• snooggums@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    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…

    • Little_mouse@lemmy.ca
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      14 hours ago

      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.

      • Lv_InSaNe_vL@lemmy.world
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        2 minutes ago

        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.

      • snooggums@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        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.

    • uis@lemm.ee
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      8 hours ago

      In rural areas everyone uses either bikes or railways.

    • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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      14 hours ago

      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.

      • snooggums@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        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.

    • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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      15 hours ago

      That’s a fringe use case and nobody is challenging it anyway. Cars are still needed in the cities.

      What we got car and oil lobby with fash of that genuine American racism to botch our urban planning and infrastructure development for mother fucking 80 years and we prolly got another decade before common sense goes main stream. Soviet Commies solved this issue on a shoe string budget… This is a political issue and the regime is in business of deny the taxpayers the solution so that the parasite can get fat. It will take the peasants getting woke on the issue.

      We have solid 30% of the country who don’t make very much money buying 50k “working trucks” while living in suburbs and working in an office. And they hate the city bus and wasting money on public transits for the “dirty poors”