Our children are victims of road violence. We need to talk about the deadly norms of car use
Our children are victims of road violence. We need to talk about the deadly norms of car use
We accept the daily toll of road deaths and injuries as the price we pay to be able to drive everywhere, but it doesn’t have to be this way.
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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:
- get the three year old ready for school (this can be ten minutes or an hour, so you better start getting ready an hour before you need to leave)
- walk to the bus stop (five minutes for me, but with a two year old... twenty minutes, not necessarily walking but you need to allow for that much time which means you'll spend a lot of it waiting at the bus stop)
- bus to daycare, 20 minutes as it winds through the suburbs
- drop the kid off at daycare, then wait for the next bus (30 minutes later)
- bus out of the suburbs onto the main bus line (another 20 minutes meandering through suburbs)
- finally, on the main bus line to the CBD (20 minutes)
- then 15 minutes waiting for a bus out of the CBD towards where I work
- then 15 minutes on that bus
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.
Would you support public transport improvements?
Of course I'd support better public transport.
But I'm not really sure what form that would take? The bus from my house to the childcare centre obviously drops us off there when the bus is scheduled to do so, which means I will always face the longest possible wait for the next bus to come by. It only takes two minutes to drop the kid off... but the bus driver isn't going to wait.
And it's pretty normal for public transport to not go to where you're going unless you're going to or from the CBD. That means changing busses.
I could live in the CBD... then transit infrastructure would be great - but the realestate there is way out of my reach, price wise.
how we can upgrade PT:
- higher bus frequency
- bus route reform (some current routes really suck)
- more bus lanes on congested routes
- more bike infrastructure so you don't have to ride a bus/car/train to get anywhere
The user here is a known car-brained troll. They have a long history of opposing better urban planning.
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Yeah I have no idea where that came from. For the record, I own two bicycles, use them frequently and my car use is limited to when there's at least two people or I need to transport something large/bulky, and I use public transport whenever it makes sense. Which, sadly, isn't very often.
Motorbike is my main form of transport... but taking a young child on a motorbike is illegal in Australia.
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Don't be sorry. They're a troll trying to play to your sympathies.
So, it turns out it's from a different user account, but with the same username, on a different instance. Given how specific the username part is, I would be shocked if it's not the same human being behind it.
But here's one thread where they've done it before. They deliberately insert themselves into conversations choosing to throw ridiculous straw men around in an attempt to pretend that car-brain is normal and good urban planning practices are absurd. Troll tactics, through and through.
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The Wiktionary definition isn’t bad.
First and foremost, car-brain refers to the individual expression of a sociological problem more formally known as "motornormativity". It’s the state of being unable to envision a world different from the one we currently live in, where everything gets designed around cars to the exclusion of more efficient forms of transport like public transportation and cycling. It’s an opposition to the idea of walkability in practice, if not necessarily in theory (someone might say they like walkability, but then oppose specific measures which would increase walkability, like zoning changes, increasing footpath width by decreasing road width, decreasing speed limits, and adding modal filters).
It’s also the tendency to blame "pERsoNaL rESPoNsibiLiTy" for traffic crashes, and disregard systemic issues that lead to increased chances of crashes occurring. But also to excuse the personal behaviours that cause the crash to happen in other circumstances, while being overly critical of non-drivers exhibiting the same behaviours. Any time you see someone say "cyclists ignore stop signs and run red lights!" That’s motornormativity, and the individual saying it is deeply car-brained. Especially if they do it in a context of talking about better cycling infrastructure or pro-cycling laws, as a way to imply "no, we shouldn’t make things better for cycling". Not only do studies suggest cyclists break the law at roughly the same rate as drivers (yet you never see these people complain about all the drivers who do it and suggesting that therefore we should make driving harder), we also know that when cyclists break the law, they’re far less likely to endanger others than drivers are; indeed, cyclists who break the law frequently do it to increase their own safety, while drivers break the law to increase their own convenience.
That’s only a small slice of how motornormativity presents in our society, but hopefully it’s a good enough primer. Here’s a pretty good article on the subject.
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Your list of barriers to not using a car are all a result of poor urban planning which is rife in the majority of our cities. If we had stopped the sprawl 30 years ago then car dependence could have been mitigated.
Guess I'm one of the lucky ones in that I can walk kids to school and daycare (less than 1km) then cycle to work easily (less than 10km).
Guess I’m one of the lucky ones in that I can walk kids to school and daycare (less than 1km) then cycle to work easily (less than 10km).
Yeah our local daycare centre isn't well run and unfortunately, so we had to go to the next suburb over. My partner and I don't work close to each other so... we live about half way between our two jobs. Can't really get any closer unless one of us switches careers. When I do have time to ride the bicycle to work (try to do it once a week) it's 70 minutes. Normally I take the motorbike.
Jesus Christ are you being deliberately obstinate here, or are you just that thick?
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
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
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.
They are arguing against a straw man so ridiculous it’s more of a small sad-looking pile of straw.
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.