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this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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You live in a place designed around cars, that's the problem. Society worked fine without cars for a good long while. We could have adopted trains, bikes, and buses without the car and things would be going swimmingly. The idea is to fix our bad town planning so that it's reasonable to get to any destination using any mode if transportation.
Exactly. Then Europeans downvote people who say they need a car, because their country/city/state/whatever has terrible planning or public transit.
Not my fault I need a car. Stop blaming me. I didn't design the city. I didn't plan where the public transit will go.
Do you really think I love paying $1200+ per year for insurance, $120+ per week for fuel, and $20,000-80,000 for a new vehicle when mine borks itself?
I partially agree but you forget that every country = its people and people can either not give a crap or start complaining. Politics are same everywhere, they want to secure their position, so they will follow those who are heard. Otherwise they will follow their own interests.
It's not as easy as people complaining, though. What are people going to do? Move to a city in 2500KM away in the next province over, because that province has slightly better infrastructure?
No, they'll complain, nothing will be done, and they'll stay where they are because they have friends, family, and a job here.
I understand that it's easier to do in a lot of European countries, but I can literally drive for over 25 straight hours, and still be in my province in Canada. It's nearly impossible to do any kind of proper public transit, and it's not feasible to move over it.
Canada really stifled its non-car mobility when it basically cut all intercity rail service after WWII though, especially for the interior and west coast. We used to have a pretty good train network for getting between nearby cities like Calgary and Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver, Kelowna and Vancouver, and even Victoria and Nanimo. We don't even have a proper Vancouver to Abbotsford commuter rail despite them being right next to each other. There were obviously even longer routes like Toronto to Vancouver but that can't really compete with planes so no real surprise they went (I don't count that one Via Rail tourist service as a proper Vancouver-Toronto line). Pretty much the only remaining part of Canada with decent intercity rail is on the Toronto Ottawa Montreal corridor, and it does get decent ridership because of it.
Also, within many Canadian metro areas, which if you live in one you'll most likely stay inside of it for the vast majority of your daily travels, you could actually reasonably live without a car depending on where exactly you live and what you have to do. I for one live in the Vancouver area and don't own a car. I take the bus and metro almost everywhere, and on the rare occasion I need to go somewhere that's straight up without public transit access I just take an Uber or something. I think the fact that many of the largest Canadian cities are investing now more than ever in building more public transit, and those projects are more often than not praised by residents with high ridership to back it up is a sign that there is a high demand for non-car travel at least within urban areas. And even for smaller towns, the infrastructure is already there for good bus services like most small towns in Europe have, and if we want to go beyond that and upgrade particularly high demand routes, streetcars and tram-trains are also tried and true options for lower density urban areas. Canada even had plenty of streetcars before we decided to rip them up.
I get that this doesn't really help people in rural or remote Canada but if we can work to reduce the need for cars in a city, where the majority of people live, that's still a win and sets a precedent for future transit expansion into lower density areas. Non-car dependency isn't an all or nothing deal for the entire country.
Obviously there are many challenges to Canadians finding car free alternatives. If you're in a situation where you do need to own a car, then you need to own a car, and you shouldn't feel bad for that. But I think that simply saying that there is no other way in Canada or that we're just hopeless and doomed to car dependency forever due to our population density is missing a lot.
I will also recommend the YouTube channel RMTransit for really good Canadian public transit content.
The way you put it is misleading. If you want a change, you have to act to be heard. If you get enough people to be heard, things will start to change. Also historically AFAIK Canada had car alternatives, but people like you decided not to use them. So there was no incentive to keep them.
Nobody is blaming the American people. It's the car corporations that bought and dismantled light rail and train systems and lobbied the government to build cities around the car.
And now the American people are so brainwashed into thinking owning a car is freedom and public transit is "socialism" that they will fight tooth and nail against anything that is against their "freedom" to be forced to own and pay for a car.
Worse: they may live in a place bulldozed to make way for cars. Plenty of car-dependent places used to have good places for walking, good transit services, all that jazz, but it was all torn down to make room for cars.