- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- fuck_cars@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- fuck_cars@lemmy.ml
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I’m an older millennial and have never even bothered to get a driver’s license.
Driving is so dangerous that I can’t even believe that it’s this easy to get a license from the first place.
good
I’m a fan of public transportation too, but if you live in America, and not in a city, no car equals no job equals no income. Good for some things, not good for economy and living expenses.
The important element that needs to be, and now is, talked about more is that this state of affairs is not normal or natural. It was very deliberately created by car manufacturers in order to make life without a car be essentially impossible.
Right. But it’s not like a complete overhaul to the entire country to be designed around public transportation is going to happen overnight. I own a house ~9 miles from my wife’s work. It’s not like me owning my house or where her work is located is going to change in the foreseeable future, so what do you propose in the meantime?
To be clear, what I’m not saying is that everyone should sell their car today and just walk or cycle ten miles every day. People are always going to do what’s most convenient for them, and attempting to blame individuals for that is moronic and counter-productive.
The energy should be squarely aimed at restoring other options so that people aren’t forced to buy a $20,000 object that depreciates to nearly nothing, plus gas and insurance, just to live their normal daily lives. There will always be some areas where cars are necessary to some degree; I myself grew up twenty miles outside of a town of 4000 people. You need a car there. But there are millions of people who live in areas that used to be perfectly livable without cars, well-serviced by local and regional transit, and filled with walkable local businesses until the infrastructure was literally ripped up. A lot of those bones are still there, and that’s where the focus should be.
While it might not be possible with the current built environment, 9mi (~15km because I’m Canadian) is a doable bike commute. Even at a very casual pace, it can be done in 1hr.
Also, there’s no reason your home address or your wife’s work location can’t change. AAA says the “Average Annual Cost of New Car Ownership is $9,282”. That means if your wife found a job where they could walk/bike, their net earnings could be ~$9K and you’d still be ahead. Or, if you moved close enough to her work that she doesn’t need a car, you could put $750/mo extra towards housing and still be ahead.
Again, it’s possible none of these options work for you, but they are options.
My wife has an old back & nerve injury, so biking 9 miles to and from work isn’t happening, not to mention it’s 9 degrees and snowing outside, so not, biking isn’t an option. She works in the healthcare industry, and her work is the closest health-related building to our house, so a closer job isn’t available unless she changes her profession.
Even if I sold my house, I’m paying ~5% interest rate on a mortgage from ~2010. Selling my house, even at a profit, and purchasing a closer house (even at a lower cost), would result in a significantly higher payment (like 2.5-3x).
I understand that these are options for people that rent, or are planning on moving anyways, or don’t have health issues. Also, I agree with the less/fuck cars movement, but I don’t see how it’s changing in my lifetime. Even if I end up moving in the next 5 years, it’s not like we are ever getting rid of owning a single car. We sometimes go camping, and don’t have a truck, so we have a car with a hitch for those things. Also, to bring for example, one of my kids to a friend’s house, we would need to drive roughly 5-10 miles, without any public transportation in between, no crosswalks, and it’s not like my youngest can bike that distance.
I also need to bring my parents to doctor’s appointments. Some of them can be 20-50 miles away to see specialists. It’s not like they can ride a bike, and public transportation is limited to very specific dates & times (and not convenient ones for 1-hour appointments). Hell, my father has dementia. He can’t go anywhere without assistance, even with a car. Car-free living in the boonies seems like a pipe dream. The more I think about it, I’m starting to get irrationally irritated at the idea.
no car equals no job equals no income
That’s one of the things my kids noticed when searching for work.
A lot of the jobs specified either that you need a licence because you will need to drive a company vehicle sometimes, or that the workplace is not transit accessible and you will need your own transportation to/from work.
From the UK, now in Europe.
There has been basically one time in my life that actually necessitated driving. Almost everything else can be covered by public transport or bikes/e-scooters/walking
Have a license, don’t drive. But for me it’s mostly trauma from all the times I’ve almost been in a crash with various drivers, myself included.
Cars are fucking dangerous and not enough drivers understand that.Genz can’t afford a car. Even used cars cost too damn much
Same shit as when Millennials were killing home ownership.
The signal of a less enthused Gen Z when it comes to driving could affect the car industry. But McKinsey analysts point out that previous generations of Americans had also appeared less interested in driving but went behind the wheel of cars eventually.
