• conditional_soup@lemm.ee
    547·
    9 months ago

    I already posted, but this post bothered me so much that I wanted to say my peace. You can tell that OP and everyone resonating with them is from Canada or the US a country with car dependency. How? Because our urban environments are uniquely awful, since they’re built for cars, not people. The suburbs are far from anywhere you’d like to go, and even if you had the gumption to walk or bike a mile or more each way, the infrastructure to do so is flat out dangerous or hostile in a lot of cases. The suburbs keep a low population density, and there’s no real cause to meet anybody else ever since they have no third spaces, so unless you hit the neighbor jackpot, the suburbs are a super lonely experience. Big box stores, chain pharmacies, and chain restaurants being the dominant businesses in your area is also a car-centroc urbanism thing, since if you have to get in your car to go shopping, you’re just going to go where you’ll only have to make one stop or where you won’t have to leave the car. It’s even in the meme: parents too busy to teach [them] how to drive, which matters because the city is fucking inaccessible otherwise.

    I live in a city of 90,000 in California and, while California is generally head and shoulders above the rest of the US in bike infrastructure, it’s still goddamn hostile to try and get across town on a bike or on foot, and that’s assuming the weather isn’t miserable. I’ve had five exchange students from different countries (Japan, HK, Russia, Netherlands, etc) and they all found the suburbs / US urban design to be isolating. All of them were used to just being able to bike/tram/bus/train across the city and even between cities completely on their own and it was no big deal at all. It’s easily the hardest thing for them to cope with.

    It’s not this way in the rest of the world, and it hasn’t even been this way forever. It got this way due to decades of deliberate policy choices, and it can be changed. Your local city and county government has a shocking amount of power over this kind of stuff, and those are levels of government that, unless you live in a big metropolis, are actually accessible to laypeople. Start organizing, get your friends together, make some noise, let them know what you want; local politics can actually be pretty responsive to this stuff.

    Edit: in case you want more information, there’s several really good channels about this stuff, but I’d recommend NotJustBikes and AlanFisher on YouTube for a start.

    Edit 2: OP is not, in fact, from the US or Canada. Took a gamble and lost.

      • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
        63·
        9 months ago

        Crap, took a calculated risk on that one, sorry. I know England is getting rough with car dependency, but I wasn’t expecting Ireland to be that way. Derry Girls lied to me.

        • Striker@lemmy.worldOPM
          4·
          9 months ago
          1. Derry girls is set in northern Ireland so the infrastructure is different.
          2. It’s set more than 30 years in the past and 20 years before I was a teenager.
          3. They lived in a city not a small suburban town like me.
          • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
            41·
            9 months ago

            Another swing and a miss on my part. I was trying to make a joke at my expense by being an American who got his knowledge from TV shows. Anyway, that’s not an apology. I’m sorry for making that assumption.

    • Zekas@lemmy.world
      7·
      9 months ago

      For fucks sake, this is my teens and it was because my parents sucked ass and were insane. We are not in fact all living in America.

    • PopMyCop@iusearchlinux.fyiEnglish
      21·
      9 months ago

      so unless you hit the neighbor jackpot, the suburbs are a super lonely experience

      Everything else you say is right on, but this is the one that annoys me. I’ve had shitty neighbors. I’ve had neighbors that were constantly committing domestic assault and having the police called on them. Overall though, I knew and spent time with my neighbors because we all made the effort to be a community. I’ve recently moved to take care of a dying family member, but even in the few months I’ve been here there have been improvements in the relationship with the neighbors because we made agreements to have a block party once a month, have the husband/wife lunch every few weeks, and generally socialize. It sucks to start if no one on your block is talking, but most people are pretty happy to start building a relationship with their neighbors. You just have to put in the effort.

  • lengau@lemmy.ml
    432·
    9 months ago

    Car culture turns children into prisoners in their own homes.

    • HenriVolney@sh.itjust.works
      101·
      9 months ago

      I am so happy I didn’t grow up in the US… Lots of biking and walking, a bus to go to town, school friends that tag along in the evening

      • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
        51·
        9 months ago

        It does not matter how windy or straight burb roads are.

        What matters is that they aren’t culs-de-sac for pedestrians/cyclists, allow mixed use zoning(!!), and are dense enough to support a diversified economy.

        See: streetcar suburbs.

      • lengau@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        9 months ago

        I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. That was hilarious and perfect content for a shitpost community.

        • awwwyissss@lemm.ee
          2·
          9 months ago

          I’m dead serious. You assholes chased me around and downvoted everything I posted for two weeks straight. So I made a new account.

          Nothing but bad things from lemmy.ml, you’re a cancer on the fediverse.

          • lengau@lemmy.ml
            2·
            9 months ago

            I’m sorry to hear there were folks who did that. I just chose this server because I wanted a general purpose one that seemed to have a decent chance of sticking around for the long term. I have no interest in harassing people or getting into server wars.

            • awwwyissss@lemm.ee
              2·
              9 months ago

              It’s not server wars, it’s a server designed to spread authoritarian propaganda behind a veneer of communism. But maybe you’re not part of that… if so good luck.

    • M500@lemmy.mlEnglish
      9·
      9 months ago

      I wonder if there is a relation between drug use and proximity to recreation.

      • PopMyCop@iusearchlinux.fyiEnglish
        9·
        9 months ago

        Pretty sure the Iceland thing proved that one. When they made extracurriculars like athletics or clubs mandatory (and obviously supported it so it wasn’t a giant effort for the families), teen alcohol/drug addiction dropped handily.

    • Striker@lemmy.worldOPM
      4·
      9 months ago

      Yes. Theresa a massive cocaine problem in my country largely because of how no one has a clue to form friends anymore. The Irish are friendly but terrible friends. Tons of acquitances but little to no actual bonds beyond a superficial level.

