Cars are absolutely not a drop in the climate change bucket.
Industries do cause the majority of carbon emissions and we should take them down. In the meanwhile, consumerism is still what empowers them. You cannot be an ecologist and think we will keep the same wasteful lifestyle.
If SUVs were a country, they’d be the sixth most polluting, and banning/regulating them wouldn’t be pushing the responsibility onto consumers.
Challenging this. Maybe the problem is the constant appetite to change your car every year? Maybe if there was a push to have consumers keep the same car for 10 years (I’ve had mine 11 now) it would be overall better for the environment. I’d argue the biggest impact on the environment around automobiles is the energy taken to create it, not to use it once it exists. This is what worries me with the push to electric. Perhaps we shouldn’t be pushing people to continue the same model of disposable vehicles except now they’re electric. Maybe we should stop people treating vehicles like they’re disposable.
This is my same belief with phones, computers, etc.
We have an underlying problem with how we treat things as disposable.
It takes significantly larger amounts of pollution, energy, resources to produce these ridiculously large vehicles that are in many many use cases not the best tool for the job of transporting 1 to 5 people. Driving a vehicle for a longer time doesn’t change this. Drive a regular sized car for 15 years or longer.
God I get triggered by these monstrosities. Something tells me that’s exactly why the people who buy them, buy them.
Pass the pedestrian crossing extra slowly.
Report any of them for any minor parking violation.
Make them eat shit. If I could.
I parked behind one yesterday. Dude backed up into my car during my brunch. He comes into the restaurant to fess up. I tell him I’m the owner. He was nice enough. All he did was put a square dent in my license plate and bent it. I told him it’s an old car and that it’s ok. But as we were walking to my car he said “you parked close behind me and I couldn’t see it as I backed up”. I had half a mind to make a remark about having a clean, lifted, truck that probably hasn’t hauled anything in 2 years, but I just shut up and let bygones be bygones.
Still, I hope that guy realizes having a 9ft truck isn’t worth the sweat every time he backs up. I have a Toyota Camry. Not the fanciest thing in the world. It’s 20 years old and I do most of the work on it. So I’m not phased by a dent in the license plate (and possible minor trauma to the bumper). But it’s the kind of car that a lot of people own. If he can’t see that, he probably should consider lowering his lifted truck. Or perhaps learning to look behind his car before he hops in and tries to exit a parking space.
People like that probably will never learn. They are buying an aesthetic, not a tool. It’s like buying a high caliber pistol, an expensive phone, or a McMansion. It’s not about having a tool. It’s about having a sense of visible identity.
Based on my long rant, I can tell I have not entirely “let bygones be bygones” despite shaking his hand and letting him drive away without a lick of shame.
The other day a jeep wrangler swiped my car in a parking lot and drove off. I wasn’t there but a kind bystander saw it and left their number and the offenders license plate. The damage wasn’t small, but also small enough for me to shrug off because it’s a 2014 golf wagon and in the end it’s just a car.
But the hit and run pissed me off enough that I reported it. The cops found the driver who will be ticketed now and their insurance will go up. If they fessed up I’d have let it slide.
At least your dude fessed up. And yes, they’d all have a much easier time parking if they chose a sensible car.
I don’t think big cars are especially bad. Imho the issue is at-will vehicle license. We should give them to people who need it for work or really can’t do otherwise.
EDIT: before you downvote, please consider if you have conflict of interest in this. If you are a polluter yourself, you are not rational.
Nothing’s as badfaithed as a vroomer.
This would straight up not work for the vast majority of the US. Public transit in most areas of the country is an absolute joke. That sort of policy would basically be tantamount to revoking poor people’s ability to travel any meaningful distance.
I don’t care that much about americans. They are a lost cause with 100x the footprint of a normal person. Most countries have trains. I’m speaking about normal countries, not settler-colonialists ones who covered the land they emptied with low-density labyrinth like suburbs.
Then it needs to come with the right to public transport. And as access to transit becomes available access to cars requires a business need.
Ok, so first of all, the fact that I am getting downvoted shows the extend of car-related propaganda, even in “leftists” and “ecologically conscious” space. It’s sad, really, I thought I would belong here. Apparently not :(
Seconds, as I said above, they won’t put trainlines on a route where everybody’s taking their cars already.
Meanwhile, people hate motorcycles even more
Bullshit, more dangerous because of the other cars who are not used to having motorbikes nearby, and you have this idea of being less protected on a motorbike, in reality you should try to understand that on a motorbike everything is much more predictable and the problem is almost only who is riding it, in a car, you have more blind spots and less control and therefore greater risk of making mistakes and for pollution, seriously, the simple use of a motorbike when all the space in the car is not needed would eliminate almost all traffic on the road therefore less pollution, less weight to move, less wasted energy, motorbikes are better in everything and not they are only considered because of the comfort zone of the average person.
And noisy what the fuck means? even motorcyclists can be idiots and change the exhaust to make more noise, but this happens because having the fucking motorbike is a niche of people who adore and modify their motorbike, but you can very well not do it.
Yes, it definitely is the cars fault
I think everyone knows someone who died on a motorcycle. I know of a few, none of which involved a crash with other vehicles.
As for noise… All motorbikes are noisy. They have short exhausts.
