Reported as not really being politics, and I could see it as being more !news@lemmy.world or even !business@lemmy.world
But pocket book issues like this impact politics.
"It's the economy, stupid!" and all that.
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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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. 😉
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.
It's a drag, but that's just an example of a poorly planned city. I've lived in places like that, but it doesn't have to be that way. I saw a you tube video about a city in the Netherlands I think it was where every house was within a 5 minute bike ride of a train station, and you could get around the city on a bike just fine, but if you wanted to drive, you'd have to go around to a road that looped the outside of a city. https://youtu.be/r-TuGAHR78w
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.
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.
This got 15 up votes?
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!
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.
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.
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
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
building a railroad these days is so incredibly expensive. Building bike lanes is also extremely expensive.
Wasn't one of the recent goals to bring labour back to US? Doesn't that seem like a perfect fit?
If traffic backs up through intersections
Replace cars with buses
if you have to walk 20 miles after you get off the train station
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?
cover a few thousand people but cost tens or hundreds of millions to build
Is road maintenance, drivers' policing, car reliance and car-related deaths cheaper?
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.
They can't, and also they cant haul thousands of pounds of food there without a truck. Even if you lived in a rural area, growing your own food is incredibly labor intensive. Do you know that before the invention of nitrogen fertilizer, it took about 90% of the people on earth to be farmers, in order to have enough food? The global population never really exceeded a billion people until the 20th century.
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.
People literally rather sink themselves in debt to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars every few years than try to learn how to take care of their own vehicle internals or invest in the tools required to do so, despite being more accessible than ever. Seriously, you can diagnose your car with your phone with the right adapter. That would have seemed like magic when I was growing up.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.