“It’s not like the government is forcing you to buy a car!”
If you live in a city with parking minimums, yes they fucking are.
If your “urban fabric” can’t support access to the public, it doesn’t deserve to survive.
If your “urban fabric” doesn’t have public transit that’s faster and cheaper than driving, it’s just an overbuilt suburb. America has one city, NYC.
There’s tiny bits of real city around the US. It’s usually leftover fragments that managed to survive through the carpocalypse of the 30’ to today.
There are very few real city places larger than a 1/4 sq mile here.
Americans have a hard time getting through the culturally ingrained car propaganda.
Yeah. It takes some real mental gymnastics to think that getting rid of parking minimums, getting rid of a harmful government regulation, increasing freedom, is a bad thing.
For some of us American’s we’re trapped in it and it seems like it’ll never go away no matter how much we hate it.
I’m someone who lives in a very rural area because I can’t afford to live in a city… so I need a car. Somehow, a mortgage and sharing a car with my husband is still more affordable than living in a walkable/bikable city in my state. That’s a problem. I don’t know how to fix it, but that’s a freaking problem. Rent in some areas is double my mortgage on my small house. People who rent are getting royally fucked over by ever increasing prices.
If we want people to have less cars then cities need to be affordable for people to live in. It shouldn’t cost more to not have a car. The US has so many backwards problems it starts to feel insurmountable.
Do you see the people walking in the top left picture?
That’s what access to the public looks like.
ah, so access to the public leaves out people with disabilities.
not much different than today’s reality, but at least you’re open about it.
last i checked people with disabilities are significantly more likely to walk and use public transport, partly because there are few disabilities that make it so u need a car and many that make it so that u cant drive a car either safely (like random seizures) or at all (like blindness) but also people with disabilities tend to be much poorer and driving is actually expensive as fuck. Public transport and pedestrian infrastructure alongside making streets safer for people by slowing down cars and reducing the overall number of unnecessary cars is actually really good for people with disabilities and even for those few who are forced to drive due to their disabilities surely their lives would be easier if everyone who didnt have to drive were off the roads too.
So if u actually give a shit and that was not just a cheap rhetorical trick then come over to our side and lets destroy car dependency for everyone happiness for the environment and for disabled people.
spoiler
and also for utility vehicle and deliver drivers who are made miserable by being unnecessarily stuck in traffic.