Thank you for wording it so eloquently.
I learned quickly the car took away my freedom. I needed a car to get a job.
I was suddenly forced to have a job to pay an auto loan. By the time I paid the loan I needed a new car as the first broke down.
Then I needed my job to pay for the 2nd car. If I lived closer to the city with public transport I likely would have never gotten a car in the first place.
I grew up with great public transit, and having access to a bicycle, (NYC.) In my 20s I realized that attempting to own and maintain a car would be so expensive that I would not be able to save money for the future. I ride my bike everywhere. If I want to go somewhere more than 50 miles away, or where transit doesn't go, I rent a car. I rent a car maybe 2x a year tops. Depending on how long I'm renting the car I probably spend $400 a year on rentals + insurance. My last bike I had for 20 years. Cost me $1400 brand new, spread that cost out over 20 years, owning the bike cost me $70 a year. It was easy to repair myself, and the tools to repair it were inexpensive to purchase. Fuck cars indeed.
Also, people younger than the legal age for driving are unable to get around safely and independently if they live somewhere car-dependent. I know this from personal experience (although where I live car dependency is not the only problem of course)
@callyral @grue don't forget disabled people. Cars are always touted as the solution for disability but there are *many* disabilities which completely remove driving as a possibility (blindness, epilepsy, many learning disabilities, many physical disabilities ... And generally being elderly, if we're honest) and car dependence leaves you entirely reliant on a chauffeur of some kind for any and every time you want to leave the house.
true but America hates public transportation
That's only because America makes terrible public transit
It's because they purposely make sure it can't get anywhere because they don't want "poor" people to go nice places. Anytime it does they move the nice shit away.
Can confirm.
My car has been "on loan" to my parents for a year. I'm lucky to live in an area with decent public trans, but my sense of freedom is definitely vastly diminished.
You have public trans? Can you just like rent them for a while or how does it work?
In my city you can just use your library card. Pretty convenient
Buy a bike, and often that sense of freedom comes back.
Still getting around, still able to use public transit at its best, but also able to fill in the other parts of trips with a form of low-stress exercise.
My Australian town is almost as bad as American ones because it was built after cars became necessary
It has decent bike paths and painted bike lanes on many roads. Riding to local centres is easy, or to any of the five or so nearby schools (which gets a lot of kids onto bikes), but if you work a desk job it is probably in one of the three big centres and you're likely to live up to an hour by bike away. So few adults get around by bike
One addition to this is also winter upkeep, which is very relevant in Finland.
People like to talk about "winter cycling", because it's somehow so much different from "every other season cycling". Mainly it comes down to winter upkeep; snow plowing and such. Then some people complain how nobody rides in the winter and they shouldn't use too much budget for it.
It would be fun to see people talk about "winter driving". How much we actually spend making driving possible during the winter.
It's not just spending money. In my city, we're poisoning the groundwater with road salt to support winter driving. One well near me has sodium levels in the water high enough that the water utility has issued a no-drink advisory for people with hypertension.
Where I live in the US that’s in the millions, hundreds of millions even. Also, if that budget dries up then they don’t plow shit. They’ll usually get an emergency fund but it takes a few days, while it’s snowing…
Isn't anyone else disturbed by the concept of independence being a problem for this person?
I'd like more public transportation in America, but I'm not really interested in anything else they have to say.
No, because your premise is incorrect. This person is completely in support of the concept of independence, but simply rejects the notion that car-dependency provides it. Real independence is achieved by removing the dependency on cars.
You didn't read the second line?
"Now the whole idea of independence is a messy social construct with a bunch of issues that I won't get into right now."
I don't see how anyone could interpret that as anything other than a blanket statement about independence.
I searched up the artist to find more evidence and saw that I wasn't the only one who thought that, because they posted a follow-up attempting to clarify that specific line. The clarification just reiterates the point of the original comic and doesn't try to explain why that phrasing was used or what it could have meant.
So maybe they just phrased it poorly, but I'm not the only one who took issue with it.
The concept of independence can be a problem because it tends to manifest in a "I'm a lone ranger that doesn't need anyone" mentality.
If you're someone who generally just wants to live alone off-grid in a cabin in the woods and interact with people once a year that's fine.
If you're massively dependent on your neighbors and international trade and are in a self-destructive anger spiral about it because the realities of living in society damage your sense of self-worth, which has been tied to the fiction that everyone is an island, it's an issue.
So if you value independence over community and you're an asshole, then that's a problem.
On the other hand, if you value community over independence and you're an asshole: also a problem.
We can extrapolate further and say that if you drink water and are an asshole: also not good. I don't think drinking water is the problem in that case.
cute! I love informative comics like this.
people always jump to assuming creating an infrastructure that requires less reliance on cars means a flat out ban on cars when really we just desperately need more alternatives to being stuck on the car-only model. of course, rural areas and disabilities and such will mean that cars are sometimes necessary, but there's so much that a fully functional public transit system can do!!
