Americans can’t afford their cars any more and Wall Street is worried
If only we had invented and built some sort of alternative mode of collective transportation. Maybe it could be in tunnels and ride on metallic rails. It would serve many people and make periodic stops to the same locations instead of the highway clusterf- we have today. Sad that we don't, but a man can dream though. A man can dream.
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Reported as not really being politics, and I could see it as being more [email protected] or even [email protected]
But pocket book issues like this impact politics.
"It's the economy, stupid!" and all that.
Everything is politics.
https://www.espn.com/nfl/scoreboard
Ok, except for sportsball
Politics underpins finance at every level
https://xkcd.com/435/
I feel most of the mod decisions are arbitrary, but there's also a good reason we don't all just post everything in an "everything" com.
Yern idiot
I didn't report it, I'm stating it WAS reported and the reason why.
My post explains why I didn't remove it. 😉
It's good to have a forum to discuss the issue from a political angle. You can wedge politics into everything if you try hard enough but then for other stories, you don't really have to try at all. This one seems like the latter.
Nothing like a great self-referential comment
Just stop importing avocados and toast
No! Only import avocados and toast.
From Argentina
Why not just finance the unaffordable cars for 10-15 years? That'll solve the problem.
And ensure they catastrophically fail around year 6 or 7
The slow wither approach.
WHAT??? HOW WOULD THAT POSSIBLY HE----oh. I see what you did there. I ate the lemon.
maybe if dealers would actually tell you the price of the car instead of spinniing it as a monthly expense
Yes, but how can that poor salesman possibly get you into the most expensive car for the longest terms that way? They've got a commission to max out!
There is a dealership local to me that pays their sales staff annual salaries with benefits rather than working on commission. It’s the only place anybody in my family will buy a car now.
America had a public rail system already...
We nationalized rail during WW1, and then after giving it back they all went broke in the 60s
So then Amtrak was created (there's a push to privatize it right now) and when that was going to put private rail out of business, Jimmy Carter de-regulated rail so private companies could cut corners and not be replaced nationwide by Amtrak
We'll never get nationalized rail on a good scale with neoliberals, they'll never fix any problem where money is involved, because they'll take the offered money to change their minds.
Uh oh
Woah
I'll tell you what though, I'm glad I have a paid off car.
About to buy one, but old and easy to fix. And cash lol.
How do I Michael Bury the auto loans? 👀
Are the millennials killing car ownership!?
Boomers told me millennials kill everything. Which by its own nature means millennials killed killing everything.
But that means they also killed killing killing everything
Not long ago I could buy a used van for 5000. Now I had to pay like 13k for a used one after our typical accident caused by another person had an insurance that wouldn't pay up.
That's such a shit business going around telling people they're covered but then in the end not actually covering anything. I get it cars depreciate.... Well great, why doesn't my insurance premium deprecate? I would gladly maintain the same level of payment if it means my car will be replaced. Similarly, if they won't actually replace my car, they should just tell me..you're going to need $5000 to make up the difference if you get into accident.
Buying a new vehicle hasn't made sense for about 30 years now.
I've been driving for about 30 years and in all that time, I've never owned a new vehicle. I kept buying used vehicles for about $2,000 - $3,000 per vehicle. The oldest one I've ever had is a 2004 Volvo station wagon and I still maintain it and it's still running as one of my main vehicles. My other main vehicle is a 2010 GMC Truck which I also maintain. They don't look new, they show a bit of rust around the edges, but they are still very good vehicles that will last several more years.
Once they break down enough ... I'll buy another used vehicle. In all, over the past 30 years, I've spent about $30,000 on multiple vehicles (I think I've gone through 8 or 9 in that time).
It has never made sense to me to buy a brand new $40,000 car that will only be used for about five years before you buy the next one.
That's going to become more and more difficult to do over time.
Cars are being designed to be difficult to repair and to fall apart in less and less time.
I agree ... I think the cutoff is about 2010-2015 vintage vehicles. I like Volvo cars and station wagons, they are literal workhorses that were designed by a Swedish company for winter use. And in that vintage, it is just at the peak when the company was still producing good vehicles and just before the point where they were heavily Americanized, then taken over by Chinese interests. The vehicles are still produced in Europe (I think) but of a lesser quality because the company got taken over by foreign interests. And like all manufacturers, they are moving away from the piston engine technology and transitioning to all electric.
Yes it is inevitable that everything will move away from old piston engines ... but I think it will all last another 20-30 years before it all becomes impossible or way too expensive for anyone to maintain their old clunkers after that.
To be fair by 2010 they'd been owned by Ford for a decade and then in 2010 were sold to Geely, the Chinese parent company. From everything I hear, the quality actually has gone up under Geely, compared to Ford, which was easily the worst era of Volvo. Personally I still like RWD Volvo bricks, but of course they're not as safe or efficient as modern cars.
No, cars are designed to be easy to manufacture. Which makes them difficult to repair. As someone who has designed and built machines, you need to understand that there is a big difference between easy to manufacture and easy to repair.
Look, I'll go out there and say it.
Cars are just an afterthought on the heater core. That's why it's called the heater CORE and also why you need to disassemble half the damn car to get to it.
I'd really like to know where you are buying 15 year old GMC trucks for $2000-$3000 that presumably run and aren't beat to shit.
