If only we had invented and built some sort of alternative mode of collective transportation. Maybe it could be in tunnels and ride on metallic rails. It would serve many people and make periodic stops to the same locations instead of the highway clusterf- we have today. Sad that we don’t, but a man can dream though. A man can dream.
Reported as not really being politics, and I could see it as being more !news@lemmy.world or even !business@lemmy.world
But pocket book issues like this impact politics.
“It’s the economy, stupid!” and all that.
Politics underpins finance at every level
Everything is politics.
The only way you can escape politics is to live alone on an uninhabited planet.
Even then, I’m sure someone would figure out a way to have conflicting ideas that need to be argued out. There’s a reason Tom Hanks invented Wilson (and the real-life stories such concepts are based on), we NEED other people to engage with, to debate with, to argue with, for validation and support and to negotiate with in order for our ideas to sharpen and for our minds to stay stable. Without this, we lose our minds or even die.
So not only is everything politics, we can’t live without it.
I think about this every time I see someone whinging about politics in entertainment.
So happy mine are paid off.
Can’t we have affordable repairable cars AND reliable public transport? That would sure be nice.
Many places in America at least are just too spread out. But we dont need a super mega duper feed f teenthousand to drive around. Shit like the Slate would be amazing if it could exist (I realize bezos funded it. Still doesn’t keep it from being a bad idea).
Thats why I will argue old cars were undeniably better. You could actually repair them and they weren’t rolling spyware with a subscription.
1990 to about 2014 is the perfect spot for cars. Before that is archaic for most people (i prefer 80s cars myself) and newer than that its just a corpo bot on wheels.
Might I suggest Open Source Repairable Cars, Trains, Trams, Bikes, Bike-Cars, and VTOL’s those would be awesome to get open source alternatives for
t.b.f the reporting is more about whether these companies have hidden loans (including possibly loans that other lenders don’t know about), which could have happened within railway companies just as easily as in car companies!
Sure. An eroded economy. Stagnant wages for many long with decreasing buying power. Price hikes thanks to tariffs, increasing insurance costs, rising subscription costs, etc. Cars bought at inflated prices and high interest for extended payment schedules during the covid price gouging, and just generally way too expensive these days anyway, are all draining bank accounts far more quickly than ever.
Bet any repos don’t go back on lots for resale, they’ll park them in the desert somewhere just to prop up scarcity and new car prices.
Awww. Theyre still not gonna make them one cent less expensive
How much do you use the train? I spent 8 years without a car, and let me tell you this, getting that 4 to 5 hours back that I was wasting on the bus, commuting, shopping, going to entertainment, Eric, that’s something I don’t ever want to do again. Bus and train combo with a bike still was hours to do a commute that takes maybe 30 minutes by car.
Well, Shaun, lemme tell ya; I didn’t mind the 4 to 5 hours a week I spent on the train or the bus. Partly, because sometimes I got to meet genuinely lovely and hilarious strangers, and even make friends with people I never would have met otherwise. Or help people that needed help, being in the right place at the right time. I kinda miss that, having chances at being a kind stranger.
And you know, there is the savings to consider. Not having to spend the extra 30 hours at a job I hate to pay for an $800 expense I don’t need was worth the extra commute time, in my opinion. All that extra free time that I wasn’t driving or working to afford driving, I could use to read books. Or write books.
Beyond that, it was nice to have the cheapest and most freeing exercise I’d get. That’s more money I didn’t spend on a gym membership, owning a bicycle and taking it to visit my friends or getting groceries. And when the weather got bad and I needed a car, I’d just call a taxi. Or set up a carpool with a coworker, offer to pay for gas. It was still cheaper than owning a car. It was nice to have a chance to make friends with my coworkers too.
How much effort did it take to plan my entire life around the logistics of taking my bike/the bus/the train? About as much effort as it did planning my life around owning a car.
The only time I ever needed a car, Shaun, was when I lived in the middle of nowhere and there was no public transit. Because the local government designed the infrastructure that way.
