I often see people in the comments acting like having a fast or loud car immediately makes your dick smaller or that you have ED. And people talk about owning a car as if they’ve never gone above 40 MPH and are terrified to do so.
For context I live in a city with actually ok mass transit, don’t own a car, and prefer to bike/take the train whenever possible. Trains, trolleys, bikes, and feet are the best forms of transportation imo.
That being said, body shaming or making fun of people with physical or mental issues (that may be no fault of their own) is just shitty. It makes this community look shitty. I hate reading comments about “loud car small dick this” or “fast car ED that”. It’s unnecessary. You can shit on asshole drivers without having to stoop that low. Secondly, some women enjoy cars as well; be more creative.
Finally, don’t act like cars can’t be fun. I’m all for phasing out the automobile and revolutionizing transport by returning to the ways of olde, but cars are fun. I understand some of you are grandparents and don’t like someone revving their straight pipes mustang down your block on a Saturday morning. That’s completely reasonable. But my god does this community act like you can’t have fun in a car. I absolutely enjoy loud and fast and powerful cars, because that’s an incredible work of engineering and it simply can be fun. Going fast can be fun. Being in a car that purrs like a lion can be fun. Going offroading or drifting or racing or anything in a car can be fun.
We won’t convince people to see our side by shitting on the things they enjoy. We convince people to try and see things from our point of view by actually looking through their perspective first, and acknowledging that while cars can be fun they are not sustainable.
ETA: Some people seem to think I think public roads should still be for cars. Never did I say that. I think the appropriate place for cars is the track. I would love to convert all the roads in my city to a mixture of bike and pedestrian lanes with trolleys running down the median. But cars can be fun and a track day can absolutely be a great time.
I challenge you to post the name of the city in Europe you visited, and then look up its population density and transportation mode share.
Reykjavík. Population density is 451 people per km2 and transportation mode share is only 5% public transit. It has around the same population density of the US city I live in and yet only 10% of the traffic fatalities. Cars are still a problem there, undeniably, but it is proof that car dependency doesn’t have to be as dystopian and hellish as it has become in the US. The size of cars matters. The price of gas matters. The way we design roads and the size of each lane matters.
Reykjavik – and Iceland in general – is tiny in terms of population: less than 250k in the entire metro area. Of course cars are going to work less-bad there than in any place with a decently-big population! It’s not comparable.
In terms of American metro areas, it would be all the way down at 196th on the list – right below Prescott, AZ.
Wake me up when you can credibly claim that some European city that’s actually big can be car-dependent and magically somehow work because everybody’s driving VW Golfs or whatever.