
Guangzhou, China
Anti-Homeless Spikes to keep them from finding shelter from the rain.
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:

Guangzhou, China
Anti-Homeless Spikes to keep them from finding shelter from the rain.
China has an oversupply issue in housing construction in general. it is... as if the problem is not merely building too few houses (as some us centric yimby people believe) but rather an unjust system of resource distribution?
For a long time, property was the only allowed wealth that could be inherited. So China became littered with extremely poor construction that was never occupied, and is uninhabitable. There are also restrictions on who can be sold to - in rural areas owners cannot sell to urban buyers or institutions. This means they can’t mortgage their homes.
And yet they have millions of what they call "vagrants" how curious.
The constantly connected seem to have a tough time parsing available housing and homelessness. Like, there are 100 homeless and 200 houses, why problem?!
But you don't understand how big the US is! We can fit two Chinas in Texas! And we can put five Texases in Texas! Omg it's so huuuuge you guys, public transportation would just not work here, like, ever!!
In America, even if you live in a city with good public transit, there's frequently no way to get from one city to another. Greyhound routes are extremely limited, Amtrak seems to just loop around major metropolitan cities extremely slowly, and the price of a rental car has gotten out of control after COVID.
So even if you live in a city with strong infrastructure, you still have to buy a car unless you're willing to be stuck in that city 99.9% of the time.
Sometime in my lifetime, I'd like to see America catch up with the rest of the world.
Can you also make the overpass racist?
purposefully designs the overpass to pass over a black community and evicts them all
*This is actuslly how roads were built in cities the past century. The project "segregation by design" has extremely good archiving of this
The amount of black/brown neighborhoods in Milwaukee with random infrastructure is absurd. Like why is there an entrance to the highway on this side street?
In my city they didn’t make overpasses. They built massive earthworks around the minority sections of town with highways on top of them.
purposefully designs the overpass to pass over a black community and evicts them all
Adds black history mural along the same overpass
Conveniently, that bus stop also punishes anyone else who makes the mistake of waiting for a bus there.
Ugh, I just want a bench.
At this point they're getting rid of the shelters entirely. I'd settle for not having to wait for a bus while standing in the rain
But a homeless person might suffer a little bit less if they aren't wet
Damn you right. What if we just rip up the sidewalk and replace it with razor wire?
The bus also only arrives once every hour (inconsistently)
Hostile architecture. When you only want to fight the symptoms, not the cause.
My county paid money to put up signs at intersections specifically telling people not to give money to the homeless
My city has a few of those, but specifically in places where the structure of the intersection has an island somehwre right in the middle of traffic, and people were being hit by cars frequently. Go pan handle somewhwre you're not likely to be run over.
But the disdain extends to the elderly and pregnant women when it comes to our bus stops. They don't have seats at all anymore. They even ripped out the seats that used to exist.
Ha, I get it! This is funny because there are no American planners.
American planner here. We don't actually get to plan shit. We end up being the middlemen between developers and Council. We explain all the rules we didn't get to make, the developers explain to council how hlthey don't even want to follow those rules, then Council overrules us and gives the devs whatever they want.
I have seen it in action in city council meetings.
No shortage of American planners. They just work in hedge funds and board rooms
I stand corrected!
So it's not funny? Oh dear
Lmao no imagine being the guy who designed that
"You want me to draw what ?"
"Torture bus stop. Make spikes that stick into their butts. But, uh... make it look 🌠Geometric🌠, so we can pass it off as an innocent post-modernist design quirk."
What a great bus stop, it looks so snazzy and appropriate. Can you make it hurt people
If we got rid of private property rights it would be a lot easier to build infrastructure.
Just sayin'
Yeah but even in places where a railroad already has right of way for train tracks they can't get around to doing any upgrades
Man up, America! Two hours each way in crushing, soul destroying traffic is PATRIOTIC. What's good for billionaires is good for the Regular Guy in the job.

Before Trump, America had democracy and no trains
Now it has no trains and no democracy
This comment section goes to weird places, man.
Kinda like what few American trains still operate. O.o
I doubt even the chinese can build a train line from scratch in 3h
You're telling me a shrimp fried this rice?
What's it with these railway based China propaganda posts?
Yes the US sucks.
Yes you can get a lot done in a totalitarian system.
But: China also sucks.
Other democratic countries all manage to have perfectly fine rail systems, it's not solely the domain of totalitarian governments- just functioning governments.
Much like healthcare, it's literally just the US government that fucks it up.
For those who want to go the "well Europe/Japan/Korea/China/etc had the advantage of being bombed flat in various wars which made rebuilding for rail easier", we STILL have plenty of unused, unmaintained rail in the US. We could do this. Hell, you wanna solve unemployment numbers going up? Public works to rehab the right-of-ways that the big companies aren't using, rehab the rails they ARE using, and suddenly we can AT LEAST enable 100mph trains across the country in less than a decade, and probably bring back passenger rail if we wanted to invest in more rolling stock.
Of course, this means we'd have to lift the steel tariff. And rehab steel mills. And also nationalize good portions of the railway (I'd suggest the entire rail network, and lease usage to the freight companies).
In Fact, China uses the same kind of hostile architecture:

There's a stark difference between Chinese propaganda and information about positive things in China.
You can post about good aspects of the Chinese society without mentioning the government, let alone glorifying it. Same goes for the USA. If I post that I like American national parks, does that constitute American propaganda? Are we only allowed to hate on those two countries?
Just because the Chinese model is incompatible with the European or American ones, doesn't mean there's nothing we can learn from it.
Yeah. Can we take Japan as an example perhaps? They've got excellent high speed rail too. Also better urban planning in general.
American planners wanting to draw something?
They rather use AI to generate their shitty ideas.