This is my absolute most favorite post comment and can relate to all that fully
That’s not really an inherent problem to buses or trains, but rather a problem with poor implementations of them. Build out mass transit and fund it properly, and they largely go away. At rush hour, I have 3 different train options that would get me from my neighborhood to the city center faster than I could by car, and cheaper on top of it.
If we keep on saying, “Well, it’s not good enough now, so forget about it,” we’ll just be having this conversation again in a few years, lamenting the fact that we didn’t take the chance to build out now, but probably with more people having even more cars.
Once living in your car became a viable housing alternative, they had to take that away, too.
Wait until they figure out we need food to live.
US admin is catering to corporations who only want to suck in everyone’s money.
The new corporate objective is to have everyone die penniless, with no inheritance for their children.
Except for the wealthy, of course. They know how to handle money responsibly, by investing it properly, and not blowing every last penny on fleeting pleasures like food, housing, and transportation.
When someone says family comes first, they often mean their family over yours.
The name of my local mall is prefaced by “Cadillac Fairview (CF)”. Cars have been overpriced for a long time now and the auto industry is investing in real estate. I think they may price themselves out of customers, just like the theater chains but at least they’ll get a bailout.
CF has no relation to Cadillac the car company. Fun fact, it’s parent company is the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan
I learned something new today.
Damn I wish theaters had priced themselves out yet people are still out here paying like $20+pp for a movie ticket. It wasn’t even ten years ago I could go to a second run cinema and get tickets for $2 :(
My truck is 25 years old 139k miles and runs great. It will probably last another 80-100k and we just paid off my wife’s car. We have no intention of taking on debt for a new vehicle unless it’s necessary.
I’m round 250k miles on my car (admittedly, not American so it’s actually a bit over 400k km) and it’s not even the most kilometers I’ve had on a car.
Buy something with an engine and transmission that are known to last that doesn’t have known rust issues, take care of it, and it will take care of you. You of course seem to have realized it already.
People literally rather sink themselves in debt to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars every few years than try to learn how to take care of their own vehicle internals or invest in the tools required to do so, despite being more accessible than ever. Seriously, you can diagnose your car with your phone with the right adapter. That would have seemed like magic when I was growing up.
Ohhh there are so many options here!
The app is often more important than the adapter at this point. Some marques have bad 3rd party app support unfortunately (looking at you, Subaru). Others have pretty great support (BimmerLink is adapter-agnostic, though they recommend using a high quality one and they have an affiliate deal of some kind with one manufacturer they recommend)
Personally I own a Chinese fake VCDS cable for <20 euros that allows me to do literal magic on anything VW, Audi, SEAT, Škoda… and could probably do a few things on modern Lamborghini and Bentley as well. Mysteriously, Porsche is the least supported out of all the VAG marques - they insist on having their own electronics. If I ever buy another VAG car, I’ll probably buy a genuine adapter to support the company behind it. I also own a Chinese fake Delphi DS150E clone, but at this point I don’t think it’s as great as it was 5-6 years ago. It doesn’t get cars newer than 2013. Plus it’s still missing some crucial things on some cars between 2000 and 2013. And outright missing some models.
Then there’s options like iCarsoft. More expensive than just an adapter and an app, but you get pretty great support for a lot of different marques. A lot more than some cheaper generic options.
And finally, marque-specific solutions. BimmerLink and VCDS I already mentioned, then there’s GAP for Land Rover, etc. Worth investing in if you’ve got a car you’re going to keep for a long time and want to be sure you can do stuff like air suspension ride height sensor calibration and all kinds of other procedures that generic tools might not have for your vehicle.
Just got my timing belt done, hoping to get to do it again at 200k miles
Yeah, why can’t these people just pull themselves up by their bootstraps like you?
You mean there is a flaw in the capitalistic idea of infinite profit growth. I am shocked.