Ain't that true. As a car mechanic(in asia), i used to not think about it for a long time, but lately the cost of owning a car seems to bug me to no end. Often in busy day, someone will come in with a breakdown which might take a few hours to do because of the workload, and the reply i get from them is "can you do mine first? I'm in a hurry and i need the car, without it i can't get anywhere". Or someone came in with a badly maintained car, where they have to delay a lot of simple but crucial repair because they're short on money. Or ignore an oil leak while topping up oil constantly because they have no time to get it fixed, which sometimes cost even more in total.
I just paid nearly 1/4 of my monthly salary to fix my 20 years old car, and that's only for the part. Can't get a used car because i need the cash, can't get a new car because i don't wanna have more mortgage. It's crippling if you're poor. It's simply bullshit when people use the poor to justify car-centric development.
I feel you on the high cost of repairs costing a large portion of monthly income - I was quoted $500-700 for a (difficult model) spark plug replacement and plan to just DIY, even if it's frustrating and hard.
With a car, you can fix it yourself if you are determined enough. However, if you're using public transport, the same arguments apply + now things are enirely out of your control. There's no way in hell the public transport company will let you tinker with their broken stuff. The insurance company can pull out of them at any time for any reason. The company can go bankrupt, etc.
i feel like independance and not having to rely on someone would work better as an argument for the car.
Consider a bicycle. Very low maintenance, simple to fix, no need for fuel, unlimited range. Complete independence, with the sole exception of winter maintenance of paths, but that's also a problem for cars and public transport.
This would 100% fix the comic for me
No matter how determined I was to work on my car, it didn't matter. That shit sucks, is hard to do, especially if you don't have previous experience.
Also, cars today aren't roomy 1990's (or before) engines. They pack it so tight in there, with the need to specialized tools and knowledge.
Cars have become increasingly hard to work on oneself. Especially as computers and mechanical engines have been fused together.
I'd rather have my bike with a lane, or a sidewalk, lined with trees, than have stroads with rubber dust, smog, and noise, uninhabitable to pedestrians.
Most public transit in Europe is government backed, they're not just going bankrupt or lose their insurence, and I don't know why I'd tinker with a broken bus, the company has people for that.
Exactly. Also, public transport is a system. Even if the vehicle you are currently traveling in breaks down, there's usually replacements and alternatives to get to the same destination.
In the past 25 years I've used public transport, I think the bus broke down once while I was aboard, and I think it ended up in the newspaper. I think it's a good thing public transport folks spend a lot of time maintaining the vehicles and especially on regular preventive maintenance.
I can barely fix my bicycle, so I don't want to tinker with the bus company's broken stuff. I trust that stuff to the certified mechanics they employ. Doubly so for trains, that's for some serious mechanics only.
How do I get to and then around Michigan’s Upper Peninsula? I don’t want to go be in cities like at all? What’s the plan for that?
You use a car.
Do not mistake cars being appropriate for the 20% of population that's rural for them being appropriate for the 80% of population that's urban, 'cause they're not.
Owning or renting a home has the same requirements of dependency on multiple companies. Sure, in a city or large town or even some.small towns we could live without cars if we built the infrastructure.
But there will always be rural areas where cars make sense. Insurance would be a lot cheaper without all the city folk driving...
In Japan they have rail lines that seamlessly integrate with the metro system of large cities.
And even if cars for rural users is necessary, their driving experience will be much smoother if all the other people have good access to transit.
Japan is an extremely small and dense country with actually very little rural areas, so I'm not sure if that really answers the other person's questions.
The main island has a land area of about the 13th largest state, Utah. But Utah has about 35 people/sq mile, compared to Japan with almost 1200 people/sq mile.
America is really rural and rural areas are really far apart from each other. Growing up my nearest neighbor was about a 10 min drive down the road. And I wasn't even that rural, I went to a normal school with a normal school bus.
Yes, that would be the best outcome and comparable to early US settlement where most towns had rail to connect each other and most people even in small towns didn't maintain their own horses. Of course travel back then required a lot more planning, which is why automobiles were able to successfully promote themselves as providing independence because they do. They do provide independence, and I can attest that as a kid when cars were easy to maintain they did provide independence in rural areas and still do!
They don't provide indeoendence in congested cities suffering from urban sprawl and loss of mass transit, which is where the comic is accurate.
In rural areas everyone uses either bikes or railways.
Owning or renting a home has the same requirements of dependency on multiple companies
Are you suggesting people go without homes? And that's analogous to going without a car?
Maybe you're really radical and want free public housing like people want free public transit, but that's far outside the overton window.
I am saying home ownership, the freedom that goes along with it, and the need to rely on multiple companies is the same and both have a different context in rural areas. So does renting and most other things in life.
Plus relying on public transportation means trading companies for government, which in theory should be better but then again government decisions tend to be strongly influenced by those companies which is how we ended up in the car centric urban hellhole that we are in now.
The comic comes across as dismissive of a ton of nuance that apply to large areas of the US to make a point that applies to urban areas.
in what world is a roadside assistance company required? Friends with oversized vehicles can perform a similar function and actually get use out of their stupid truck.
Do you have some more pixels?
Its usually your client that causes this. When you open the the image properly, you will se that its perfectly fine.
Make sure to press the HD button to get full resolution
