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Fuck CarsHey there, i'm new here! i feel...atracted? by this topic/movement but im a completly newbie, so where are some sources or webs to read about this hate to cars (lol)? or if you want to tell more about of this, let me know in the comments Thanks for reading!
A starting point with lots of links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externalities_of_cars
...leading to, among others:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car-free_movement
also if you've had any contact with areas with decent public transit (ie. a lot of Europe) - being able to get around without a car or even a driver's license
one of the classic books is Jane Jacobs' book The Death and Life of Great American Cities - part urbanism, part diatribe against the racist Robert Moses who is responsible for most of the current US urban "design"
Robert Moses was such an asshole that Behind the Bastards even did a couple episodes on him
My hatred for cars developed in 3 stages. The first involved a casual observation that well, they seem to cause a lot of death don't they? Both directly through traffic fatalities and indirectly through urban pollution, global warming, sedentary lifestyle issues, etc.
The 2nd stage occurred when I visited Phoenix AZ for the first time. It's a major city built from the ground up to serve the automobile. You basically can't do anything without a car. You can't walk to the corner store. It's miles away. There is no sense of community anywhere. You can be in perfect health and yet feel handicapped because walking won't get you anywhere. And last but not least, even with a car city like this, Phoenix is still plagued by traffic jams! It's just so depressing.
The 3rd stage set in when I bought my first e-bike. It didn't outright replace the car, but it did replace around 90% of the trips I had been making by car. It cost a tiny fraction to buy it and maintain it, and it made me angry to think of how much of my personal wealth had been sunk into automobiles and fuel over the years.
Regarding stage 2, the first documentary I watched that really drove it home for me was The Human Scale. It's a little dated at this point, but still relevant in the central points it makes about urban sprawl.
Ugh, I thought Phoenix was the worst. Then I went to Houston.
Impossible to do anything without driving. I saw my hotel was a half mile from my destination. I did not rent a car. I was a fool to just assume there would be pedestrian infrastructure. Couldn't even step out and get lunch without getting in a car.
Ended up costing the company more in stupid short rideshares....
Wow, I've never had the "pleasure" of spending any time in Houston outside of an airport. The only place in Texas I've ever been is Midland. Let me tell you about Midland.
It's Permian Basin oil country. The landscape is barren desert with endless oil derricks and methane fires stretching out to the horizon. Methane is natural gas. While the rest of the world worries about global warming and is trying to use it as a transitional fuel until renewables catch up with demand, in the PB it's just burned off because it's a nuisance gas.
There's also a sting of sulfur in the air. So it's a literal Hell in the fire and brimstone sense. I did rent a car on that trip. A tiny little Kia Soul. Everything else on the road was a pickup truck or some kind of industrial vehicle. Halfway through my stay there, a flash flood came out of nowhere and I had to move the Kia to higher ground before it got carried away. I have no desire to see that place ever again in my life, and am still traumatized at the thought it actually exists.
Whew, sounds like some kind of post apocalyptic hellscape.
I do have to feel bad for the people who grow up there, and think that's just normal.
The real answer is that "fuck cars" is the first realization for people of the failures of the economic and political structures within society. Once you realize how ridiculous the infrastructure of transportation is (within America especially) it starts to expose to you the incentive structures and contradictions when you look to change that.
If you stop there and just enjoy hating the structures then the movement of "fuck cars" is where you remain. Within a mostly inactive and losing "movement".
The short answer is. There is no "fuck cars" movement. There is a "fuck cars" meme that either leads you further down the left wing pipeline. Or, you never actually attempted to make change within your city or neighborhood. Which is fine. You can enjoy the infrastructure or social critique of City Nerd. You can enjoy the "here is an example of good infrastructure" of NotJustBikes. That's fine. We all enjoy consuming content. But that's not a movement.
But neither of those people that make these common forms of consumption of "fuck cars" content is going to tell you to join a "fuck cars" movement. Those don't exist. The movement of leftist and socialist politics is the only means in which a fight against the fossil capital that created this car dependency to begin with.
But if you're looking for a MOVEMENT within America that is against car dependent infrastructure. You're looking to join DSA and disrupt and dismantle the control of fossil capital within our society. To take control of the natural resources and production powers. To take them away from those that privately own and control them.
Within our current structures there is no means in which to change things on the scale that need to be changed when our systems require that satisfaction of capital profits.
It's the same reason an activist like Greta Thunberg changed her focus from Climate Change to fighting against the imperial powers and structures of capital directly. It is not that climate change is not extremely important. It is not that car dependent infrastructure isn't awful. It's that, once you recognize the problem and attempt to work within the system to solve it. You quickly realize that these issues are not unique in what is preventing them from being solved.
Those of us on the left WANT to reduce car infrastructure. Those of us on the left WANT to produce renewable energy. Those of us on the left WANT universal healthcare and affordable housing.
The movement is not about "fuck cars". "Fuck cars" is about giving people the opening to a movement that can actually solve the car dependence problem.
Your "fuck cars" pipeline.
- Strodes, realizing why you hate American infrastructure
- Fuck Trucks Specifically
- Hmmm this seems to be related to fossil fuels and climate change
- Fossil Capital
That's a good start. Soon you'll loop back around to "cars are actually ok and can be kind of cool and useful; it's just the levels of dependence and disruption to community and walk ability that I really hate. We must seize the means of production and free our society from serving fossil capital to change things comrade!" I'm being hyperbolic, but only a little.
We don't really hate cars for the individual hate of a single car. We hate what the over dependence on cars and fossil fuels has done to our society, our neighborhoods, our sidewalks, our communities. I like when I hit the pedal on a car and it goes voom voom. It's fun. I just don't think we should design our entire transportation structure around that. It would be like designing our diet and health programs around eating ice cream.
I was going to post that not just bikes video! That's the one that seriously got me.
OP I also highly recommend the Climate Town episode where they talk about parking lots and how utterly stupid they are.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNXFHpUhu8
I love Climate Town!
It's a great video. It's the one that gets most people. The absolute insanely dangerously bad design of strodes is something you can't unsee. They are everywhere and you're constantly reminded of it everytime you go outside.
It hits with "pro car" people because it is also a design that is as frustrating to them as it is to people trying to walk or bike.
It's my go to video for normies to understand why people hate cars.
Once you see how bad parking lots alone are it's pretty hard to unsee it. I hear all the time from people "but we have a lot of space", which is just crazy to hear. We constantly pave over anything that gets in our way to make another parking lot. Then the lots get so big that going to literally the next store over means it's easier to drive than walk, which then leads to even larger parking lots.
Then it's just everywhere in all conversations. If we're building a new neighborhood how much parking will there be? New bike lane? What about parking. New walkable community? Parking?
And then you see the asinine things we've built. Malls are just mimicing a true walkable community because we have killed them, and then surrounded them in islands of massive parking lots. Malls literally just solve a problem that the parking itself created.
It's.. just so fucking stupid, and now I get mad whenever I see a stupid parking lot.
Not directly answering your question (though it does explicitly call out the problem of car-centric infrastructure), The Case for Socialized Ownership is a fantastic intro to why individualist forms of infrastructure become impedements to societal progress and overall well-being.
Hi, the most direct one about the hate for cars in my opinion is Carmageddon by Daniel Knowles. Curbing traffic by Melissa and Chris Brunlett is also amazing and it focuses more on the solution. Happy city by Charles Montgomery is also a well done book focusing more on urbanism. To end there are also books about positive human powered alternatives: How cycling can save your life by Peter Walker, The miracle pill also by Peter Walker and lastly Bikenomics by Ellie Blue