I bought it when it was ten years old and from a friend of a friend who was selling it privately. The only real way to grab a good vehicle is if you know of someone who had a vehicle from new. It's just constant searching and luck that one is able to find vehicles like this. The guy I bought it from had it from new and took care of it and by the time I got it, it had minimal rust. He knew the truck's life was limited which is why he wanted to get rid of it. As soon as I took hold of it, the rust started growing on the damned thing and I've been fighting to keep it going and away from any further rust as possible. The engine and transmission are good and will last a very long time, its just the rest of the truck, especially everything from the wheel wells down (minus the engine and transmission) that will fall apart first.
Speak for yourself.
I have purchased multiple new cars over the last 25 years, and, while they’re more expensive than a used car (although that difference is shinking all the time), I also run them for years because I can keep up with maintenance. My last new car was bought 14 years ago and is pretty much still new condition. I still even have the plastic film over the climate control screen.
I don’t care about depreciation or resale values.
EDIT: Punctuation.
This is how we know this guy is a bot, alien, psychopath or monster.
HOW THE FUCK HAVENT YOU PULLED THAT OFF?!?!?!?!?!?
Ha! 112k miles and still sticking. At this point, it’s like a streak milestone so I’m just seeing how long it goes and curious what the dealership reaction will be if I ever trade it in. Thus far no one in the service department has ever commented on it.
Would you peel it before you sell it if you ever sell it?
Like you could show it to them and peel it off...
Ooh. That’s a good question. Or do I leave it so they can put it as a feature on the car’s listing? :D
Demand an extra $3k for pristine screen with the oldest most satisfying peel off you would ever experience. Feel the 200k miles as you slowly pull it off, or let it grow to 300k for even more vintage plastic value!
You could have bought yourself a 1 year old used car and saved yourself thousands for the same outcome
That's what I did, less than half the price for a car with 10k on the odometer
Maybe. Or I could be driving a one year old lease repo that the dealer pinky promises is good as new. I’d rather actually buy new and get the warranties and protections that come with it. Thankfully thus far, I have been in the financial position to be able to do so. I’m beyond the point in my life where I want to be driving the $600 K-car to save cash. Everyone has something that they think spending the extra money is worth it, for me, it’s having a nice car that lasts.
Plus, without people like me buying new stuff, you wouldn’t have those one year old cars to buy in the first place.
See, this is where your stupidity and ignorance shines. Used cars can and do last. It's not even a gamble if you go to a reputable dealer.
The insults are not necessary. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I could make the same argument as you about someone spending a bunch of money on a new top shelf gaming rig instead of buying used parts on eBay.
I didn’t say used cars didn’t or can’t last. I’ve driven plenty of vehicles in my life and know how to maintain them. I’d like to buy the exact car I want, know I’ve been the only driver, and know it’s full service history and drive style over the entire life of the car, which as I said, I keep for many years. And for me, that’s worth the premium to buy new.
If you’d like to continue to buy used, have at it.
Yeah, he's an idiot.
Don't take financial advice from people who buy new cars.
You better hope there are plenty of people like him. Without someone buying new cars, there would be no used ones for you to buy.
I can say this proudly because I live in northern Ontario which basically salts our vehicles for about six months of the year. We might as well live on an ocean coast, we have so much salt on our highways. I do my own undercoating every year (it's a real pain) and I put it on thick and in every nook and cranny. The work that I do just delays the rust, it doesn't prevent it because there is just too much salt up here. Mix into that ice and snow and all that stuff just cakes on, falls off, takes away the coating, exposed metal, more salt and repeat all winter long. I'm lucky if I can hold onto a vehicle longer than ten years up here.
I’m in Minnesota and we use salt also, although in recent years it’s been a lot more brine and pre-treatments before it snows rather than just dumping rock salt out like they used to, which has helped. Used to see rust in wheel wells and such all the time, but it’s much more rare these days.
I've never seen people more mad that a stranger paid a few thousand extra amortized over 14 years.
You're an actual dumbass. New cars lose 20% of their value the moment you drive it off the lot.
Clearly. You'd rather get ripped off by the dealership.
How about you get some life experience and try buying and maintaining a used car? Then you can see for yourself how stupid your assumptions are.
If you buy a piece of equipment new and keep it for the expected lifespan of the machine, then you get to 'keep' the depreciation. Depreciation only matters if you plan on replacing the machine BEFORE the end of use life. And with things like cars, people often get rid of them long before the use life span is reached. And it's at that moment that the depreciation is a problem. I too, find it doubtful that hydrashock has kept multiple new cars long enough to personally use up the depreciation value of any one of those cars.
Example: That shiny new iPhone you bought took a depreciation hit the moment you paid for it. And when you trade it off when the next new model comes out you pay the cost of that depreciation through the trade in value. Had you kept your phone until it no longer worked before you replaced it, you would have recouped the cost of depreciation.
I dunno. I bought a Honda new twice. Once showed up on the city bus and negotiated them down to a nothing down & low monthly payment that I could manage for 5 years (I am an accountant and first built a spreadsheet with present value calculations to figure out my target price) car is built to last 20 at least, I paid it off easily enough, then someone ran a stop sign and absolutely smashed it to bits, I took the insurance money as a down payment and got a better car new, same low monthly, paid that off years ago and have been driving it since 2014. This was mostly possible because Honda did a zero or 1% loan both times. Used to buy beaters but this has been so much nicer, and it's easier on cash flow. I hope I can keep this one for as long as I need a car (mostly use the electric bike now) because it has all the tech I want but none of the tech I don't want. Like at this point if I won the lottery I still don't know if I'd want a car of today.
New car at today's prices, and what they are, I kind of agree with you but used cars at today's prices seem just as bad of a deal. And it was not always like this. You used to be able to negotiate, they had too much inventory.
