village #CarFree #walking #biking #TheGoodLife #CleanAir #exercise #ClimateCrisis @hughster @breadandcircuses before British Rail was hammered by the Beeching cuts and later was privatised, even many tiny villages had train stations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts @apolaine @breadandcircuses I know, there are numerous such closed branch lines around here, including one that's now a heritage line. There's no doubt many of them should've been saved, and we'd be in a lot better position now had they been. But even then the lines didn't go everywhere and the routes weren't always that useful for passengers, given most were built with freight in mind. And we are where we are now: the lines would be prohibitively expensive to reopen and most have been built on.  @breadandcircuses there're quite a few cities in the world that already have this. Just none in the US or Canada  @breadandcircuses i like the idea as i'm originally from Europe. The only thing with the whole public transport/cycling thing is for people who live 40 miles outside a city in "the country". First a lot of mayors don't want to put public transport outside their cities to other neighbourhoods. If you can fix that then I'm all ears 😁 @breadandcircuses cars are not needed in cities, but in rural areas. So don’t say you want this for cites but literally everywhere.  @breadandcircuses I love the Madrid metro. The rides are stupid cheap and you get a train every few minutes. This is the gold standard for public transport for me, everyone else needs to catch up. So, clearly not too much to ask, as it alredy exists in a place that is not much different from the rest of the developed world.  @mzedp @breadandcircuses Comparing transit options in my city, walking puts you on par with the bus system unless you're truly going completely across the city. The buses are so infrequent and the routes so pointlessly basic that anywhere the bus can get you in less than 90 minutes is walkable in the same time. @breadandcircuses can I also have shops, libraries, schools, parks and healthcare within an easy 15 minute walk, so I don’t have to drive to some windswept, out of town hellscape where it will probably take me that long just to walk across the car park? @breadandcircuses I want all that, and Seperated Bike Lanes, and Raised Pedestrian Crossovers, and Bike Busses to get kids to and from school and other activities.... And I want all the cars that are left to be Level 5 Autonomous and Electric.  @breadandcircuses There's a need for both. My kid cannot drive due to a seizure disorder. She's a successful biologist but can't live and outside a major city. For people like her, for the blind, the elderly, and others who can't drive to be able to live outside the few big cities with good transportation is important. Also, in 6 days I'll be landing after 16 hours of travel, and have to stay in a hotel to avoid driving 4 hours home after no sleep. A self driving car would be safer. Just seeing "I don't want self driving cars" in the preview, my mind automatically completed the thought "...I want self driving trains" But y'know, regular trains with drivers are cool too. @breadandcircuses You only have to ask one question: Can my children play on the street of my residential area? If the answer is 'no', something is wrong.... @breadandcircuses @dr_rugby My kid asked my what car I would buy when they are out. of the house. I said that I don't want a car, but a rail pass @below @breadandcircuses currently in London. Son (12y) says, best thing in this vacation is the tube. We never check the timetable, the next train is just around the corner. @dr_rugby @breadandcircuses That being said, I find that once the Tube ends, public transport in the UK is a disgrace @breadandcircuses I want self driving cars for being mobile from home to the train station, supermarket or friends and back. @breadandcircuses I would like to see more trains and public transit and better-designed crossing areas. That said, EVs are needed for those who live in rural areas and for some people who have mobility issues and yet find that the schedule of access buses don't allow them to be productive. |
@breadandcircuses
Bring back the tracks!