A lot of progressive leaning regions are actively trying to slowly legislate cars out of existence, see the camera system in the UK that’s being sttacked by the so called “blade runners”.
Fact is cars are real freedom, and the next time the government declares a pandemic and determines that public transit is too dangerous, a car is your only movement option for going outside of bike range.
the gubbermint is coming to steal our cars so we have to live in their bicycle dystopia 
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Cars are so free. I love freely driving down a predetermined path set by a road that is jammed every morning by other people freely driving the same free path as me to our free job that most of us freely hate. I’m so fucking free.
Only price of purchase plus ongoing licencing, registration and maintenance costs. Freedom!
someone forgot insurance
This irrational hatred of livable cities is fascinating to me. These people are so used to their government never helping the people that they assume anything a government does is automatically bad, and livable cities must be part of some nefarious government plot to…destroy cars and make people reliant on the government or something? As if paying rego for a car and having easily identifiable license plates doesn’t make you easy to track in your movements. As if people aren’t forced to comply by their government already? I’ve never understood this aspect of conspiratorially minded people. They’re always worried about some potential “future government oppression” slippery slope if we ever do anything positive for society. Why are they so obsessed with society being run into the ground to prevent “oppression”? Insert Parenti quote here.
I honestly think that Trashfuture had the best theory of why the anglos are so irrational about this. If you are below the age of 60 and live in Britain, you’ve gotten used to the neoliberalism permeating government to such an extent that any time the government says it’s going to do something to help you, they just inevitably make it 10 times worse. Like seriously, you can probably count on one hand the amount of times that the UK government has tried to help people and actually delivered a positive outcome. A bunch of municipalities across the UK (counties or w/e they’re called) also used the supposed “15-minute city” moniker to justify their austerity, in a sort of advanced type of greenwashing.
So i reckon it’s primarily because all these people have ever known is an unresponsive, unhelpful piece of shit government, where no matter the party in power, nothing ever gets better. Also enduring a brutal 1½ decade of austerity that basically removed the most public service from the people who needed it, and people rightfully are deathly afraid of anything that promises to change things for the better. They simply have no more trust in the instutions of the state, and just wants the government to fuck off, since it’s perceived as something that destroys anything it touches.
I think also there is the deserved feeling that the UK government is incapable of successfully accomplishing a task
Don’t forget that anti-walkable cities so-called support is likely astroturfed. These “people” voicing their concerns get an awful lot of media coverage
If I was an evil government with unlimited resources who wanted to track everyone’s movements, I’d use the already existing systems of license plates and registration, as well as those cameras toll roads and traffic light cameras use to see license plates and identify who’s driving them, and just simply put more cameras up and use them to see everyone’s last location. 15 minute walkable cities would be much harder, I’d have to have so many agents manually check every building or park they could possibly be in. Even within a 15 minute walking distance, it’s still a lot.
Or just get the data from the GPS enabled device everybody willingly carries in their pockets at all times that either of the two massive cellular corporations will gladly sell.
“The worse the traffic the freer the people.”
“The people were in [traffic] so that prices could be free.”
The chain around your foot that constantly needs money to maintain is freedom.
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Lol, he’s talking about the ULEZ probably. The mayors have put up cameras to make Ultra Low Emissions Zones because the air quality in London (and other major cities) is giving people cancer and asthma. If you have a car that isn’t within the regulations you had an option to trade it in with government assistance of like £2000. Some people got fucked over a bit because there was a big push for diesel a few years ago, and now they’re not within regulation. That’s the minority though.
The cameras are dishing out big fines so far. One guy staged a failed hunger strike against the cameras, while other people are cutting the cameras down and then posting it on social media, only to be caught immediately as a result. Britain’s greatest minds.
I thought this was made up for a second due to how based it is. Rare Britain W.
Yeah, it’s fairly solid. Right wing newspapers are driving up a total huff about it to pretty good effect, so now it’s up to each mayor to keep Labour in the mayor position in spite of the shitstorm the tabloids are pumping out about children with cancer needing cars to get to hospital.
There’s also other problems like how some suburbs aren’t that well connected by public transport, but also, just sell your fucking car? The government is literally giving you 2 grand to sell your car, and the prices of lots of these non compliant cars actually havent gone down that much because buyers in the countryside are ready to snap them up. Compliant car prices have gone up some, but I think this is a symptom of a larger problem.
The government needs to add more means tested benefits. Same shit as in lockdown - rich people got the same as poor people when really poor people needed more and rich people needed less. Why should David Beckham get 2 grand toward a new car, leaving a struggling family having to break the bank to upgrade to a compliant car.
I was saying to abolish carsIt’s not like we’re abolishing cars or roads
Beeing super dependant on cars is Freeeeedom.
Freedom is when you have no choice but to buy petroleum.
A lot of those people aren’t ever travelling more than 5 miles. A cargo-bike with some electrical aid makes biking accesible for most anyone.
If you are disabled driving isn’t really an option in most cases.
Most of the things that make bikes unacessible is inadequate infrastructure and an over-reliance on cars. Kids can’t drive cars, they can ride bikes. If you have traffic that is safe enough for kids to bike on their own, then you have suddenly freed up their parents from having to transport them. The world is now also accesible to children.
It is easier for a walking-impaired person to cross a bike lane than a road. Bike-centric infrastructure is also more accesible for those that cannot ride bikes.
Bike-centric infrastructure requires not just bike paths, but a placement of daily needs within about 15 minutes radius. This placement again means that it is more accesible for the physically impaired - especially when combined with public transport.
Cars are inacessible.
Read Invisible women. Read the Vienna manual for Gender Mainstreaming. Read Making Mobilities Matter.I’m so scared for these people when the lights go out and they can’t get to a gas station. Suddenly their only means of freedom is a lawn ornament and they’ll be trapped.