I used to think like you, but then my time became worth money. It's no longer such a clear cut case.
If I spent even 100 hours a year working on my car, that's now several thousand euros. More than a year's worth of lease payments on a brand new budget vehicle or (and this is my preference) a 3 year old executive car. And at the end of the lease I have the option to buy it for what's likely significantly under market value and then either keep driving it, or sell it immediately to recoup some of the depreciation.
Then consider that with the new vehicle you can get full coverage insurance which isn't even available on a 20 year old vehicle (and full coverage gives you peace of mind that if YOU fuck up or an animal fucks your car up, you get the residual value back). This occurred to me when my friend's old, around 1000 euros worth car slipped into a ditch in the winter. Its value just dropped by half and there's nothing to do about it. If it'd been their significantly newer car, it would've been a 350 euro copay to get it repaired or totalled and paid out. My car at the time was worth around 3k and if I'd totaled it by either driving into a ditch in the winter or hit a moose, I would've been out of a car and out of money. My next car after that was a lease and if something would've happened to it, insurance would've made me whole. In fact I got a brand new OEM Mercedes windscreen fitted for free, no copay since it's usually 0% for windows. That alone was worth over a year of insurance payments.
Currently I'm back to driving a shitbox. Nice car attracted gold digger, gold digger ruined finances, now I'm living as cheaply as possible. But the shitbox life is not great either - I'm going to have to either change the transmission on mine to keep it going another few years, or sell it for a loss compared to what I paid for it just 5 months ago. This is after I've already done brakes, belts and some electrical work. Sunk cost fallacy becomes way too real way too quickly on cheap used cars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
You're a smart person and can probably manage your money better than most Americans swept up in consumerist hysteria.
The problem is, most people bitching about "not having enough money" will say that the decisions you made are "not good enough" for them. They believe they are entitled to more before others who have less so they can give that excess to the people ripping them off.
And if you say anything about it, you're the bad guy.
Yeah, a lot of those shiny trucks and SUVs are bought on credit by people who really can't afford them and don't need a vehicle like that anyway.
Yeah, my current car is an almost 20 year old Mercedes c class, bought it a couple of years ago for 3k. Some of those cars that used to be at the upper end of the price range are pretty affordable when they get older. Mine had a good dealership service history, it's given me very little trouble, and it's great to have a nice car. I can't imagine wanting to buy anything new, even if I could afford to.
My 2003 E-Class remains the best car I've ever owned, except for one annoying fault that kept coming back with reman parts and new part availability was shit - the steering rack. I do fully believe I just had bad luck with the reman units personally, but it made me sell the car. It had almost 400k km on it at the time and still drove beautifully. Of course I replaced some ball joints and two lower control arms and a few other things... But that's natural.
Once living in your car became a viable housing alternative, they had to take that away, too.
Wait until they figure out we need food to live.
They already have. Why do you think grocery prices have been a major political talking point? Since most people don't have enough money to buy property where they can grow/raise their own food, and many municipalities explicitly ban the raising of animals to "protect" the agriculture industry, most people are stuck. Your only option is the monopolistic grocery chains.
Do you know what Henry Ford himself did?
Increased the wages so his own workers would buy his cars...
Henry Ford was a capitalist, racist, eugenicist asshole, but he had one thing the current capitalist, racist, eugencist assholes in power today don't: long term economic planning.
It's literally just supply side economics. If you have the power to increase the buying power of your customers, your customers can and will spend more money. Also more free time means people will want to spend more money on things to do and things to own, meanwhile if they're stuck spending 60-80 hours a week purely focused on work they'll be too tired to want anything other than food in their belly and a bed to sleep in
And gave them more time off to use them. He wasn't any humanitarian paragon, just a good capitalist.
A capitalist with a longer time horizon than next quarter
Right, a capitalist. What we have now is something else, something demented, rotten. The wealthy are aware of that, maybe not that they caused it, but they pay smart people to manage their money and it must be obvious that a myopic business strategy is preferable to a long term one. Workers aren't assets anymore. Ford might have been a shithead, but he understood the vitality of low turnover to a successful long term company. My grandfathers brother worked for Sikorsky his entire life, started turning a single bolt and retired from the executive suite. But his generation was among the last to be that lucky. There is a barrier between labor and management, it used to be a college degree, now it seems to be a PhD or a Masters. Which is just a different representation of money because education is wildly overpriced. There are obviously exceptions, but it's rare to find large companies that still promote from within, especially from the floor to a desk.
Not sure we should celebrate that man, but the idea
Fake News. All my homies can’t wait to go sixty goddamn thousand dollars in debt to by a house-sized . . I wanna say . . truck?
Me though, been pulling extra shifts - got my eye on that $90,000 volvo EV. Mmmm! You basically can’t afford NOT to buy it!
If I had the money lying around I'd totally buy a midlife crisis car. A v8, automatic coupe style with a real healthy rumble to it. I drive less than 3k miles/year, and barely travel far enough to make the lowest end of the fuel efficiency range. You know the kind of car that says "yeah this car is for fun, and that dude is probably not alright".
But I have class so at minimum I'm looking at burning $60k on like a used Lexus RC F.
Like come the fuck on you know? Even if I ponied up "half" that cost, the 5 year loan runs $700/mo. $700. Who the absolute fuck has a monthly extra $700 just sitting there right now AND that mystery $30k I mentioned.
Are people just not able to math?