Don’t forget proper bike infrastructure, trams, subway, busses. Like in most European countries. You’ll end up with smaller roads, lower speeds, less accidents, cleaner air, faster transportation, less car parks so more room for development of huises, more jobs, less waste. Or you could widen the roads, remove sidewalks and force people to drive cars on a road crowded with massive trucks which will crush you like a tank when hit. Hard choice.
Sure but one of the problems is North American cities are to sprawled out.
Our cities are fine, they’re just governed by shitheads. It’s the spaces in between that are the hurdle.
That’s one of the amazing things about ebikes is they make the sprawl so much more manageable!
Sure commuting 10 miles by ebike (probably about an hour commute or noticably less if you go faster than the 10mph average of an accoustic bike) isn’t as nice as commuting 2-3 miles by ebike (about 15 minutes commute time at 10mph), but chances are you’re already commuting between 30-60 minutes by car depending on traffic so what’s making that a consistent 45-60 minute commute with no meaningful traffic jams and wonderful fresh air and sunlight?
Any ebikes you would recommend?
Personally I’m thinking of getting a walking bike instead
Some city folks are just as disconnected from the real world as the morons that insisted they need a f350 super duty to run to Costco.
You’re gonna take your spouse and kids on that ebike? You’re gonna do grocery shopping for a family on it? You’re gonna ride an hour in the rain or intense sun?
You cannot manage the American urban/suburban sprawl with an ebike. Maybe you can, but the average family cannot.
That’s when you attack a wagon to the back and make sure the ebike has enough power to move all that
To be serious though a bikecar would be better. Plenty of those but we need more affordable options
Some city folks are just as disconnected from the real world as the morons that insisted they need a f350 super duty to run to Costco.
Actually I live in a town of about 10,000 surrounded by farm communities so I don’t think most people would say I live in a city. I did grow up in a much larger city, and I’ve visited plenty of cities with hundreds of thousands or millions of people in them, but I’m definitely not a “city folk”
Heck I literally have to drive to the next state for some of my less frequent houseware purchases because that’s where the closest place to buy that stuff is
You’re gonna take your spouse and kids on that ebike?
I do all of my school pickups and dropoffs by bike. I hook a trailer up that the kids ride in. The trailer was $20 at a garage sale and required a $7 standard hitch that I ordered online (said trailers are sold for about $100-200 on Amazon new too) my oldest is getting a little big for the trailer so I think next season we’ll upgrade to a trailercycle for her and hook the trailer up to that.
You’re gonna do grocery shopping for a family on it?
My weekly grocery shopping for my family of 4 is about 3 paper bags worth, or two reusable bags worth. Plastic bags always make the amount of groceries one buys look like way more than it is, but I worked in a grocery store for several years as a teenager and learned how to really heavily pack paper bags, and cloth bags you can fit even more into per bag.
You can get gigantic paniers that will hold that quantity of food, or again, use a trailer that you hook up for grocery runs
You’re gonna ride an hour in the rain or intense sun?
Personally, I love biking to replace car trips, but in the current American landscape it’s most realistic to bike as a compliment to driving. We’ve been a one car family for about 1/4 of the time we’ve had kids thanks to biking, and most of the time we haven’t been a one car family has been due to job changes requiring 40+ mile commutes
So riding in the rain or intense sun? Yeah I do it pretty regularly, but I fully respect folks who decide that’s the day they’ll drive
You cannot manage the American urban/suburban sprawl with an ebike. Maybe you can, but the average family cannot.
If you were talking about an accoustic bike I’d agree. I’m a crazy person and I’ve been enjoying seeing what my body can do with enough training, so I’ve been pushing my limits on my accoustic bike, but ebikes are absolutely game changer since they flatten the hills (I live in an extremely hilly area. My school route literally starts with a 100 foot climb!) and allow for one to not work as hard or at all if they’re sick, too hot or otherwise just don’t feel like putting in as much effort that day
But most importantly more folks should try bikes because they’re freaking fun!
Bicycles and trains. Always has been.
Those are nice, but they are not options for much of the US.
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