Comment by phoronixrly
1 day ago
Anyone who's working on making driving a car unbearable has my vote! My bicycle has a single chime and it's manually operated.
1 day ago
Anyone who's working on making driving a car unbearable has my vote! My bicycle has a single chime and it's manually operated.
Let me guess: You get your groceries delivered by some underpaid sucker? While I enjoy biking it's impractical many times (if you don't live a sheltered life with people doing all the annoying stuff for you).
We have those inner city bike extremists here, too. There's proposals like banning all motorized traffic from the city because you "can walk to your bakery duh". But they never ask themselves how the baker gets all his materials to the bakery.
To be fair it depends so much on the city. Oxford is a great example, driving there is a hellish experience because it's a historic place with notable buildings which too important to knock down, especially in order to replace them with roads and car parks. They try to cram cars in anyway and it's just miserable. In reality the whole city centre should be pedestrianised because that's what the city is actually supposed to be designed around. Remove the private cars and buses, taxis, and yes of course delivery drivers will have plenty of room.
This perfectly legitimate argument for Oxford would be silly to make about say Milton Keynes.
Exactly. Amsterdam has been trying to get as many cars as possible out of the city center, and the city is that much better for it. Use your car to leave the city, but not to get to the center. There's bikes and trams for that.
> inner city bike extremists
WTF? In inner cities, bikes are the sensible option for 90% of traffic. Not for emergency services and larger freight of course, but it's possible to aim for a sensible mix.
I own a car and a bike. I wouldn’t mind if cars were banned or very heavily restricted in the city.
I have a trailer for the bike, we can haul 100 lbs. it’s more than enough.
Businesses can be allowed to get deliveries, just personal cars are restricted.
In my city, many businesses have switched to operating from a cargo bike: plumbers, electricians, even mechanics.
Not very hilly? Or are they all e-bikes?
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Depends on where they live. Groceries don’t have to be a weekly run to a far flung place to get a truck bed full of stuff. It can be a daily visit to a neighborhood supermarket on your way home. If zoning laws allow those can exist.
That’s nice in principle, but it really is not the same budget around here, even though the shops are here. Small neighbourhood supermarkets and corner shops are significantly more expensive than the big supermarket that’s a 10-minute drive away.
We’re doing both: buying what we need in large quantities or with a long shelf life once a week from a supermarket and things like some meat, fruits and vegetables from the corner shop but that takes a bit of work and planning. Still, there’s money to be saved taking advantage of economies of scale.
> But they never ask themselves how the baker gets all his materials to the bakery.
You can allow transport for business (speed-limited to 30 km/h or ~20 mph) and ban individual's cars. There are busses, trams and subway and there is no need to have a car.
On the plus side professional drivers are probably better drivers than the average person, since their livelihood depends on it.
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It won't work for everyone, but I have a bicycle trailer for food shopping. 20 minutes ride each way. I go about once a week.
I have car and rarely use it for grocerries. I walk to shop and buy stuff. I take car only rarely, when I need to go far.
The condescending assumptions people make when they dont have arguments are getting absurd.
No, I walk 200 meters to Billa or Lidl, or less to one of the plethora of small grocery stores.
giving up your freedom to limit others in the name of safety seems unwise.
too much control creates a generation behave like the kids.
Oh, the good old cars are freedom cliché? Thank you, I feel perfectly free when I don't have to worry about parking, gas, maintenance, taxes, inadvertently killing anyone, polluting...
Mobility is freedom, yes. During communism movement within countries required a written permission slip, movement outside even more so.
The longer it'll take you to leave or organize against your leaders, the less freedom you have. See DPRK for an extreme example.
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If your primary mode of transportation is a bicycle and you're cheering shit that annoys and (critically) distracts motorists you might have a death wish.
I feel compelled to mention that the vast majority of cyclists are part of a household which owns a car, as well.
Yeah, the occupants of the car won't be dying, I'm pretty sure every collision is survivable with seatbelts on with modern cars that have a meter of crumple zone in every direction and look like bloated whales. But pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists are gonna die on impact with them.
Solidarity. Cars belong in the rubbish bin of history. The Soviet Union had the right idea, as usual--make cars unbearable to drive to encourage public transportation.
I don’t think you’ve ever lived under SU rules.
Yeah, people don't seem to understand that in SU a very small well connected elite gained control over the means of production and abused it for their own purposes.
While not in the SU directly, I got to enjoy public transport in communist Poland for a few years and yeah, you don't want that.
Public transport in communist Poland was horrible because it was severely underfunded. Remember that Poland bankrupted in the 1981 (when the West put sanctions on the country after the Jaruzelski's "coup", and sanctions kiled the economy) the whole decade was kind of surreal in terms of state's lack of funds and decrease of living standards.
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Communist Sydney trains are awful too
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The Soviet Union never had such a goal. Passenger cars universalization was actually a long term goal of the system, but the soviet system prioritized heavy industry, infrastructure and defense over consumer goods.
That was the reason while Ukraine, before the war, was a huge net exporter of electricity. They never got too many or really good cars, but they do sure had plenty of electric generation plants.
The Chinese apparently learned with this, and used and export oriented economy to have the necessary scale to invest both in heavy industry as well as consumer goods.
That works for people in cities, if cities were made to by usable by cyclists and pedestrians. Not so much for people that live in rural areas.
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Wait until they mandate a panel of warning LEDs on your bike or a cam on your bike recording your face.
Wait until manual bikes are banned and only gps tracked e-bikes exist for citizen safety!
I legit can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.
Why would you care what the guy was thinking writing that comment? Do you know him? He might as well just be a stochastic parrot.
Just like with other media (movie, book, etc), the product is the end product, in this case a joke or a thought-provoking view. You shouldn't care about the creator's actual views or consider them while engaging with his comment.
That's what so great about it, isn't it?