No, they are not. That’s why a significant number of students fail math classes. The number of children who cannot even perform basic 7th-grade math is shockingly high. Then, they discover that they will pass even if they fail, so they relax and blame the teachers when their parents see their grades.
The average American car payment right now is like $670 per month. Its truly absurd. Its no surprise that people are drowning when you look at what theyre paying to have this or that.
Even more shocking is the amount of people buying their next car while still underwater on the first one. A large number of people are rolling $10k of prior vehicle debt into the purchase of a vehicle, driving up their monthly even further
You have gotta be shitting me.
I thought I was being unreasonable for playing around with the idea should I figure out a way to save up the $30k for a midlife crisis car.
And here people are already paying that premium while in debt with another vehicle. So they roll over the debt. Now, I'm not exactly sure why the people bought a new rolling death machine, but it sounds a lot like a significant lack of reason.
He’s not. I bought a Subaru with an 820 credit score and still couldn’t get less than like a 6% APR through my own shopping and dealer even looking. This was a year ago. My payments are in the 500 range though.
Thankfully my other car is paid off and we’re in a position to afford the Subaru without issue. It’s become my wife’s daily while I drive the paid off Hyundai.
Don’t forget about insurance and property tax. The monthly payment isn’t all you have to spend.
Registration fees too.
My wife and I are saving for a "down payment" for our next vehicle. I've got about $10k saved but I really need at least $20k down to make the payment manageable. I should be buying outright with $20, but here we are.
Trump is bankrupting Americans and America so they can install a technocratic dictatorship
Why do we only blame trump?
There's bi-partisan support for making sure China can't sell its EVs in the US, even though they cost $15k and have 300km range.
Meanwhile we have dumbasses buying teslas saying "they didn't get ripped off."
Of course part of the reason those Chinese EVs only cost 15k is because China heavily subsidized their EV market. Basically they did what the Americans and Europeans didn't have the guts to do and poured boatloads of government money into a brand new sector to give their companies a leg up while they ramped up. Guess what's going to happen next?
These companies have all of the knowledge that making multiple generations of EVs brings you, they have all of the tooling already, they can now start expanding into more markets and start making it really difficult for competition to compete because the competition put in only the effort that they had the financial incentive to put into EVs and therefore they're not ready to compete at all. The rest of the world basically ceded this entire industry to China because politicians were too heavily bought and paid for by the oil companies to do more than a pittance, and now the auto market is about to be heavily shaken up
Sure. An eroded economy. Stagnant wages for many long with decreasing buying power. Price hikes thanks to tariffs, increasing insurance costs, rising subscription costs, etc. Cars bought at inflated prices and high interest for extended payment schedules during the covid price gouging, and just generally way too expensive these days anyway, are all draining bank accounts far more quickly than ever.
Bet any repos don’t go back on lots for resale, they’ll park them in the desert somewhere just to prop up scarcity and new car prices.
Can't we have affordable repairable cars AND reliable public transport? That would sure be nice.
Many places in America at least are just too spread out. But we dont need a super mega duper feed f teenthousand to drive around. Shit like the Slate would be amazing if it could exist (I realize bezos funded it. Still doesn't keep it from being a bad idea).
Thats why I will argue old cars were undeniably better. You could actually repair them and they weren't rolling spyware with a subscription.
1990 to about 2014 is the perfect spot for cars. Before that is archaic for most people (i prefer 80s cars myself) and newer than that its just a corpo bot on wheels.
Good luck finding parts from the 80s though besides pickup trucks since I still lots of those from that era on the road still
Oh there's a lot of parts for American 80s cars around. And their crude enough you can fab most things to work fine or just get aftermarket if you need to.
Just bring lots of money for gas.
Also, Obama trashed most pre 2000s cars, so Detroit bailouts would work.
Yeah that whole thing really pissed me off. Tons and tons of great old cars destroyed. Further helping the rich and fucking over the poor.
Might I suggest Open Source Repairable Electric Cars, Trains, Trams, Bikes, Bike-Cars, Walking Bikes, Boats, and VTOL's those would be awesome to get open source alternatives for
Slate EV is open. But watch, no one will buy them.
The name of my local mall is prefaced by "Cadillac Fairview (CF)". Cars have been overpriced for a long time now and the auto industry is investing in real estate. I think they may price themselves out of customers, just like the theater chains but at least they'll get a bailout.
CF has no relation to Cadillac the car company. Fun fact, it's parent company is the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan
I learned something new today.
Your point about it being a cash-flush industry stands though, a huge chunk of the rich families around come from dealerships. Realtors (another high margin sales job) are smarter about hiding their money from their client base, a lot of them take trips constantly and buy secluded homes. Dealership families building mansions on acres of lawn, visible from the main roads, like castles. Not a smart choice but we'll see how that plays out.
Damn I wish theaters had priced themselves out yet people are still out here paying like $20+pp for a movie ticket. It wasn't even ten years ago I could go to a second run cinema and get tickets for $2 :(
This got 15 up votes?
The new corporate objective is to have everyone die penniless, with no inheritance for their children.
Except for the wealthy, of course. They know how to handle money responsibly, by investing it properly, and not blowing every last penny on fleeting pleasures like food, housing, and transportation.
Awww. Theyre still not gonna make them one cent less expensive
Don't forget proper bike infrastructure, trams, subway, busses. Like in most European countries. You'll end up with smaller roads, lower speeds, less accidents, cleaner air, faster transportation, less car parks so more room for development of huises, more jobs, less waste. Or you could widen the roads, remove sidewalks and force people to drive cars on a road crowded with massive trucks which will crush you like a tank when hit. Hard choice.
