Fuck Cars

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/3264067

From autumn 2025, drivers in Aarhus can travel for free by light rail and bus during rush hour if they park at the Park and Ride facility at Klokhøjen.

This is stated in a press release by Midttrafik, which together with Aarhus Municipality is behind the pilot trial.

The trial will test whether free travel by light rail can motivate more drivers to leave their cars and continue their journey by public transport, with the aim of reducing congestion and car traffic in the city centre.

Drivers can collect a free ticket via the Rejsebillet app at Klokhøjen. The trial will run until the end of 2026.

One step forward, one step backwards. Somehow, Denmark manages to make public transportation benefit only the people who need it the least.

For context, Water Street in Vancouver looks like it was taken straight out of Paris or Amsterdam. It's one of the oldest parts of the city and one of the few streets that were developed before cars. It should be an absolute no brainier to make it car free permanently, but carbrained North American city council gonna carbrain. This is less than the bare minimum and is absolutely not praiseworthy.

More importantly, they're proposing it to be car free on the day with the least transit service and what little there is randomly gets delayed or cancelled without notice. Great idea!

Seriously, as someone who exclusively uses transit in Vancouver, the weekend service is infuriating and basically unusable if you're under any sort of time pressure. You show up at a bus station, transit app says the next one is in 30 minutes when it would be 5-10 minutes on weekdays. So you resign yourself to a 30 minute wait only for the bus to not show up with zero announcements, even though they're pretty good at notifying you of these things on weekdays. So now you have to wait for the next one in an hour, which might not show up either, and when it does, it's packed to the brim because it's carrying three buses worth of passengers and the driver puts on the "sorry bus full" sign and refuses to let you on even when several people get off at the same stop. It's genuinely like they want you to drive on the weekend.

Calling it now: when car free Sundays inevitably flop because no one wants to bother with the shitty weekend transit, city council will go "see? car free streets never work!" And it will be used to shoot down every subsequent car free initiative. Wonder if that was their plan in the first place.

Alt text: "Photograph of a bench surrounded by cars in a public square that's actually a parking lot. Extremely visually displeasing. NSFW."

Source

I let my folks know that I'm getting rid of my drivers licence, because I don't plan on driving for at least the next 5 years.

My parents then said things like, "you're moving backwards in life", or "what will you do if you need to transport someone in an emergency?", to which I responded, "Taxi, or ambulance".

Am I a fool? Should I retain my licence for emergencies? I'm broke ATM, but should start working again soon, and my licence is expiring in a few weeks (and my wallet fell in a river a week ago, so I don't have the card anyways, not even kidding), so I'd rather not pay the $90 to keep it, if I don't have to.

What about you? Do you still keep a license handy for situations, or no? Is living car and license free possible in Canada?

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Alot of this is caused by people buying tall suvs because they need 3 rows for all their kids. Here is a dumb idea.

Bring back front facing 3rd row wagons. Front facing 3rd row wagons are rare, only offered by GM in the 70s but they were so popular.

Bring these back and tax SUVs by hood height. Families will buy wagons again.