This one really gets me: commuting by car is such an inefficient way of getting around that every major radio station feels obliged to constantly update their listeners about how gridlocked the roads are.
Not one mention is given to alternative transport options that might actually help reduce traffic. They just treat it like a weather forecast. Nothing can be done to prevent it. It’s worth saying that radio is still really popular where I live, so it’s a daily reminder for me of how deeply fucking carbrained my culture has become.
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In many ways the carbarians view traffic as a force of nature. Not to be addressed, only avoided.
Or funneled, with ever-increasing capacity, like stormwater…
Not entirely true in my location. Radio also mentions (large) train outages.
Honestly, you’re overthinking it. Radio traffic updates are just a holdover/tradition from 10 years back and earlier when we didn’t all have realtime traffic info in our pocket.
I live in the Chicago area and listen to public radio on my way to work, and the traffic update is just a list of the same half dozen freeways and stating there is a delay of either 20, 30, or 40 minutes between the same reference points. This takes 20 seconds tops, is useful to nobody, and they rattle through it with the same efficiency and flair of a DJ reading a spot for the local car wash. But they have probably been reading the same script at the same time for 40 years like station IDs and other familiar hooks.
Fuck car culture and all, but relax and take a breath… not everything is some weird insidious plot.
No, I’m not over thinking it. I’m just thinking about it. Neither do I think it’s a plot. I work in environmental research, so I think about systemic issues like this quite a bit.
The reality is that my country has set out to reduce carbon emissions by 51% by 2030, which is an incredibly ambitious target. In order to reach that goal, we need to adopt a Dutch transport model that reduces car dependency significantly. That means that people who drive everywhere need to be told to use active and public transport as an alternative to driving all the time.
Using state funded media to get that message across every half an hour during traffic reports seems a fairly obvious way of doing so.
Using state funded media to get that message across every half an hour during traffic reports seems a fairly obvious way of doing so.
I will heartily agree there in principle, but if the public transport is not a time savings over driving–as is very commonly the case–it would be self defeating.
Why does public transport need to be exactly as quick as driving? I leave myself an extra few minutes to walk to the bus in the morning with no negative consequences compared to driving whatsoever. It’s not the end of the world if getting from A to B takes a little longer. This is exactly the type of dogshit logic that makes it next to impossible to get anyone to do anything differently.
Lmao you proposed using public radio to remind people to use public transport alongside traffic reports. If the radio says “there’s a 45 minute backup from O’Hare to downtown, but the CTA is running 1:15” it doesn’t exactly make the case for public transit, and tacking on “but spending that extra 30 minutes on the train will help support a better system eventually” will change exactly zero minds.
Look, the topic of this post was how traffic reports are reinforcing that driving is the only viable way to get around. Traffic reports are at best a symptom, not a cause, more realistically they are a relic of the time before we all had smart phones. Railing against anything that reminds you of cars is not the path to systematic change.
I’m not interested in changing people’s minds. I’m in favour of literally telling people to stop driving because the fucking planet is on fire. If that adds 30 minutes to your commute, so be it.
Meanwhile I live in a city with good public transport, such that it only takes 15 minutes longer to get around, but 95% of people still drive. That absolutely justifies regularly reminding people that acceptable alternatives are available every time they listen to the radio.
Railing against anything that reminds you of cars is not the path to systematic change.
Yes it is. That’s why this community exists: to discuss alternatives to car dependency.
On this subject, I love having a transit app that uses multiple sources to determine when a train will come by. (The one I use is just called Transit)
There’s an old top gear segment where they host a local radio show, and Clarkson tries to direct the traffic around to reduce it. It doesn’t work, obviously, but if the message was “get on the train”, it might.
Google maps is now popular enough that it’s affecting traffic patterns. At the moment it does a lot of directing cars down quiet streets where they shouldn’t be, making the problem worse. If it was corrupted for good that could improve things.
I think its also a mindset of if we give accurate traffic info, we get more listeners. More of a symptom of car dependancy than a cause of it.
To be fair, our regional stations mentions major issues with public rail transport sometimes. But not all railway commuters are having a radio with them, or they are able to use the internet.