Hell, my generalized anxiety disorder was enough to get me to move to a city and give up driving. I understand, comrade.
Car culture ruins so much for so many people. "Did you know we’re allowed to drive" - and so many assholes would be like "Well don't let these neurodivergent people drive!" - but in modern society that's like saying why don't we simply cut off someone's leg! Civilization is built around the assumption of private car ownership and there's nothing you can do about it. It makes me so mad. It touches so many things! A person being tired in public is fine. A person being drunk in public is mostly not a problem. But since we have to drive to get anywhere, suddenly it's a life or death problem.
One of the dirtiest tricks capitalism pulled was framing mental health as a personal issue. This is what disability advocates mean when they say the ableist environment is what limits neurodiverse people much more than their mental state.
i'm dyspraxic and the world expects me to pilot a tonne of metal and plastic at 60mph everyday for the rest of my life without killing anyone? fucking hilarious :agony-deep:
this is why im in favor of trains. cars kill so many people and we could just... not do that
I think about this all the time. We literally let almost anyone get behind the wheel of instant death machines and nobody bats an eye.
Love that old joke about geriatrics sitting around complaining about how they're basically blind, can barely hear things right next to them, have the reflexes of a opiated snail, etc, with the punchline that they all agree "well, at least we're still able to drive!"
I actually enjoy driving but it's also frustrating as hell. Cool I'm gonna spend 30-40 minutes twice a day going faster than my perception can properly parse while I'm dead tired and cold. And there are a few hundred people around me also doing this and half of them are tailgating me for only doing 15 over the speed limit in the passing lane or just existing in their vicinity.
My wife has roughly the same commute and I'm terrified for her safety all the time. She's a great driver but you can't fully account for other people or simple human error.
Fuck it's so stressful.
Driving is terrifying and we are too used to it. You can feel the need to get a big stupid pickup truck when everyone else on your 50 mph roads has one. It's not peer pressure, it's crumple zone pressure squeezing the life from you
I still remember being stopped at a light watching the rental car in front of me mock charge a pedestrian using the crosswalk. I’ve never had a stronger desire to open up Minecraft
Another shitty aspect of widespread car ownership is how much money is wasted on individual car repairs. Any important component that breaks costs hundreds if not thousands of dollars for parts and/or labor, even if you do your own repairs. And that's all for one people-mover that more than likely only moves one person.
The worst are the people that regularly test semis and other large vehicles. These guys are driving around 32-35 tons for long stretches of times, having to be hyper aware, and then some dumbass suddenly decides to fuck around in the semi's blind spots or try and cut in front of them. If something goes wrong and the the fuckwad somehow survives, they get mad at the semi driver for their own mistake.
Capitalism's plan for truckers rn is squeeze out every bit of labour you can from them before AI drivers are good enough not to cause lawsuits.
before AI drivers are good enough not to cause lawsuits
You mean before the cost saved by using AI drivers offsets the inevitable lawsuits. Lives lost are irrelevant.
We should reframe these things in terms of human sacrifice and get the Q folk on board. Something like:
A cabal of drivers openly kills a pedestrian every 88 minutes in the USA to maintain the car status quo.
Fordism was a useful industrial development, Ford vehicles shouldn't exist, Ford himself should be dug up, reanimated, and shot.
I take issue with this because there are many deranged and unhinged drivers getting away with all sorts of shit in every street going every way every minute of every day. It's only egregious error or the displeasure of particularly aggressive drivers that get honked. It's mostly reserved for the people who block others from going fast.
The car crash is, however, an incredibly common way to die that is not considered nearly enough while driving and wigs me the fuck out. Why do you feel the need to follow me so close in the right lane that if I break we're both fucked?
fucking corbynistas on their maoist bicycles, smh. don't you know you're making the oil industry sad?
Extremely true, busses and trains are the best ways to get around
Bikes if you just need to get down the street
