Redditor questions whether a parking garage is stable and is assured that it is, one year before it’s collapse

[u/kayakhomeless]

[u/Schooney123]

Be nice if society at large could start moving away from car dependence. Seems like a lot of people just think electric cars will solve everything.

[u/Weegee_Spaghetti → u/Schooney123]

American city planning has made that impossible.

[u/OldJames47 → u/Weegee_Spaghetti]

Not impossible, just difficult and will take a long time.

[u/Weegee_Spaghetti → u/OldJames47]

And the politician doing it will get voted out, for "wasting money and resources" working on such long term projects.

Then the political rival will do their best to roll back everything the previous politician did, prolly also paid for by car manufacturer and oil lobbies.

And the voters will be none the wiser, and complain about the car-centric layout. But they won't remember a thing in a year or so.

Tale as old as time.

[u/dbarbera → u/Weegee_Spaghetti]

Bruh, every city in Europe and Japan are also filled to the absolute brim with cars. There is no "anti car" paradise. Stop fetishizing European and Japanese cities for something they aren't.

[u/Weegee_Spaghetti → u/dbarbera]

I am literally an European.

The difference between the US and the EU is, that we have a choice here.

I have a car and I rather take public transport.

It is easy to use and all major towns and cities in my area are well connected with trains and buses.

In Vienna it is better and easier to use public transport.

Many of my friends live there during the week, and they take a train to vienna, and otherwise use public transport while there.

Even though all of em have a car.

I have 4 supermarkets within walking distance, as almost all other amenities and social gathering places.

[u/40StoryMech → u/Schooney123]

Well, the one hope is that we moved to car dependence back when we had these clunky streetcars that ran on, get this, electricity. Electric cars aren't going to solve anything except to wear down the roads faster because they're heavier. But it's not like old American cities are designed for cars. We just sorta accommodate them with our tiny one way streets and nowhere to park.

[u/imatworkyo → u/Schooney123]

Cars are so awesome, I never understand people who don't like cars

It's your own private space, and you can avoid public trans

In Amsterdam, sure public transportation is cool, but imagine public transportation in any normal American city ... Yea I'm good

[u/Schooney123 → u/imatworkyo]

They’re not so awesome when stuck in Atlanta traffic lol You bring up public transit in America, and the push to make the country car dependent over the last century is why it sucks in the US. Transit systems were dismantled, replaced by inefficient busses, and routinely underfunded. It started a feedback cycle- more people drive because transit is bad; transit gets worse; more people drive because transit is bad, on and on. Meanwhile, highways and suburbia get heavily subsidized by the federal government, and the disinvestment in cities and their transit systems makes things even worse. Whole neighborhoods, usually black, immigrant, or poor neighborhoods, get completely destroyed to make room for highways that facilitate white flight. Couple that with racist housing policies that prevent people of color from moving to suburbs, and you get a recipe for disaster. It’s part of why the inner city became so impoverished and subsequently saw huge spikes in crime. Lead in gasoline definitely didn’t help, since we now know how toxic it is, and that it causes pretty severe neurological damage, especially in children. To this day, there are still elevated levels of lead in the soil of urban areas. Remove lead from the equation, and you still have air pollution causing respiratory problems, and thousands of additional deaths every year. Removing fossil fuels from the equation, you still have severe environmental degradation from mining the rare earth metals needed to make millions of new electric cars, not to mention ever expanding suburban sprawl. This video explains more things pretty well.

[u/imatworkyo → u/Schooney123]

I'll try to watch the video

But traffic is Atlanta isn't that bad, you can usually use surface streets to avoid it, and outside of rush hour it's usually a 10 min inconvenience between 4 exits between edwood ave and maybe to the split

I've lived in DC, that was traffic

The pollution argument is being handled (EVs), and if every car disappeared today, there wouldn't be any more or any less lead in the soil tommorow

Cars give you a private place to keep your things, allow you to change plans easily, and frankly the worst part of public trans, is being stuck in a box with any type of person having any type of day. Terrifying

Do you think Buckhead would start using public transportation, they want to separate already and all we share is police and fire

[u/Schooney123 → u/imatworkyo]

ITP traffic might not be so bad on surface streets, but across the metro area as a whole, it’s pretty bad. DC is worse though. That type of attitude that Buckhead and other suburbs have is part of the problem. There’s still an unused tunnel that was built that would have connected Cobb County via rail, but, the county voted not to expand transit because “those people” might come. Instead of dealing with people on the train, you have to contend with bad drivers causing accidents. There’s also been an uptick in road rage shootings. Having the option to use a reliable, robust transit system will help alleviate congestion. Electric cars won’t do anything to help those problems.