Sure but one of the problems is North American cities are to sprawled out.
Our cities are fine, they're just governed by shitheads. It's the spaces in between that are the hurdle.
So? Let's compare just one American city to the Netherlands, the entire country. Because an American city isn't bigger then our entire country.
I live in the centre, in Utrecht. I can take a train to Groningen or Maastricht, the 2 cities furthest away from where I live. I can bring my ebike on the train or take a public transit bike (so rental) at the station I arrive. Or I take the bus for the final part. Or when I go to Amsterdam, I take the subway and/or tram. Or when I go to a rural area, I take the strain, then bus or bike. Within 2 hours I can reach any city in my country with public transportation or 3.5 hours for any rural location. I can reach any part of Berlin in 7 hours. This is on the other side of Germany.
It's the layers of public transportation which solves issues of being sprawled out or super dense. Sprawled out? Faster transportation, like trains, bus and subway. Super dense? Tram, bus, bike.
I understand many Americans don't see it as a solution, as they have busses, trains and subways. But these networks are poorly planned. New York for example, all metro lines run to the centre making travel between suburbs a living hell. They have taxis, awesome, but they clutter the already cluttered streets even more. It's so dumb.
See these videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zysL_lkdtys on the design of Tokyo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP-G-inkkDg on the design of The Netherlands
You might say "but it's impossible to change our cities to public transit heavy, walking and cycling friendly cities, we're too far down the drain!". No. You're not. We designed Rotterdam, one of our largest cities, as an American city completely focused on cars (after it was wiped from the earth during the Second World War bombing by the nazis). It was shit. They changed the entire city to car unfriendly with the focus on walking and cycling, with public transit to support that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22ovt1EMULY
That's one of the amazing things about ebikes is they make the sprawl so much more manageable!
Sure commuting 10 miles by ebike (probably about an hour commute or noticably less if you go faster than the 10mph average of an accoustic bike) isn't as nice as commuting 2-3 miles by ebike (about 15 minutes commute time at 10mph), but chances are you're already commuting between 30-60 minutes by car depending on traffic so what's making that a consistent 45-60 minute commute with no meaningful traffic jams and wonderful fresh air and sunlight?
Some city folks are just as disconnected from the real world as the morons that insisted they need a f350 super duty to run to Costco.
You're gonna take your spouse and kids on that ebike? You're gonna do grocery shopping for a family on it? You're gonna ride an hour in the rain or intense sun?
You cannot manage the American urban/suburban sprawl with an ebike. Maybe you can, but the average family cannot.
That's when you attack a wagon to the back and make sure the ebike has enough power to move all that
To be serious though a bikecar would be better. Plenty of those but we need more affordable options
Actually I live in a town of about 10,000 surrounded by farm communities so I don't think most people would say I live in a city. I did grow up in a much larger city, and I've visited plenty of cities with hundreds of thousands or millions of people in them, but I'm definitely not a "city folk"
Heck I literally have to drive to the next state for some of my less frequent houseware purchases because that's where the closest place to buy that stuff is
I do all of my school pickups and dropoffs by bike. I hook a trailer up that the kids ride in. The trailer was $20 at a garage sale and required a $7 standard hitch that I ordered online (said trailers are sold for about $100-200 on Amazon new too) my oldest is getting a little big for the trailer so I think next season we'll upgrade to a trailercycle for her and hook the trailer up to that.
My weekly grocery shopping for my family of 4 is about 3 paper bags worth, or two reusable bags worth. Plastic bags always make the amount of groceries one buys look like way more than it is, but I worked in a grocery store for several years as a teenager and learned how to really heavily pack paper bags, and cloth bags you can fit even more into per bag.
You can get gigantic paniers that will hold that quantity of food, or again, use a trailer that you hook up for grocery runs
Personally, I love biking to replace car trips, but in the current American landscape it's most realistic to bike as a compliment to driving. We've been a one car family for about 1/4 of the time we've had kids thanks to biking, and most of the time we haven't been a one car family has been due to job changes requiring 40+ mile commutes
So riding in the rain or intense sun? Yeah I do it pretty regularly, but I fully respect folks who decide that's the day they'll drive
If you were talking about an accoustic bike I'd agree. I'm a crazy person and I've been enjoying seeing what my body can do with enough training, so I've been pushing my limits on my accoustic bike, but ebikes are absolutely game changer since they flatten the hills (I live in an extremely hilly area. My school route literally starts with a 100 foot climb!) and allow for one to not work as hard or at all if they're sick, too hot or otherwise just don't feel like putting in as much effort that day
But most importantly more folks should try bikes because they're freaking fun!
Any ebikes you would recommend?
Personally I'm thinking of getting a walking bike instead
You mean there is a flaw in the capitalistic idea of infinite profit growth. I am shocked.
Anyone got a non paywall link.
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How much do you use the train? I spent 8 years without a car, and let me tell you this, getting that 4 to 5 hours back that I was wasting on the bus, commuting, shopping, going to entertainment, Eric, that's something I don't ever want to do again. Bus and train combo with a bike still was hours to do a commute that takes maybe 30 minutes by car.
That's not really an inherent problem to buses or trains, but rather a problem with poor implementations of them. Build out mass transit and fund it properly, and they largely go away. At rush hour, I have 3 different train options that would get me from my neighborhood to the city center faster than I could by car, and cheaper on top of it.
If we keep on saying, "Well, it's not good enough now, so forget about it," we'll just be having this conversation again in a few years, lamenting the fact that we didn't take the chance to build out now, but probably with more people having even more cars.
