this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
1056 points (98.4% liked)

Fuck Cars

11167 readers
575 users here now

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

Rules

1. Be CivilYou may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.

2. No hate speechDon't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.

3. Don't harass peopleDon'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 topicThis community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.

5. No repostsDo 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.

Posting Guidelines

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:

Recommended communities:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

cross-posted from: https://jlai.lu/post/17684914

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (2 children)

In a small European town, you get on your bike, travel two blocks through zero red lights, and arrive at a cozy corner shop that has everything you need for lunch and freshly baked bread. If you don’t have a basket on your bike, you just walk there instead.

The gigastores we associate with groceries in the USA are a product of our car culture. Someone has braved the highway ramps, so they need to bring back a big haul in their large trunk. Of course, that also leads to food being wasted as we buy in bulk and let it expire.

Citing population density is just exemplifying the planning problem. You can look at Australia’s population density too, but it’d be disingenuous to include the large outback - which no one settles into, because why would they. Same question for America’s pointlessly broad frontiers, where everyone just seems to want to get away from each other.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Population density is relevant here, I'm not grabbing a lot of extra uninhabited territory to make the number bigger, I'm just using the smallest organizational unit that includes all my weekly trips.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

I'm not trying to get groceries from a gigastore. This grocery store building has been there since I was a child in the 80s and while it is bigger than the store my father used to run, it's less than 20% the size of the WMT supercenter down the road -- half the size of the grocery section of that "gigastore" (it's not a max size supercenter). But, it is the closest produce section. You can be shelf-stable stuff from the dollar store(s) much closer, but I do sometimes need produce and I'd rather shop at this locally-owmed location than the chain dollar stores. (I don't even this they are franchises, just corporate owned.)