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Our children are victims of road violence. We need to talk about the deadly norms of car use
(theconversation.com)
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"We could reduce the speed limits for cars to be closer to the average speeds of walking (6 kilometres per hour"
Geezus christ. I'm guessing the author has no idea what it's like to be a parent.
Here's a hint: kids need to go places. Public transport cannot get you to those places. Also, parents need to work (both of them) or else the kids don't eat. As a parent I'm flat out busy from sunrise to midnight, and they want me to take the 1 hour I spend commuting each day and expand it to five hours. That doesn't work:
Unfortunately... you can't get a 3 year old to eat breakfast at 5am and the childcare centre won't let you drop them off at 6am either. So that schedule means starting at work at around 10:30am. Ouch.
And in order to get home in time for the kid two have dinner without throwing a tantrum... I'd probably need to leave work at 2pm.
Sorry but it's just not possible to work 3 hours a day and pay a mortgage/put food on the table/etc.
Wait, what? They are absolutely right.
No they're not. They are arguing against a straw man so ridiculous it's more of a small sad-looking pile of straw. And they know it, too; they're a regular car-brained troll in this community, and they've had it pointed out to them why their arguments are nonsense many times before.
carbrains are real but this user isn't one
it's obvious that the real problem is that Melbourne's buses and roads are shit, not that people are driving at normal car speeds.
lowering speed limits are a good thing but really low speeds like 6km/h only belong in carparks and high pedestrian areas.
20km/h should be the norm for areas like shopping streets.
Anyway the real problem is that we have designed our car moving roads to be right in the centre or population centres, and that our buses are really fucking horribly scheduled and operated. Even our 90x "smartbus" high frequency lines have really shit 20m or worse frequency sometimes, and off peak frequency is generally shit on any route, even rail.
It would be nice if 2 people waiting at a crosswalk got priority over 1 person in a car, but that's not going to happen with the primitive "heavy moving box strong" logic in our brains, get real
Absolutely. Which is why that nobody is saying 6 km/h should be the norm. The article said closer to. With current speed limits normally being 60 km/h, and you're extremely lucky if you can get it reduced to 40 km/h, their "closer to" is pretty obviously not saying it should be 6 km/h. They're talking about 30 km/h on local residential streets.
fwiw this user definitely is car-brained. It's not just this one comment. They have a long history of opposing improvements to our cities and defending motornormativity.
What is the "straw man" in their argument? Be specific.
No, I won't. Because you're smart enough to figure it out yourself. The only barrier to figuring it out is a deliberate obstinance and opposition to better urban planning.
If I knew what the fuck was going on in your brain when you said something, I wouldn't have to ask. I'd also be a lot richer because it would also mean I'm psychic.
Alright, here it is so that people with no critical thinking skills can get it:
Nobody, at any point, said we should make the speed limit on all roads 6 km/h.
Nobody even said we should make the speed limit on some roads 6 km/h.
The actual thing actually proposed by road safety advocates and people in favour of better urban planning is reducing the speed limit on local residential streets, and in commercial shopping districts. Usually to 30 km/h.