Well, Shaun, lemme tell ya; I didn't mind the 4 to 5 hours a week I spent on the train or the bus. Partly, because sometimes I got to meet genuinely lovely and hilarious strangers, and even make friends with people I never would have met otherwise. Or help people that needed help, being in the right place at the right time. I kinda miss that, having chances at being a kind stranger.
And you know, there is the savings to consider. Not having to spend the extra 30 hours at a job I hate to pay for an $800 expense I don't need was worth the extra commute time, in my opinion. All that extra free time that I wasn't driving or working to afford driving, I could use to read books. Or write books.
Beyond that, it was nice to have the cheapest and most freeing exercise I'd get. That's more money I didn't spend on a gym membership, owning a bicycle and taking it to visit my friends or getting groceries. And when the weather got bad and I needed a car, I'd just call a taxi. Or set up a carpool with a coworker, offer to pay for gas. It was still cheaper than owning a car. It was nice to have a chance to make friends with my coworkers too.
How much effort did it take to plan my entire life around the logistics of taking my bike/the bus/the train? About as much effort as it did planning my life around owning a car.
The only time I ever needed a car, Shaun, was when I lived in the middle of nowhere and there was no public transit. Because the local government designed the infrastructure that way.
Well I don't know where you getting the name Shaun. But when I say 4 to 5 hours I don't mean 4 to 5 hours a week I mean 4 to 5 hours a day. I would get up and on the bus by 3:30 in the morning to be to work by 6:15 I would then get off work and I wouldn't be home until sometimes 5:00 or 6:00 at night and if there were a delay could be as late as 7:00 at night. I too had great experiences with people I met on the bus I'm at a lot of great people I took homeless people out to eat I became friends with quite a few people the bus drivers hell my next door neighbor that ended up moving in I knew him because he was a bus driver before he moved in. However there is a limit to how much we need to be able to do.
I dunno, you called the other guy Eric, so I thought 'Well, alright, if we're doing the naming-strangers-on-the-internet bit, I guess I'll call you Shaun.' No harm or offense meant, friend. There were places I lived where the bus infrastructure was legitimately that bad. I remember the 3 hour rides to work too. -_-; Those were awful. I spent months camped out at the city planner's office begging for extra service on my route after I quit that job and got one closer. No dice, sadly.
This is my absolute most favorite post comment and can relate to all that fully
My truck is 25 years old 139k miles and runs great. It will probably last another 80-100k and we just paid off my wife's car. We have no intention of taking on debt for a new vehicle unless it's necessary.
I'm round 250k miles on my car (admittedly, not American so it's actually a bit over 400k km) and it's not even the most kilometers I've had on a car.
Buy something with an engine and transmission that are known to last that doesn't have known rust issues, take care of it, and it will take care of you. You of course seem to have realized it already.
Ohhh there are so many options here!
The app is often more important than the adapter at this point. Some marques have bad 3rd party app support unfortunately (looking at you, Subaru). Others have pretty great support (BimmerLink is adapter-agnostic, though they recommend using a high quality one and they have an affiliate deal of some kind with one manufacturer they recommend)
Personally I own a Chinese fake VCDS cable for <20 euros that allows me to do literal magic on anything VW, Audi, SEAT, Škoda... and could probably do a few things on modern Lamborghini and Bentley as well. Mysteriously, Porsche is the least supported out of all the VAG marques - they insist on having their own electronics. If I ever buy another VAG car, I'll probably buy a genuine adapter to support the company behind it. I also own a Chinese fake Delphi DS150E clone, but at this point I don't think it's as great as it was 5-6 years ago. It doesn't get cars newer than 2013. Plus it's still missing some crucial things on some cars between 2000 and 2013. And outright missing some models.
Then there's options like iCarsoft. More expensive than just an adapter and an app, but you get pretty great support for a lot of different marques. A lot more than some cheaper generic options.
And finally, marque-specific solutions. BimmerLink and VCDS I already mentioned, then there's GAP for Land Rover, etc. Worth investing in if you've got a car you're going to keep for a long time and want to be sure you can do stuff like air suspension ride height sensor calibration and all kinds of other procedures that generic tools might not have for your vehicle.
Just got my timing belt done, hoping to get to do it again at 200k miles
Yeah, why can't these people just pull themselves up by their bootstraps like you?
That's the funny thing about it all: the ruling class couldn't give less of a shit about the wellbeing of the people. But they care about their companies' revenue, and that is threatened if people have no money to spend. That is why we need Universal Basic Income in the near future.
UBI is a great idea, but it allows people to take risks. Including the risk of forming a union, protesting in a larger way and so forth. That sort of happened with the Hippies in the US. It was easy to get a job, so people used that to earn some money, quit and enjoy themself for a longer period.
That is why the social safety net is as crappy as it is. Fear is the only way to keep the general population in line.
I shopped around for like 3 months before I finally found a car in my budget, and it was 600 miles away
My car needed more repairs than it was worth so I sold it and banked the cash.
I know what I want for my next car but it technically doesn't exist yet. They're still building the factory for it. 😟
https://www.scoutmotors.com/traveler
I wouldn't buy that just based off their fucking terrible website design
that shit's basically unusable, can't even scroll through it on mobile
also wow another crossover, what's so special about this one? I'm only asking because the website wouldn't fucking tell me without flashing all sorts of shit at me
*oh wait that's actually an SUV, body on frame
Anybody notice how the video that plays after you scroll down is AI?
I mean, they literally only have a couple of prototypes right now. Very little of it is actually "real" at this point.
