• SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
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    7 months ago

    I’m convinced that to many Americans, there’s no difference, and that their mental image of a person includes four wheels. (And that a human without a car is not a person, as in, not deserving of moral comsideration.)

      • faythofdragons@slrpnk.net
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        7 months ago

        Yeah, I have to spend two hours on the bus when it takes half an hour to drive downtown. They have great bus service if you’re within walking distance of the downtown area, but until earlier this year the last bus home left the station at 4p. Now the last bus home leaves at 6p.

        I haven’t owned a car in a while, and I cannot even find a job because employers don’t want to work around the useless bus schedule.

          • faythofdragons@slrpnk.net
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            7 months ago

            Sort of? I used to have a regular bicycle, but the route with the least grade is also the truck route with no shoulders on parts of it. I quit biking after I got run off the road by a semi, so I think the main problem is just a lack of infrastructure.

            • Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz
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              7 months ago

              Correct, but until you can fix the larger systemic issue, a 2-wheeler helps shield you from the monthly cost, stress of finding parking, traffic, etc when living in a carcentric hell.

          • faythofdragons@slrpnk.net
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            7 months ago

            PNW sadly enough. The fuckin neolibs running the area are using public transit to virtue signal how green they are without actually spending the money to make it actually effective. Gotta look good, so there’s multiple 15min bus lines, but it only covers a couple square miles, so nobody wants to pay the $2 when they could just walk.

              • faythofdragons@slrpnk.net
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                7 months ago

                You’re not wrong. It’s also not helped that they look for any excuse to cut service, like they cut service during the '08 crash, took nearly a decade to bring it back to something close to what it was, only for it to get cut back even farther during COVID. There used to be a bus between the train station and the bus station, but that got cut back in '17 for unknown reasons. Heaven forbid they actually help people with their public service.

                They say they don’t want to expand the lines because nobody rides it, but that’s only because their timetables and routes are shit. The first bus goes by my neighborhood at 6:30a and it’s always packed to standing with people who start work at 9am. But I guess people being willing to stand on a bus going 50mph is “nobody”.

      • NewOldGuard@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        You say that like the reason for those things isn’t because of the design of the cities. It is exactly advocating for the car centric design that keeps it car centric down here. Sincerely somebody who’s lived in the south their whole life but doesn’t think cars should define your life

      • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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        7 months ago

        Yeah that’s a stupid way to build towns and cities, and should change. But the south tends to vote Republican, so that’s just going to make everything worse. (Not that Democrats are amazing, but it’s like squares and rectangles.)

      • SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
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        7 months ago

        And that forces you to treat people without cars as sub-human? No sympathy, or even empathy, for people who have to navigate such a landscape without one?