I fucking hate living here. The culture is poison. The economy is a fucking disaster. The education is designed to leave a huge portion of the country illiterate. Every single atom of it is white supremacist. The land is all stolen. The capitalists are completely above the law. Fuck cars. Fuck America,
I really can’t stress this enough. Fuck cars, and fuck this god forsaken country where I’m forced to rely on them. My friend lives in one of like the 3 places in the country you can get by without a car, it’s a shorter walk for him to get from his front door to Safeway than it is for me to get to my car. The amount of shit that would fit in this town if you just deleted every parking lot.
And why can’t I get a train to a major city 2 hours away? I’m literally at the mid point between 4 major cities. But there’s not a passenger rail service for over 100 miles. Want to visit my friends? That’s a two hour drive on the interstate. Hope my meds don’t put me to sleep! Oh and it’s toll roads too, thanks Florida.
I hate driving, I hate maintaining a car, I hate having to own a car, and I hate what cars have done to our cities. Immediately ban the construction of new cars, roads, and parking lots and move towards the banning of cars for most private use.
And it's literally impossible to undo the way we've built it, too. Yeah we can densify downtown neighborhoods and maybe if we're lucky we can get a few intercity rail lines going in 20 years, but 99% of suburban strip mall single family shit hole america is stuck that way. We literally sunk all of our cheap fossil fuel energy into building the whole country like that and now we don't have enough cheap energy to change it. Kunstler calls it the greatest misallocation of resources in human history. It's a fucking bummer.
deleted by creator
Literally the only way to deal with it is to allow huge areas of suburb to be abandoned and rot. Densify already dense downtown and urban areas and simply ban new construction in certain areas and allow them to deteriorate, with some public transit and electric cars as a temporary bandaid. But there’s no salvaging most of Orlando for example. Recycle the building materials we can, and let it rot.
You say allow like it should be a policy, but the fact is that it will happen regardless. Suburban cities all over the country can't pay to maintain themselves because the cost to take care of infrastructure exceeds the tax revenue they get from sprawled out development. We're talking thousands of miles of roads and sewers PER CITY, all paid for and subsidized by the federal govt, transportation lobby, and private development over decades.
And when they reach the point of facing bankruptcy (without understanding how they got there), cities will be forced to raise taxes like crazy and beg the fed for cash (already happening now with municipal bonds), at which point those who can move away to avoid paying more will, and those who can't will be stuck with a dying city. It's really fucking bleak, and it's going to be the norm in 10-20 years.
Yeah I say “Allow” because instead of letting it idly happen like it’s going to, we should do it as a matter of policy, so that we can actively manage which areas are abandoned and which are maintained and give assistance to people to leave the areas being abandoned and to move to city centers.
You’re right though, that’s not gonna happen, it’s just going to idly fall apart until it’s too late.
lol there’s no point saving Orlando anyways. most of Florida will probably be flooded in the time it would take to undo the damage
True, I just said Orlando because it’s 99% suburbs. Honestly Florida should already be in the early stages of a nearly full, permanent evacuation. The fact that there’s still new construction happening in Miami is 🤡 shit
Or we just respect a few culverts, transformers, and gas stations.
Suburbs and exurbs are basically hanging by 3 threads.
Yeah it's why we do actually need electric cars even though they are not that great. It's the best we can do now that we fucked ourselves... unless we want to burn even more carbon and waste even more resources literally destroying most buildings in the country.
Electric cars are a mediocre band-aid at best, but yeah they are part of the solution. More important though is making more room on roads for bikes, buses, and people.
Yeah in even the poorly designed urban areas you can get by with a lot of electric buses instead of trains. But in suburban America it's such a massive fucking twisting labyrinth of low density housing and zero infrastructure / zero nearby stores, that people would wait hours for a bus
unfortunately forcing every American to buy a car allows the capitalists to squeeze like a cool $20k out of everyone which is "good for the economy" I guess because cars are one of the few things we still make here. Everything in this country is a fucking racket it sucks.
Eco Gecko's video on SUVs, "Vroom Doom", estimated that a typical automobile costs 6k (low-end sedans) to 11k (high-end pickups) per year to own/operate, all told. That doesn't include roadway spending, so it's possible that we spend up to 25% of our GDP just on having motor vehicles.
deleted by creator
I live in one of those 3 places that you "don't need" a car, and I still need a car. Every job on my field is in a location that is not transit accessible, period. The nearest grocery store is over a mile from my house and involves crossing multiple intersections that I - a healthy, fit 29 year old man - feel sketchy crossing, let alone someone not in "peak physical form". Buses come once an hour at best outside of rush hour, and even then getting anywhere could take multiple transfers.