They let Leno drive one.
https://youtu.be/KJbBCAVhXuc
Lord Bezos appreciates your sacrifice
What if Wall Street failed and collapsed? I feel like that would be good
Every time they face consequences for their actions, we are robbed to save them, so be careful what you wish for
Maybe we should stop passively watching them commit crimes. French style revolution is the only solution.
For every 1% increase in unemployment, 40,000 people die.
Makes sense. https://www.lisep.org/tru
The status quo of poverty caused by wealth inequality results in around 183,000 deaths every year.
https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2023/04/17/poverty-4th-greatest-cause-us-deaths
t.b.f the reporting is more about whether these companies have hidden loans (including possibly loans that other lenders don't know about), which could have happened within railway companies just as easily as in car companies!
So happy mine are paid off.
can we make city streets public transportation only and resort personal vehicles to the outer parts? Like we dont got trolleys going down our cities' broad streets/broadways these days, but lets get a shitton of busses goin up and down with no worry of joe in his civic.
This is not a singular issue. That’s still millions who prefer the US to be car centric, and they fight to keep it that way. Just move to Europe
Public transport in the U.S is tricky. Half of the population probably is rural, and the U.S is very spread out which greatly increases the costs. American cities were also just built around cars. The car was like the most American invention ever for a long time outside of the firearm which made everyone equal in a way. Cars were sort of the thing Americans liked because it represented autonomy and freedom to people who were mostly stuck living with other people, and Americans traditionally being the most liberal, but also innovative culture, tended to butt heads a lot and needed personal space.
European cities were built in a time when people walked mostly, and are laid out to be compact and narrow. The entire EU is like the size of the U.S maybe even less. The population is much more urban. They have urban zoning, so you have houses mixed in with shops and industry where in the U.S you have HOAs, suburbs, parking lots, and dozen of miles of flat and sparsely populated cities with distances of hundreds of miles between large urban areas. Americans are also obsessed with material things and want to work long hours so traveling for work is harder.
Trump being dumb, wants to force Americans to buy shitty American cars. There is a reason nobody buys them, they are junk. They break, are a ripoff, they drink gas, even the small cars. They are slow and dangerous, and likely won't even last until they are paid off.
Without cars, many people have become desolate. Entire families have been made barren. It's kind of too late to fix it.
Its never too late to build better trains and bike lanes everywhere
It actually is because building a railroad these days is so incredibly expensive. Building bike lanes is also extremely expensive. The economy hasn't grown in 50 years in fact much of it has been shifted into bubbles to hide automation and globalization which hurts more developed economies. It's nice to have bike lanes be included when upgrading but it depends on the situation. In many places you can't really build wider roads without tearing down billions of dollars worth of buildings, and if you reduce the amount of road width, you greatly increase the amount of traffic which causes issues in cities. If traffic backs up through intersections, it brings entire chunks of a city to a halt and the problem just snowballs. Trains are cool but if you have to walk 20 miles after you get off the train station it's not really feasible for most people lt takes half a day at least to walk 20 miles and it leaves your body sore. A train station in a modern city might only cover a few thousand people but cost tens or hundreds of millions to build as you have to lay out track.
One potential solution is to tear down and rebuild entire areas of cities after they become desolate but with a more urban and public transport focused layout. This is still expensive but cities can actually start with a good layout, like wide roads, bike lanes, and sidewalks, with tunnels and walking paths and stuff everywhere with better urban zoning more like what they have in aisa and Europe, and then let the city build around that. Another solution is to just build cities from the start to be urban and let the populations migrate over time out of the old car centric cities so they can rebuild, but this is hard because of corporate capitalism which creates a very inefficient economy, so you just don't really have the resources to do these things like people did 100 years ago who lived in much more socialist and worker centric societies with more labor valued economies and less fiat currency protecting every terrible corporation from having to give up their assets to be better managed in an actual free market and small business.
Not that I want to argue with you but when reading this, I thought
Wasn't one of the recent goals to bring labour back to US? Doesn't that seem like a perfect fit?
Replace cars with buses
20 miles?! There should be at least 5 stations on that distance Build the local train in a circle, with a station every few miles. Disperse the "last mile" via buses. Attach one point of the circle to the intercity railroad with a big station servicing inter- and intra- city trams, buses, maybe add a parking lot for now, so people can leave their car and continue with public transport. Later it can be changed to a mall, office space, hotel, w/e. Administration buildings maybe? So those are easily reachable?
Is road maintenance, drivers' policing, car reliance and car-related deaths cheaper?
This, but we need 4 lanes dedicated bus-only. Two for "local" busses that stop at every station (in both directions).
Two more lanes (in both directions) for "express" busses that only stop at a few major stops with transfers.
Why express busses need separate lines? A bus at a bus stop should not block the lane. Unless you expect to have really many busses, you could just have a separate naming convention for the express ones
So that express busses can pass slow busses at full speed.
It's not about bringing jobs back, it's just expensive. Building a 10 mile road in the middle of nowhere can easily cost 20+ million with a bridge or two, and take 3 years to build nowadays vits not like in the 60s where you could just lay down dozens of miles per road, per crew per year, while killing the entire ecosystem where they are working. Building in a city? Even more expensive. This is why they generally don't build roads in cities anymore. They just patch up old ones, maybe add a better intersection. It just costs too much. If you want to build a bypass through a city this could easily become a multi decade project taking a chunk of the states entire GDP.
