It’s always a good day when private cars running costs go up, incentives people to drop it if it’s not absolutely needed
Edit:
Me: cars bad
Americans:
I live in the LA area. By car, 45 minutes to work. By bus, 3 buses and 4 hours one way.
In a sense that there needs to be a way to show that the status quo of only maintaining/expanding car infrastructure and providing nothing else as viable alternative is a dead one. Ridiculous insurance increases is part of that.
Fixed route and Accessible buses are possible even in smaller cities like Missoula, MT, population 70k, which provides fare-free transit service to its residents. In bigger cities, mass transit, urban and interurban rail needs to be explored and expanded today, else these problems will only get worse with no end in sight.
Sure, but that doesn’t mean that those who have no other choice should be punished.
You are severely harmed by not having a car *and being too apathetic and selfish to do anything about it
Sorted that for you
And there’s that ignorant privilege. No one is coming out to Kern County to build stop lights, let alone a some how functioning public transit system, our best bet would be high speed rail out here, and you can thank one individual billionaire for fucking that up. What are we supposed to do? Use our voting power of a low population county to address billionaire’s fucking us too hard? I drive my neighbors out of town if they need me to, I do what I can, there’s no options, you get access to a car or you die.
The state is huge, you’re right. It’s not just LA and San Francisco. But to anti-car people, there are only five places to live in the US, and if you’re not in NYC, SF, LA, Chicago, or DC, you don’t exist. Walk everywhere, lose your job, become homeless! That’ll get politicians to invest in public transportation!
I agree with the cost of private cars in the US are detrimentally low. We have insanely subsidized gas, the car owners don’t pay for the cost of the roads (see federal gas tax being laughably low), and the side effect health hazards (noise, plastics dust, crash deaths) are considered normal despite the sheer suffering they cause.
That said, making cars more painful (cost/time) must be coupled with the work of rebuilding our infrastructure to modern standards. This means normal frequency mass transit (8 minute or less intervals), separated bike roads, and pedestrian safety put over car speed.
It can be done (there’s solutions to all of the superficial emotional jabs people seem to throw online), it just takes work to get our cities back from the clutches of the car only thinking we’ve been doing for 60+ years.