It’s like a threat
It’s like a threat
Welcome to America. This is how it’s done.
Nobody is really interested in the way things work here, it’s literally about forcing you to accept that you have to live this way to even begin to survive. It’s about making people make choices they wouldn’t otherwise make, based on a system of requirements that is always changing.
It was the same way with homeownership until it wasn’t Americans turned more conservative as they aged and got more “skin in the game” in the markets. They started seeing their homes valuation at something important, and so businesses and stocks doing well was also suddenly important. It’s interesting (not) that their children who are not able to be similarly invested because they can’t even begin to afford a house are not growing up conservative.
Cars will be forced on the populace, the people that run this country have no imagination and refuse to budge because they’re making too much stinking money with how it works right now and they’re going to drive this sucker into the ground, drain every last penny out of the economy, and then the rich will fuck off to Europe or Australia or Honduras or somewhere they can ignore how they hollowed out one of the largest nations, which is quite an achievement.
“The beatings will continue until morale improves.”
Born into the cheapest air fares ever.
Is it really a choice if they fundamentally cannot afford to do so?
Many can and choose not too. Fuck cars.
Don’t disagree with you but north american infrastructure is not set up for public transit
i mean, sadly
With any luck, over time, we’ll learn proper city building infrastructure from the europeans and implement it locally. Florida will probably be several feet under the ocean at that point, but hopefully when everyone relocates to higher ground we’ll build half decent cities for them to live and work in.
Hopefully.
… hopefully.
Honestly Japanese city infrastructure and planning is better than the european one, so americans should learn from Japan in that regard not europe.
- Especially integrating train stations with shopping malls.
- Make train companies real profitable by making the stations profitable by integrating them with businesses like hotel chains supermarkets and more using the location to their advantage
- Parking in your own garage or Parking House required, no curb side parking making roads smaller more unobstructed improving visibilty and safer.
Definitely agree with you there, I would also posit that everyone should be following the Japanese recycling, compost and trash models as well.
No reason why anyone is doing anything different than what the Japanese are doing in 2024.
“Gen-z is choosing to be homeless.”
These crazy kids are forgoing the tradition of having a roof over ones head in favor of urban camping. It definitely has nothing to do the kleptocracy that made housing unaffordable by converting it into a speculative market for Wall Street and foreign nationals to park dirty money.
My old jeep blew its head gasket back in November 2022 and I have been walking and riding my ebike since then. Now my cheap Chinesium bike is out of order so just walking everywhere until I get new parts.
younger millennial. never got my licence, or really wanted it.
people are shocked when i tell them i don’t drive. it was annoying growing up cus people kept trying to push it on me but eventually most people gave up. older people get weirdly offended if you don’t drive, i truly don’t understand it. honestly just find cars massively unappealing, nausea inducing, and gross for everyone and everything involved. like a loud moving pollution boxes that can kill. roads are pretty gross too, covered in oil and garbage. i was recently diagnosed autistic, i think it partially explains my distaste for them with sensory issues, at least the nausea part.
and in modern world it’s not even really an inconvenience. if I need to get somewhere there is uber, if there was better public transport options where i live i would take them instead, trains and rail tend to cause me much less nausea. but i still have to use uber a lot even tho they make me car sick. pretty sure its way cheaper than actually owning a car, at least with how often i use it. get groceries delivered ect…
i would be pretty happy if the car industry collapsed ngl
Gen Z is definitely driving, they’re all over the place.
In the article they noted this was the same for millennials and gen x before them. I’m going to assume the standard for youths purchasing cars was with the baby boomer generation. I know my dad told me when he was young, you would purchase a cool car that didn’t work for the equivalent of $100 dollars, get a friend to tow it home, then work on it for a few weeks to get it running. He told me how much he missed his MG Midget, which let’s recognize as a cool ass car for a kid to have. He could fix that car with a wrench, a stick of butter, and a deck of cars. All his friends would be doing the same.
Nowadays it would be a $1k junker, and you’d need to have a computer science degree to fix the onboard computer while having all the specific tools to get into their proprietary parts. There are older cars too, but the standard of fixing a car has increased, all the while each generation has less time and money to do it.
_He could fix that car with a wrench, a stick of butter, and a deck of cars.
Well yeah, having a whole deck of other cars would make it pretty simple!
