What do we do about car culture?
Nov 21st 2023
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I think a lot about car culture and how much it seems to just wreck
our cities, wreck our environment, wreck our lives.

I'm extra salty about it tonight because I almost got hit by a car,
again, on my way to work. It was the classic dangerous situation. My
guard was slightly down because I had a walk light and no cars who
would be taking right turns were planning to take right turns but
suddenly a car who was turning left *went for it* in a slight gap in
traffic and, well, I managed to just barely jump back. And I mean
barely. Maybe by an inch if I'm being generous.

But it's not just moments like tonight. It's the way I notice how much
of our space is roads, how hard it is to get anywhere because everyone
assumes you drive rather than walk or take transit, how constantly
unsafe we all are when we walk or bike. It's the way I notice the
ghost bikes, bicycles painted all white and tied to telephone poles to
commemorate a biker who was killed at that intersection.

I think about how much waste it all is and I feel helpless because
it's one of those societal structures that I feel like we're very
locked into and only a handful of people even see a problem with.

So, yeah, what do we do about it? Because I can't even imagine how we
get anywhere good from here.