For one small crew you are looking at about 60k-80k for skilled operators per operator, and a crew needs 2 or 3 usually at least. This is in low CoL areas. You also need about 5 or more laborers, which is around 40k a year, a supervisor which is around 80-120k a year. So in labor costs you are looking at let's say 600k per year just in labor costs, this isn't including the state workers and inspectors, which will probably double that cost so about a mil per year just in labor. The machines are on average probably 250k each. Let say that a company has to replace 2 or 3 per year and does 3 jobs per year, that's an additional 250k.
So 1.25 million.
The engineers are probably going to charge at least 100k plus labor so maybe add about 300k over the life of the project about 2.5 years. This is 1.35 million. Running 5 machines a day at let's say 75 gallons of fuel each per day, is let's say 1500 a day, times 365 is about 50k a year in fuel to run 5 machines. Maintenance is hard to estimate but it's probably around 250 a month per machine. Thats about 3k per year per machine and you have 5 so that's 15k per year for this one crew. So maintenance and fuel costs is about 65k per year, we are at 1.5 mil with occasional large repairs like engine swaps and tires, and we haven't even considered the material and hauling costs or asphalt or grass and signs and everything else which is most of the real cost. With the materials, on a 2.5 year job, I would reckon it would be about 5 million dollars in hauling plus a 15% profit margin, 4 million in asphalt, 50+k in seed, 250k in pipe, 1-2 million per bridge. You quickly get up to around 15-20 million for even small projects.
Now build that in a city and you easily double the cost or quadruple it. You have to buy the land at near market price, you have to haul off the waste. You have to reroute water and power and sewage and gas lines. You have to build temporary reliefs so traffic can still flow. You can only work in certain hours in order to keep traffic moving while it's the most busy. You will destroy roads by hauling millions of tons of material in and out which will eventually have to be repaired. It's a miracle that any construction work gets done in cities these days with all the complexity and regulation and costs associated with it. That's why it mostly doesn't happen. It costs too much, it's too much of a headache, shutting down some roads will just completely destroy a city and the local economy for years because of traffic. There is so much stuff in the ground that it's hard to dig anywhere without causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage. It's a real nightmare and it only works because dozens of people are delegating tasks which they are experts in, but even this class of people is disappearing because the pay is so low for the amount of work, and the stress is high. Being skilled at that kind of work takes years of experience, yet most of the people they can hire these days tend to be drug addicts and stuff because the pay is so low. They stay for a year and leave because the job is hard, the hours are long, the equipment sucks, especially with the def systems that blow piss in your face now, and dealing with subcontractors is just a nightmare because nobody can build anything within spec anymore. Things have to be done over and over to pass inspection and subcontractors know that they can try to avoid responsibility and make you sue their insurance company after the job overruns and you get penalties as the prime contractor.
It's not as easy as just throwing money at the problem even if you have money to throw at it. There is a lack of skilled workers because inflation has been destroying working class wages which means any job that is hard to do is undesirable. The only thing that makes someone want to work 10-12 hours in the sun in the mid all day is good money. Since the money hasn't been there for over a decade, there is a big gap in skilled labor for this type of job. Most of the old folks are starting to become cripples, there isn't much in the way of middle aged experts in this stuff. Theyd rather go work a much easier job, for 10-15% less pay and just see their family and not have a terrible life on the road, and work reasonable hours and have breaks and downtime. Companies aren't going to pay more because the only thing that will overcome their greed is state requirements for minimum pay for certain roles, but with the increasingly Republican and liberal politics, those wages are way below what inflation has been so in reality workers just don't care for that type of work.
Unfortunately there is nothing you can do about it. Society will just degenerate, the rich will become apartheid, American cities will just become 3rd world countries. Politics will swing back and forth between far left and far right economics, equally as stupid. There is no way to save it until it just collapses and people learn some humility and the weak die off so life can prosper again.
It costs nearly nothing to put bollards in the middle of roads to make existing paved roads bicycle-only
And it very quickly pays for itself because the roads last wayyy longer.
It does because you have to have the capacity for cars first, and many cities are already under built for the amount of traffic you have there. You can't just take roads used for cars and convert them to bicycle only lanes in many cases because you will gridlock the entire city in traffic if it isn't gridlocked already you cant haul 30k lbs of food on a bicycle. These roads are like the arteries of civilization. Modern cities can have more then a million people living in them and they all need resources to survive as well as they need to be able to commute to survive.
It's also a compounding problem. The more traffic backs up, the longer it takes to merge and turn, the slower people drive and the more stressed people become so they highly the passing lane and stuff. In a city some places can be a bottleneck where a single bad accident can bring 80% of the traffic to a stop within minutes.
There might be ways to do this stuff but it's not necessarily as easy as just converting roads to bike lanes unless you are in areas that don't have a lot of traffic. Some good solutions are things like requiring that new builds keep a minimum distance from the roadway so that you can easily expand in the future. Building new expressways to relieve pressure on other roads so you can utilize them. NonE of these are quick or easy or cheap.
Grid locking cars is the goal. You want people to say "ugh, I don't want to drive because that'll take all day. I'll go by bicycle instead. It'll be soo much faster"
That might work for a day or two until you realize you don't have any food in the supermarket and nobidy is picking up your garbage and the entire economy just stopped.
Grocery stores can do last mile deliveries with bicycles.
Cars and Wall Street and the American people for that matter can all go fuck themselves. Can't we just have free and accessible public transit and walkable cities for fuck sake?
But the stock holders . . ..
/s
Bicycles and trains. Always has been.
Those are nice, but they are not options for much of the US.
Yern idiot too