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this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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Unpopular Opinion
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I just avpid the issue altogether and just use trains, buses and trams if I'm not walking or biking. Public transport is the only real future. And bikes.
Btw I lived in a rural town before living in a city so don't @ me about public transportation not being viable in rural places, once the cities are well served and built around public transportation that can be expanded to more rural places. The few places where it is genuinely impossible to viably use even a modest or limited public transportation network are inhabited by so few people that its impact from them using cars would be negligible.
In fact I'd say it's not so much what type of car you drive but rather how much you use your car, because electric cars are less polluting than combustion engine cars but they're still pretty polluting and come with all the issues cars come with. If you have alternatives to driving: use them; if there aren't but there could be: fight for those alternatives; if neither: use whatever car you have already for as long as you can before it destroys itself like your toilet after a night out eating 50kgs of mexican food like a slutty little boykisser, after that perhaps look into buying one of the alternatives listed here.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk
The public transport argument is just not feasible for most people though.
I live in a suburb of a city in the UK. For me to get to work I need to take two busses and a train which equates to around 2.5 hours of travel each way without delays. Alternatively I can drive to work in less than 40 minutes.
Public transport is only the future ifit becomes a realistic and reliable alternative. At the moment, that is simply not the case for the majority of people. And in my city the public transport has arguably gotten worse in the last decade.
Ofcourse this is location dependent. When I lived in London you couldn't have paid me to drive a car as the public transport was far easier to use.
Bring on the downvotes for speaking the truth
Agreed and I'm a rural American who lives in a proverbial transit desert. Surrounded by multiple major cities with fully integrated public transit, so this whole idea behind "oh once the cities get it so will the rural areas" is total bullshit. Hell, I even live on a commuter train line and the fucking thing doesn't run on the weekends and only goes north to south, it doesn't connect to any major urban center to the east. So, if you have to work that way, you have to drive. There's no bus, no tram, no train, only massive stretches of interstates. Our state got a massive transportation grant and instead of begging the state to bring the commuter line to at least the next city over, the county had them build fucking park and rides - just giant parking lots in the middle of nowhere where you can, in theory, catch a bus that will take twice as long to get you to your destination than driving.
I've attended the state's annual transportation public meetings every year for the last six years. They send a delegation to each county to discuss budgets and county needs. Every year. Every goddamn year our county begs the state to increase the commuter rail availability and every year they lie and say they're working on a plan then turn around and expand the highways and try to sell the local political apparatus on fucking toll roads.
This is all too true.
Ahhh the "solution" with park and rides! My city tried this, and three years later they remain largely empty. 🤦♂️ Let all drive in the rough direction we need to go, stop a few miles short, just to wait around for 20 minutes to get a bus there.