- cross-posted to:
- fuckcars@lemmy.world
- fuckcars@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- fuckcars@lemmy.world
- fuckcars@lemmy.ca
You must log in or # to comment.
It’s honestly insane. Half of regular travels in the world is done using huge machines 10-20X the weight of humans inside.
People get to carry a giant piece of metal around and they think it’s okay.
People who say driving is freedom have never lived within walking distance of the amenities they need. You think driving to Costco/Walmart is convenient? I’ve left the house 5 minutes before the grocery store closes. When I want to make a recipe, I don’t check the fridge for what I have until literally right before I need to start making it because forgetting something adds at most 15 minutes to the prep time. I’ve never had to haul ten grocery bags from my car because I never need to buy that much at one time and then watch half of it go bad in the fridge. I can go get snacks when I’m high as a kite on weed without killing someone on the road. True freedom for me is never needing to drive or own a car.
Amen, Driving is dependance.
I’d argue it’s both freedom and dependence.
If you live in a rural area it really does feel like you are trapped there without a motorized vehicle. Especially late at night or in an emergency, even an ambulance can be 20+ minutes away in many places.
You can see this with the popularity of over powered e-bikes with teens. Basically silent dirt bikes at this point. They let kids go much farther from home and reduce the speed differential on road sides.
Public transit would be nice of course, but lots of people live 20-50km from any stores, and plenty live further. And have long cold winters.
I commuted by bike and subway for 18 years in Boston, but then moved home to care for dementia parents, now my son is biking (just pedals), and we’re forced to ride on paths or one town over where they have wide sidewalks and crossings (there aren’t either in our 2 stoplight town). Btw my commute took twice as long by public transport than by bike, but that’s another issue.
Like everything else, it’s a gray area, I think the US could realistically reduce vehicle use to the 40%s, but to go much lower would require the elimination of sprawl, building denser housing and a ton more local shopping, doctors, and grocery stores. Not just more trains and buses.
/end rant, sorry it got long, nuance is tricky.
If you live in a rural area… in the USA
Rural areas where I lived in Mexico are walkable/bikable and most people get to the city an hour or so away with a shuttle that goes back and forth to the village. Our rural model is different and better where all the people live close in a small town or village area that has all the stuff to do and grocery stores and the crop fields, ranches, and orchards spread out radially from there.
The USA was built over the past century for the profit of oil companies. Most USians probably don’t realize that it’s possible to do things differently, and at this point it’s probably not possible to change without land reform, given how much of US farmland has been consolidated under corporate ownership.
People all over assume things are done the best way already, and will argue endlessly with any proposed improvements, insisting they aren’t practicable despite being dead wrong.
I think in rural areas you are dealing with a small minority. Suburbs should not need 2-3 cars per household. Cities certainly should not.
I think even Rural infrastructure should be setup for a 0-1 car per household. 90% of personal transport can be handled by two wheels and ride hailing services.
Using the unsafe argument for two wheels just points out the car problem more. Also the truck problem, which is due to mismanagement of train and rail resources.
Depends how you see it. I live in the countryside and would hate living in the city. Yet one does not both live in the countryside AND eat without a car when the closest grocery store is 30km away. We used to have a local grocery store that hardly had anything and which unsurprisingly went out if business.
In my case, driving IS freedom. It’s the freedom to go where I want when I want without having to rely on anyone else.
Do I miss having the grocery store across the street when I lived in the city? For sure, but I sure am glad I’m back in the countryside now.
I’m just looking at this full size grocery store surrounded by medium-small farms. Two of them are growing canola, its flowers are beautiful yellow. There’s farmshacks and traditional countryside things like windmills, barely further from the grocery store than that store’s parking lot.
I can’t imagine this being possible (the full sized part anyway). The less customers you have, the less options you can offer, it’s simple economics.
Perhaps what doesn’t help my case is that most of the town works for that one company where everyone has one or two of their meals at their cafeteria. Still, of the neighboring towns, none has a grocery store bigger than a corner store. The only town that does have one has almost 5000 people….
The truth is, when we did have a grocery store, everyone went to the city once a week anyway because everything is there (or they work there). So while they’re at it, they also shopped at the bigger grocery stores, leading to a decline in customers at the local one.
ah yes, there are commie block style apartment towers about 300m away, but you can’t really see them from the store because of the big trees.
An entire continent is missing.
More than one!
Three of them, though I don’t know how much biking people are doing in Antarctica.
