Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
view the rest of the comments
To be fair speed cameras are a terrible way to address the problem of speeding. The solution isn't speed limit enforcement, it is road design. If you build a wide straight open road that feels like you're driving on a highway, drivers will naturally tend to drive on it at highway speeds. Slapping a low speed limit on a road like that will make following said speed limit extremely uncomfortable and drivers will naturally tend to go too fast the moment they stop monitoring their speedometer. Hiding a speed camera on a road like that is essentially tricking people into paying an extra tax and speed cameras are often being blatantly used in that way.
The real solution to keeping speeds low is narrowing the street and also if possible making it windy. Use the space to add trees and protected bike lanes. Suddenly drivers will feel comfortable driving a slower speed without the need for a speeding camera. As a bonus it improves the safety for cyclists and pedestrians far more than a stupid speed camera ever would, and it makes the road far more enjoyable to use for everyone, including the car drivers.
I would generally agree with this sentiment. However, the behaviour of drivers these days goes well beyond road design. It's rabid entitlement, often aggressively so.
As an example, we design intersections so that vehicles can STOP and then proceed when safe. However, I very frequently see people ignoring stop signs and red lights. We NEED enforcement here, and no amount of acceptable* design will help.
*by acceptable, I mean something that NIMBYs won't complain about... which is often the biggest barrier to road design intended to keep speeds low or roads safe for other users.
And yes, road design helps. But we need to also make sure that those who ignore road design and legal speed limits are fined, and that's what speed cameras do - by the tens of thousands per location. Have them pay for better road design 🤭
Stop signs should generally be replaced with roundabouts and speed tables. Stop signs that get ignored are a great example of design not matching needs.
You should see how drivers navigate roundabouts around here 😂😂
And NIMBYs are against them, too!
If people are bad at driving, then you need more non-driving options so they don't have to drive.
I've got a friend in the Toronto area who is a terrible driver, knows she's a terrible driver, and is insured at terrible driver rates; but there's just no practical alternative for her.