    • Ziixe@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      16·
      9 months ago

      I live in the middle of nowhere in Europe and all is true except the outside picture and the fact that there isn’t anything to walk to (except if you want to take a 20km hike trough a forest to get to the city, and then do another 20km back)

      • credit crazy@lemmy.world
        5·
        9 months ago

        I’m In middle of nowhere north east amarica and replace walking through a forest your climbing hills steap enough to be considered cliffs, and you have my childhood. It amazes me that I biked all that just to visit a ice cream stand.

  • bi_tux@lemmy.world
    213·
    9 months ago

    I live in central europe, I could travel across the entire continent in a day for not that much money and could go anywhere in the eastern part of my country for 60€/year, I could go to any western part of my country in 5h for less than 20€

    this dark magic I could use is called a “train system” also reffered to as “good public infrastructure” by many

    • problematicPanther@lemmy.world
      7·
      9 months ago

      goddamn. i live in western europe and i have to spend upwards of 100 euro just to go for a 3 hour train trip. i have to spend 500 for a yearly transit pass to get around my (relatively small) city.

    • johannesvanderwhales@lemmy.world
      413·
      9 months ago

      Keep in mind that trains are not popular in the US because much lower population density means that it is harder to plan efficient routes.

      • Fedizen@lemmy.world
        12·
        9 months ago

        yes and no, we also HEAVILY subsidize roads via federal grants and until recently passenger train infrastructure didn’t have any kind of federal backing.

        This means elected officials with tight budgets will ‘address’ transportation with new roads even where its a bad solution because its cheaper and it looks like they’re doing something. By the time people realize it didnt fix anything the elected official has moved on.

        • johannesvanderwhales@lemmy.world
          6·
          9 months ago

          We’ve also built cities (and especially suburbs) around cars which means that they’re not very centralized, especially in the Western half of the country. In most places this means busses are a more practical form of public transportation than things like subways or light rail.

          • Fedizen@lemmy.world
            2·
            9 months ago

            as somebody who has worked in the field, the word is not as much “design” but “attempted to design” but the problem comes down to sprawl and effeciency, and we have many places in the US that have passed the maximum density that cars+ parking can effeciently accomodate even in small cities. This is one of the reasons that economists see big box stores (wal mart), strip malls, etc as net drains on local economies.

            One of the reasons the US is stagnating economically is the lack of medium density infrastructure that is simply not built because roads, oil, and cars are so heavily subsidized

            Take out those subsidies or match them with similar subsidies for trains and similar, and you’d see a shift where trains become cheap to small cities which would ease pressure on large ones.

      • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
        122·
        9 months ago

        No, that’s a myth. America had extensive train networks – both within cities and between them – and deliberately destroyed them because of a combination of misguided modernist city planning and corrupt lobbying from corporations from oil companies and car manufacturers.

        There is nothing special about America that makes it inherently unsuitable for trains.

  • saltesc@lemmy.world
    141·
    9 months ago

    Ha. I grew up across the road from the beach so just surfed every daylight hour not in school. No friends, no cool things around, no games, no hobbies, but didn’t care at all because surfing trumped anything you could offer a kid.

  • root_beer@midwest.socialEnglish
    10·
    9 months ago

    This was my adolescence except miles removed from Cowtown, the second largest municipality in Pigshit County, Ohio. People wanna talk about car culture and how the suburbs ruined everything, and I get it, but rural life as a teen was depression on top of the depression I’d already developed in elementary school.

    If I hadn’t been able to drive my busted-ass ‘85 Toyota Van when I was 17 I don’t know if I would have made it to 18, I was hanging on by a frayed thread. Even then, my hometown was utterly worthless, I’d have to go at least half an hour on the highway to go somewhere with a veneer of life.

    I would love for the semi-rural suburb where I currently live to modernize and become walkable and bikeable, but I’ll still take this any day over what I had 25 years ago.

  • mojofrododojo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    91·
    9 months ago

    this was my youth, we still fucking walked / biked everywhere, even in the deep south’s 100+ degree temps. people who think europe is an non-automotive utopia: this is a recent trend - it took time to build out the infrastructures (PLURAL) that replace driving everywhere, and even then it’s taking time to get the cars out of the cities.

    https://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2019/08/the-car-free-myth-netherlands-is-great.html

    It’s something we have to work at together, and the vroom-vroom crowd who want to murder cyclists with their coal-rollers are very much in the way.

  • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    105·
    9 months ago

    Hah, or you can be me. I grew up in New York City with the ability to go pretty much anywhere unsupervised and I never did - I spent all my free time either reading books or playing videogames anyway. I had almost zero interest in the real world (I think it’s pretty boring even now that I’ve been an adult for a while) but I still feel like there was something wasteful about not bothering to experience things that so many other kids would have really enjoyed.

    The worst part was college. I attended a famous party school but went to zero parties, zero dates, etc. At least I managed to graduate in three years with a double major. (By the time I got to college, I did want more social interaction but I thought that I was incapable of it so I didn’t try.)

      • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        21·
        9 months ago

        It actually hasn’t been bad overall. Those were my missed opportunities but there were also other opportunities that I didn’t miss.

        (I do live in New York City again and I do still think it’s really boring here. There’s nowhere to go and nothing to do that doesn’t involve a crowd of strangers which ruins it for me. The main reason I’m here is to be close to my family but even visiting them requires a miserable two-and-a-half-hour round trip on the subway. I got to live in a small town for a while and I liked it a lot better - having a house with a big yard, being able to drive everywhere, and easy access to nature were great.)