“It’s like a cult — ‘cars are bad,'” she added. “Be a little bit reasonable and understand that sometimes some people can’t live your puritanical, cultish indulgence of either always walking or biking,” she said, arguing Furnas’ plans will hurt seniors and people with reduced mobility.
My local bike trails are filled with people in wheelchairs, elderly walkers, and 80+ year-olds safely using e-trikes. The network is usable year-round and cleared of snow faster/more completely than the roads.
The one local car dealership that sells modified wheelchair minivans is currently retailing a 2011 model with 173k miles for $25k, or the cost of 12 really good ebikes. That’s the cheapest option within a one hour drive to get a vehicle with a ramp. If you need one with a lift, $41k is the cheapest option. We can’t paint our roads for night visibility, they’re hazardous for half the year, and those mobility-limited people have to react to highway traffic at 120kmh if they want to go anywhere from their disconnected suburb.
Car demons have to be one of the most insufferable kinds of person. It’s such an antisocial lifestyle.
Yeah, cars really don’t help vulnerable populations as much as they seem to think. Public transit is also really peak senior friendly, since they can just sit back and relax, letting someone else deal with the driving.
Exercise is good for people too, forcing seniors to stay in cars can cause them to decay much quicker.
I have back pain and adhd. Know what I can do on a bad day? walk/pt and zone out, even on painkillers. If I can’t sleep because of pain I can walk/pt. Can’t drive though, it’d be a serious risk.
The only dangerous part of walking tired or doped up is cars…
I wish so desperate for better planning and mixed res/light commercial so I can like feed myself without a car on days pain stops me cooking and shit.
cars absolutely help vulnerable populations (like children and cyclists) get to heaven earlier
got me in the first half
cars are only any “good” when everything else better has been obliterated.
i could walk or take the bus to the grocery store but any frozen shit would melt and anything perishible would be pretty risky on a hot day. Plus i’m door-to-door putting the food away before i’d even be to the store if i wasn’t driving, but that’s entirely on the zoning and civil planners.
idk the little industrial park where my office is located has a bunch of those cute tiny little cargo trucks. I think they’re neat. But yeah I get you, I ride the bus.
I couldn’t even afford a car if I wanted one because COL is so high here. I will admit though some guy that works with me has a really sweet cobalt blue BMW E36 with racing seats and a roll bar and assuming god knows how much money spent under the hood and
.I get the appeal sometimes.
yeah i’d rather live somewhere better.
recreational automobile racing is probably something we could withstand as a society but we’d all be better off if it wasn’t an every day thing for most people
Just gotta solve the remaining issues with batteries and then the more insidious problem of tire dust.
the orders of magnitude reduction in kilometers driven would do a lot to reduce total pollution, the per-unit pollution doesn’t necessarily need to get better. if we really needed to, you could build a structure around the track and capture tire slough.
(this does not apply to gas cars, iirc you can map school performance against where race tracks are and there’s some dip from all the leaded gas)
Yeah I mean we also need to solve the tire problem more broadly, as there are certain things that are just not feasible to solve without last mile solutions that don’t involve some sort of tires. At least not currently. We could I guess go back to just spring suspension and wood/metal wheels but that is a loooong way off.
i have a friend that is missing a leg and has to walk regularly for health reasons, living in a walkable area would be so good for them
I have an aunt who’s been hobbling for 50 years after being hit by a car. A car ban would have been wonderful for her.
puritanical, cultish indulgence
They’re doing the thing where they describe car culture and say “bike riders are like that”
Like I refuse to be lectured on people who want a mandate on the only acceptable way to get around.
How adorable they love their precious automobile so much they can’t enjoy it unless everyone drives too! All that infrastructure is real expensive compared to public transportation.
So carbrains, “HoW aRe YoU gOiNg To PaY fOr AlL oF iT?”
Obligatory remark about how even driving gets better when a city has proper bike and mass transit infrastructure cuz the people who choose to take on the expense of owning a car have less traffic to deal with.
Holy shit, this.
When driving is a genuine choice and less people drive: the driving experience gets so much better. Imagine not needing to twiddle your thumbs for hours because of some incompetent drivers ahead of you.
Cars are good for disabled people in the sense that they produce a lot of people with disabling injuries
Among the plan’s more than 80 demands is a bizarre proposal to build playgrounds smack in the middle of city streets that would then be redesigned into cul-de-sacs — a move the group claims will solve the city’s “playground desert problem.”
Children playing? Not in my city!
Its wild how against children playing outside people are. I remember the one time I got into it with my parents’ neighbors was when they were canvassing to prevent a playground from being built in their gated community by the hoa, saying that they didn’t want the noise and that they didn’t want teenagers to smoke on the swingset and shit like that is why my younger siblings have nowhere to go after school but straight home.
And then they wonder why kids just want to play Roblox instead of going outside.
The whole article is just full of these scare quotes.
Furnas’ group also calls to slash parking spots all over the five boroughs — with plans to “repurpose” the space on blocks close to subway stations with “amenities” like wider sidewalks, larger bus shelters, bike parking, benches, so-called “micro forests” and even public restrooms.
even public restrooms.
the horror!
That piss smell is part of NYC cultural heritage. This is literally cultural genocide!
mamdani caves to the zionist lobby again
I invite these types to go find a small town if a city is just too much for them.
Breezewood, PA sounds like it’s more their speed.
“A city…wants to do CITY STUFF?!?! WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!?!?!”
The American mind cannot comprehend infrastructure. Like, where tf do they think NY and California’s massive property values came from?
Take it from someone who is stuck in their “utopia” of rural Ohio, wanna trade?
not really a fan of cul de sacs, but if they have through-routes for cyclists and pedestrians they can be tolerable.
Mamdani continuing to alienate those key Nassau county and New Jersey voters.
Critical support for Zohran
maybe Zohran Mamdani will be good after all. car haters in control is a win, no matter how you look at it.
The first popular production car was created by notorious antisemite Henry Ford so its actually antisemitic to drive and not take public transport
When will the ADL condemn cars
Hey, now that I think of it. Isn’t cars like the Obamacare of transportation?
They love health insurance (or in this case) cars so much they want to mandate that EVERYONE has a car no matter how expensive it may be.
Choose anti-wokeness, choose the DOGE way of small government, choose walkable cities with local public transportation!
There you have it folks. Cars are both antisemitic AND woke like OBAMA! Say no to Hamas! Choose public transportation!
lol with this endless propaganda blitz against henry ford, he was no antisemite! i doubt he ever said in his life that palestinians are people like you and me.
When will the ADL condemn cars
when’s the last time a carbomb was used by the resistance?
hexbear users
getting whiplash between all the malding about the YIMBY neoliberal and the objectively cool and good* this guy.
*as far as i know
fortunately mayors don’t make foreign policy.
that makes it worse that he said anything about it at all, but it’s also hard to say it tangibly matters.
A little different from “objectively cool and good,” though, right?
Also that just excuses electing imperialists at any level lower than congress. American Socialism without internationalism is just making the camp busses run on time
sorry for the ambiguity, i was contrasting the YIMBY appointee we were mad about last week with this Furnas guy apparently being good.
Mamdani was and remains not revolutionary.
Cursed myself before because of the Trump meeting (again, sorry about that.) and now this looks promising.
Cautious optimism it is.
practicing anti-dialectics regarding Mamdani, I simply rewrite my brain entirely based on the last thing I heard about him
We’re Zo back
Finally, a war I can get behind
