semi serious question.
I stumbled onto my local metro area’s reddit while trying to look up some historical photos and stared into the abyss for a few mins.
I resisted the urge to leave libreddit and make an account just to reply but, I ran into this post that is basically complaining about having a car in one of the most central neighborhoods in the city, and asking for advice on getting off street parking (in reality, anything that isn’t an overpriced surface lot that offers no protection is going to be quite a hike away from their apartment, there’s no way this will work out).
They claim they work in X first ring suburb where “there are no buses” and that’s why they have to have this car, which is hilarious because they could one seat ride to half of that suburb in under half an hour from a bus that leaves from their front door. the other half it’d be a 2 seat ride but still under 45 mins, and obviously way cheaper than a car. There are also plenty of neighborhoods they could move to that would have less breakins and cheap off street parking, but they seem convinced that’s not the case.
But I digress.
The fellow 
ers in there commiserating about how horribly expensive off street parking is (in a neighborhood that is basically in downtown) got me thinking… If we can’t get city governments to do shit about on street parking and massively unsafe roads, is allowing the street to be so unappealing to park on that people have to actually pay for their giant waste of precious urban land, a viable option to improve things?
this expectation that you should be able to just leave your 2 ton death box lying around in public anywhere for any length of time and nobody will so much as touch it doesn’t apply to any other kind of property (just look at bike theft), and it really fucks with people when you violate that. I feel like that’s a usable weapon, in a way, against gentrification and car dependency and traffic violence.
Were kia boys doing praxis?
AFAIK, you can drive without a cat… it just hurts everyone around you. So its not even that much of an inconvenience. Like, it would take something like expecting to have your car towed once a month due to damages while you were away to make people thing “I don’t want to deal with the headache of having a care”. Bike theft certainly is cited by many as the reason they won’t commute by bike. Probably not because cheap bikes are expensive to replace (even replacing one for $200 every single week would be cheaper than what many people spend on cars in the US each year), but because not knowing if you will have a ride home from work each day probably sucks. If driving was like that, people would certainly reconsider driving.
This is true. My catalytic converter was stolen a few years back and I drove on it 2-3 times (when I realized it was gone and when I took it to a friend’s garage to repair. In the intervening 6 months I just bused/biked.)
You are more likely to be harassed by the police for your loud exhaust (they don’t give a shit about the cat in most of the US) but in most places they don’t seem to care even about the noise unless its an excuse to
I still harbor some affection for the idea of a mass campaign of deflating SUV tires but honestly its lib shit and wouldn’t work
Deflating just means people spend $50 on a tool to conveniently air up their tires if it became super wide spread. Probably better to use that energy to do tactical urbanism to make the environment more friendly towards alternatives and less friendly towards oversized vehicles.
you can physically remove the valve core as well, or slash the tire, neither of which are going to be as easily solved, but yeah.
I’d love to see some practical examples of tactical urbanism that aren’t just cutesy BS that does nothing (not accusing it of all being like that I just wish it were posted about more!)