Fun fact: there’s no universally-accepted definition of “continent!” Depending on how you define it there could be as many as 8 or as few as 4. Sometimes Africa, Europe, and Asia are counted as one continent, and sometimes Antarctica isn’t (notably in the Olympic flag). Sometimes Zealandia is added as the 8th continent. All the definitions I’ve seen count Australia as its own, though; and as noted that one’s missing.
All of that to say, the original commenter might have an Afro-Eurasian non-Antarctic model in mind when they say that one entire continent is missing. The second one might have a non-Antarctic six-continent model in mind, and you have the traditional (English-speaking) seven-continent model in mind. But you might very reasonably (well, okay, slightly reasonably) say that this infographic is missing four continents: Africa, Australia, Antarctica, and Zealandia.
Side note, I just realized that the continents alphabetize really strangely, if you combine the Americas:
Africa Americas Antarctica Asia Australia Europe
The letter A is way overrepresented in the names of our continents.
For the glory of A, Europe shall now be renamed to Aurope!
More proof the Atlantis continent was real!
You finally unlocked my mind, I get it now
I’ve often seen Australia included in Oceania.
I thought Oceania was just another name for Australia?
It normally also includes the myriad of islands of the Pacific, New Zeland, and maybe Papuasia.
Oceania is a useful geographic region, but I haven’t seen anyone include it as a continent; the most common definitions I’ve seen for continents are “lands sitting on the same tectonic plate” (so, the geological definition) and “contiguous land of a sufficient size not broken up by any ocean.” Interestingly, both of those definitions still allow some wiggle room in what counts and what doesn’t, but in either definition, Australia is not part of the South Pacific islands.
I need to know how the penguins commute
They waddle or swim! They used to drive until the Heard and McDonald Islands got tariffed :/
Also excluding Mexico for some reason.
Mexico is part of North America…
It is, but read the small font: it says they excluded Mexico from their North America stats.
oh. lol.
Maybe they put it under Central America, which is all north america technically.
There’s no “technically”. It just depends. Sometimes America is considered as a single continent, sometimes 2 (north and south), and sometimes 3 (north, central and south).
Mexico is part (most) of Central AmericaI was mistakenalthough wrong I think it would make more sense
There are no buses in Antarctica, silly
0% cars, 0% public transport, 30% walking/biking, 30% swimming, 40% belly tobogganing
What about Africa ?
Everything is within walking distance for them due to Mercator contraction.
How did they get an average of 51% for cars, when all but one bar is below that?
First off “Africa” (22.2% cars) and “Australia and New Zeland” (75.9% cars) are not shown. But probably more important: The paper where the data is taken from used the traffic data from 794 cities, “weighted by the population of each observation”. Most probably there were more cities from regions with high car usage in the data.
Interesting side fact: “The 794 cities in the data are not representative samples of cities worldwide or different regions”.good answer
weighted averages.
Through extremely heavy use of cars in Africa of course.
Everyone knows that in Africa people get around in cars 24/7 100%.
Me: stays in basement
So Africa/Mexico/Oceania must have a very high proportion of drivers to skew the world average, as from the graph alone there’s no way the average is 51%
Especially the area where China/India are in the 20% area and are 10x bigger in population than N-America
The North America stat is fine if you’re only talking about the US and Canada… but since they left Mexico out it’s not really accurate
I think they’re trying to tell a story about the way cities in the US and Canada are brutally malformed for moving people around in them. Mexico is much more like Central America in its modality, and so adding their stats in obscures the abnormalities that are the US and Canada.
Unless I’m missing something, there’s no mention of cities.
The closest grocery store for me is a 20 minute drive. Of course I drive. There aren’t too many buses running around the woods of northern New England.
I’m not saying that the numbers are not still pretty bad. Boston has way too many cars. New York did an awesome thing with congestion pricing. But sometimes public transport doesn’t make sense for the area.
I would like to see a graph that just shows major metropolitan areas. I’m sure the US still sucks but you can’t include households that are many miles from any store at all and use that to skew the numbers.
Also, why exclude Mexico and then call it North america. Why not call it Canada and the US? Why not label Canada and the US separately? These numbers are pushing an agenda. I’m not saying the agenda is wrong but this graph seems a bit dishonest.
You’re right, this graph isn’t specifically about cities; it’s just that cities are currently the biggest transit problems in the US.
I would like to see a graph that just shows major metropolitan areas.
The org that did this research also has a visualizer tool where you can compare different cities around the world, and you can see that even new York City has something like 65% of its population using personal cars. And it’s by far the most multimodal city in North America; Ithaca gets close, because they have a robust cycling culture, and there are more Canadian cities in the hunt than US cities, but it’s still unbelievably skewed in favor of personal cars. Which means that, even if you excluded all rural areas from this graph, North America would still be dramatically anomalous.
you can’t include households that are many miles from any store at all and use that to skew the numbers.
