this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
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Fuck Cars

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A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!

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[–] finitebanjo@lemmy.world 36 points 3 days ago (4 children)

Guangzhou, China
Anti-Homeless Spikes to keep them from finding shelter from the rain.

[–] Antitoxic9087@slrpnk.net 18 points 3 days ago (2 children)

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?

[–] ohulancutash@feddit.uk 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] finitebanjo@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

And yet they have millions of what they call "vagrants" how curious.

[–] Dozzi92@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

The constantly connected seem to have a tough time parsing available housing and homelessness. Like, there are 100 homeless and 200 houses, why problem?!

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[–] AlligatorBlizzard@sh.itjust.works 91 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Conveniently, that bus stop also punishes anyone else who makes the mistake of waiting for a bus there.

Ugh, I just want a bench.

[–] arrow74@lemmy.zip 35 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca 29 points 3 days ago (2 children)

But a homeless person might suffer a little bit less if they aren't wet

[–] arrow74@lemmy.zip 19 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Damn you right. What if we just rip up the sidewalk and replace it with razor wire?

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The bus also only arrives once every hour (inconsistently)

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 72 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Can you also make the overpass racist?

[–] Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com 35 points 3 days ago (4 children)

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

[–] justaman123@lemmy.world 15 points 3 days ago

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?

[–] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 6 points 3 days ago

purposefully designs the overpass to pass over a black community and evicts them all

Adds black history mural along the same overpass

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

In my city they didn’t make overpasses. They built massive earthworks around the minority sections of town with highways on top of them.

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[–] WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 82 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Hostile architecture. When you only want to fight the symptoms, not the cause.

[–] arrow74@lemmy.zip 39 points 4 days ago (4 children)

My county paid money to put up signs at intersections specifically telling people not to give money to the homeless

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 17 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (5 children)

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.

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[–] Mulligrubs@lemmy.world 40 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Ha, I get it! This is funny because there are no American planners.

[–] chiliedogg@lemmy.world 20 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] eestileib@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 3 days ago

I have seen it in action in city council meetings.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 19 points 3 days ago (1 children)

No shortage of American planners. They just work in hedge funds and board rooms

[–] Mulligrubs@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago

I stand corrected!

So it's not funny? Oh dear

[–] k0e3@lemmy.ca 12 points 3 days ago

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!!

  • some bootlicker, probably
[–] Swaus01@piefed.social 42 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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."

[–] FatVegan@leminal.space 3 points 2 days ago

What a great bus stop, it looks so snazzy and appropriate. Can you make it hurt people

[–] MystValkyrie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.

[–] SnarkoPolo@lemmy.world 18 points 3 days ago

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.

[–] SethTaylor@lemmy.world 11 points 3 days ago

Before Trump, America had democracy and no trains

Now it has no trains and no democracy

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] SethTaylor@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

This comment section goes to weird places, man.

[–] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 6 points 3 days ago

Kinda like what few American trains still operate. O.o

[–] Redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I doubt even the chinese can build a train line from scratch in 3h

[–] frostysauce@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

You're telling me a shrimp fried this rice?

[–] Stitch0815@feddit.org 21 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (18 children)

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.

[–] ysjet@lemmy.world 63 points 4 days ago (14 children)

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.

[–] Mirshe@lemmy.world 30 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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).

[–] cogman@lemmy.world 12 points 3 days ago (1 children)

A really sad fact is that rail lines used to connect even the most rural of communities. Many cities removed rail lines to put in roadways.

You can still find rails to a lot of farms in Idaho because that's how produce used to be shipped.

The big rail companies are a major reason rail sucks in the US. They were given the land for their lines nearly for free with the promise they'd provide public transit. Well, they stopped that. So the US created Amtrak to relieve them of the obligation of public transit with the promise that Amtrak trains would get priority. Well they constantly break that law which makes Amtrak suck with constant delays.

Heck, these companies are at least supposed to be in charge of maintaining the lines, and they don't do that either. The US has a crazy number of derailments and a big reason for some of them is that the tracks receive little maintenance.

These are still multi billion dollar companies and they do what all giant companies do and nickel/dime everything.

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[–] DupaCycki@lemmy.world 27 points 4 days ago (8 children)

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.

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[–] finitebanjo@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago

In Fact, China uses the same kind of hostile architecture:

[–] mcv@lemmy.zip 15 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Yeah. Can we take Japan as an example perhaps? They've got excellent high speed rail too. Also better urban planning in general.

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