this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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Fuck Cars
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The only thing cars are better at than public transit and/or riding a bike (or similar), is traveling long distances. I'm not talking about your commute to the office; I'm taking about driving a percentage of the way across the country.
In that context and that context only, vehicles move more quickly, more consistently, and without needing as many breaks. With the obvious caveat of: traffic.
Other than that, for any notable Metro area, public transit should be the default, not your backup plan when your vehicle won't start.
Cars are actually sub-par for long distance travel. They have to stop to refuel every few hundred miles, require horrifyingly expensive highway infrastructure to travel at speed, have to manually negotiate all intersections / exchanges, and their individualized form factor multiplies the maintenance upkeep required for that sort of mileage. Trains and planes both kick their ass at distance travel in different ways.
What cars are actually superior at is medium to short distance adhoc hauling trips at medium speeds on the edges of a transportation system. Rural work and visits, last mile drop-offs, back country mobility.
Motorcycles/scooters. You can get way more out of limited road infrastructure and are much more flexible when it comes to obstacles such as traffic.
Ah, but in a world where the optimal vehicle is utilized for each trip, there isn't much traffic :P Also they can't haul much. Honestly I do feel like I want to embrace motos but in a system where the best vehicle for a given trip is always available I suspect they would be largely displaced by bicycles and ebikes.
Idk, I've seen a family of 5 with a dog, construction workers hauling 30 foot rebar, and dudes with like 200 lbs of plywood, in like an aframe around the bike. A hero of a construction worker with a 20 year old Ship of Thesisus'd Honda Winner probably hauls more stuff per year than your average GMC Canyon.
Lol... OK maybe replace "can" with "should".
Interesting take.
Especially considering internal combustion engines are most efficient at high gear, moving at a steady pace on a freeway.
I gave my opinion, you gave yours. It would seem that my opinion and your opinion are both different and to some extent, incompatible.
It's interesting, isn't it? In any case, I respect your opinion, even if I don't share it, and I hope you have an excellent day.
So we're not going to do any examination of data to figure out which ~~model~~opinion matches reality?
I don't have the funding to do such an examination.
Can we get a grant for this?
I submitted a grant proposal, but we were automatically denied because of the word "transport".
Figures.
Airplanes, long distance busses, or trains?
Cars a good for long distance travel to the middle of nowhere. Which I personally rarely do, if I need to, I carpool or rent a car.
I live in the middle of nowhere, I am basically obligated to own a car.
Circumstances have always demanded that I have one. Whether work demands, or simply being able to travel away from my house at all.
If I lived and worked in a city, at a job that didn't demand a vehicle, I wouldn't have one.
what if your local community and the trek into town was bikeable and/or had a bus route to a robust rail network
I would be utterly amazed that they decided to send a whole assed bus through my <10k population town, when even the taxis and Uber drivers won't bother, and our police presence is one officer in a vehicle that drives through town twice a day.
Which isn't to mention that pretty much every home here has 3+ cars in the driveway.... Aka, zero demand (or close enough to not make it viable even stopping in the town). The nearest "city" with more than 10k population is at least a 15 minute drive down country roads with little if any shoulder; so overhauling the routes to make them bike friendly for the handful of people that actually own a bike who live out here, and not only can ride that far, but are able to go that distance in a reasonable timeframe.....
To be blunt, I'd wonder what the local government is smoking, because there's so few people who would either want, or benefit from, such an infrastructure project that would likely go into the tens of millions in costs, if not more.
I get what you're saying, but my town could triple in population and I still don't think transit would make sense economically.
Forget buses, there are smaller towns that have 15 minute train service, for an average ridership of <1/day on their unmanned platform. Here's a random line: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyohashi_Railroad_Atsumi_Line
On trains in the US-
I have to be across the country soon, and looked into the best ways to get there. I axed airplanes due to a fear of flying at this time.
A car would've gotten me there in 50 hours, the train takes 75. I went with the train bc I would be exhausted driving for 50 hours. In the US, trains are much less time efficient for cross country travel 9 times out of 10.
(Amtrak is a private company and not owned by the government. i wonder why this is.... /s)
The only reason that's true in the US at least, is because our long distance public transport infrastructure is horrific. Trains here are slow, dirty, expensive, and limited in their routes.
If we had a dense network of cross-country high speed trains, cars would be far less necessary. It's a vicious cycle. More cars requires more car-centric infrastructure, which creates incentive to continue using cars, which feeds the need for expanding the car-infra, etc.
The fun part is that the freeway system isn't built for cars. It's built to a standard that will survive entire armies, tanks, and other equipment being shipped across country, and they can act as impromptu runways for aircraft.
The American road network was built the way it is for national defense in case anyone were foolish enough to try to invade, so the military can quickly and effectively relocate their assets to where they are needed.
Sure, most of that stuff could go offroading to wherever they needed to go, but it would not be a quick trip.
Cars just use the highways and justify their existence until something else needs the roads as something other than a road.... Automakers have taken advantage of the fact that most of America is isolated in small pockets and Metro areas, while the vast majority of the country is borderline desolate. There's hundreds of miles of grassland, desert, forests, farmland, etc between some places. No transit goes there, because nobody lives there and nobody goes there, so if you need to go through that place, GFL without a vehicle.
The story isn't any different in my country.
It's all just a charade to make it seem like the government is doing everyone a favor in building highways and freeways, meanwhile the military is pulling the strings for where these roads should be built.
The public transit vehicles that go short distance are optimized for short distances. The ones that go long distance are designed differently. This is feasible, because there is no need for a single vehicle to work both short range and long range routes.
Take busses for example:
The standard for passenger rail over long distances is 200kmh, which is about 124mph. Can your Toyota pickup do that?
No. I also don't own a Toyota, or a pickup. But I need to go to my city in "middle of nowhere". Your high speed train, local transit buses, and even taxis, don't go where I live.
There's lots of cases where vehicle ownership is not a requirement. There's also plenty of examples where if you don't have a vehicle, you're just not going anywhere.
My car could probably hold 200kph somewhat indefinitely but there are laws preventing that. And my bank account after that when I run out of my not cheap fuel.
Yes, most vehicles today can do that.
Yeah that sounds about right.
Countries with super good train infrastructure can get around that pretty well but countries without that would rely on cars.
I'm in Canada, the only thing we have in ample supply is land.... If you're not in a city, you're either driving through farmland, or a forest.
Google shinkansen
Nahh
The shinkansen is expensive, I vastly prefered China and even Koreas HSR. Public transit isnt supposed to make a profit.
@MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca didn't mention price, they only mentioned long distance speed and convenience. Shinkansen is king at long distance convenience and second at long distance speed. It's the most comfortable and easy way to go a long way.
That is true for convenince, especially given the chinese require security screening.
The chinese HSR might win in comfort though, they have dining cars. Then again the shinkansen often have heated toilet seats and/or bidets. The toilet situation in China is... not great.
Even then I would much rather be in a TGV going 300 kph than driving a car myself for hours on end..
I would need a vehicle to get to any infrastructure based transit.