I think that the reason that the graph doesn’t exclude rural areas from its data is that the density of North America isn’t dramatically different from the density of Europe or Asia. Yes, the US is slightly less dense than the world average, but not excessively so; and there are plenty of countries in those other continents with lower density than the US or Canada. In fact, Canada is quite a bit less dense than the US, but it’s pulling North America’s multimodality up. So no, you can’t use it to skew the numbers–but I mean that in the sense that you’re unable to do it, it’s impossible, because it’s affecting the numbers worldwide in more or less the same way.
Also, why exclude Mexico and then call it North america. Why not call it Canada and the US? Why not label Canada and the US separately?
Better readability, is my guess. The only divisions in this infographic that really matter are the political ones, because those are the divisions that affect the data in a meaningful way. So cutting out Mexico is no more arbitrary than cutting out Canada would’ve been.
These numbers are pushing an agenda.
All numbers are pushing an agenda.
Ok, not all numbers, but there’s no real reason to gather demographic research data otherwise. We do censuses and polls and studies to figure out what to do as a society. That’s why we do that. The numbers are telling a story, and it’s not a false story: multimodality in the United States and Canada is dramatically lower than in other countries around the world. Cities in North America don’t serve their citizens as well because their citizens don’t have as many options for how they get around.
Sure, they could use this data to highlight how multimodal transportation in Eastern Europe is, but that’s just another way of pointing out how one-sided it is in North America. Or you could use it to show how dominant public transit is in East Asia, or biking in South Asia, but again, they would just be another way of showing how anemic it is in the US.
And when you’re an organization called “Environment International,” that’s the story you’re trying to tell. They’re just slicing it up in a way that makes the story clearest.
I’m not saying the agenda is wrong but this graph seems a bit dishonest.
It’s not dishonest. It’s being pretty up-front about showing a huge disparity, and it’s not trying to hide the fact that they’re cutting out Mexico to show that there’s a serious problem in the US and Canada. It’s like if you took a photo of a purse-snatching in progress, and you cropped in to show the crime occurring. No one would accuse you of lying because you cropped out the kid getting a treat from the ice cream truck on the right-hand side of the frame; you just made it more clear what you were trying to show with that photograph.
Canada may be less dense, overall but something crazy like 90% of Canada’s population lives within 100 miles of the US border. No one lives in the northern tundra.
How is Europe split? Germany is rather central. Does it Count as north or west europe? South? Probably nor east. Or is Germany divided again for this analysis? Resembling post-WWII times.
Germany is in the western half of Europe
@Zacryon @dessalines normally central Europe. Here I’d assume its counted as western Europe
All 154 german cities in the data are listed as western Europe
Hello! Australia is a thing! We get around just as much as everyone else does, thank you very much! I’ve got the emu feathers to prove it!
I’m no mapologist, but I believe Austria is included in one of the Europe sections.
I didn’t know Hitler was from the land down under
he is strange and makes me nervous. i’m not eating his breakfast tho
I see you speak my language
Where women snore and men chunder?
You thought he’d be from Denmark like Hamlet?
Crickey mate, put another undesirable on the barby?
They’re called prawns. Hoges only said ‘shrimp’ at the time because the tourism board figured Americans wouldn’t know what prawns were. But, by God, you come here, you speak our language, dammit! Don’t make me get the man from Ironbark!
Australia
Austria
lmao
charts without New Zealand
Now do urban, suburban, exurban, rural splits.
I looked at it and the study is only considering cities. I wonder why whoever made the chart omitted Mexico since it is included in the original study?
The researchers for this study put together a neat data explorer at citiesmoving.com
deleted by creator
I think the Mexico data is really off, but at the same time I have seen several cities (like Culiacan, Mexicali, and Guadalajara) where the price for public transport has gone way up while making the service quality worse (fewer buses, fewer routes, no AC on summer)
so it would not surprise me if usage keeps going down over time
Weird to exclude mexico
Brother you realize you could have more than one sentence per comment right?
Why many when few do trick?
Did you see how many comments the top level commenter put out?
The cultural distinction between US+Canada and the rest of the Americas (usually called Latin America despite Jamaica), which is the divide they probably used, makes for more distinction in most metrics than the geographical division. Similarly, most polls about “Europeans” exclude Ukraine and Belarus, not to mention the Western parts of Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkey.
Link to article?
