• SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
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    4 months ago

    That’s kind of analogous to saying we don’t have a problem with zebras, but with zebra stripes. It’s like that old joke, that the morons behind the wheel give the other 1% of drivers a bad reputation.

    But on a serious note, even if we had some foolproof test to weed out the morons, cars are dangerous, loud, polluting, expensive, and anti-social. We have plenty of other reasons to dislike having a society built around them.

      • SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
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        4 months ago

        What stuff? Where does it have to get to? Why?

        That’s not even what cars are used for, as the majority of car trips are under 3 miles, and the average occupancy is 1.2 persons. I think we don’t have c/fuckguns because nobody is forcing us to have and use guns every day for everything.

          • SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
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            4 months ago

            We can’t cherry-pick scenarios in which cars could be easily replaced by something else? Good lord, why not?! Nobody has a magic wand that we can wave to undo nearly a century of demolishing and building a landscape exclusively for cars. It’s going to take incremental change to undo that, and the wise way to do that is exactly to cherry-pick the easiest scenarios and start there. Best benefits for the effort, and all. Then, as alternatives expand, those alternatives become an option, or even a better way, for more and more people.

            Speaking of too-lavish conditions, that exactly describes using a 4,000lb. luxury machine to cart a 185lb. body around from point A to point B, which is located much further away from A than it needs to be, in order to accommodate the operation and storage of those machines. It’s really the opposite of efficient—less than 1% of the energy in gasoline gets used to move the human.

            In short, using cars stupidly describes the vast majority of how people use of cars. The reason that it seems reasonable is that everybody else is doing it. Monkey see, monkey do, eh?