The new job entails thousands of miles of driving each month to properties in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois [...] and his employer won’t reimburse him for mileage.
No fucking comment.
this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
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America is just too car centric
Yeah, I think we are certainly learning it, albeit slowly. When we set up our suburbia world, it was fine, because there were just fewer people, and we had the room to do it. It's now chaos, you take your life in your hands driving to work, it costs an arm and a leg. Unfortunately, we designed ourselves into a corner, and (at least where I live) trying to fix it feels insurmountable. And I live in a place with some of the best trains outside of Manhattan. And they're terrible.
No solutions here. Just observations.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unsustainable
not capable of being prolonged or continued : not sustainable
It is going to be very funny (read: horrifying) watching the American economy entirely grind to a halt, due to our car centric design of everything just completely imploding as ICE vehicle commuting itself becomes a luxury.
We're so fucking delusional about this.
Cars are unaffordable.
Gas is unaffordable.
Public transit basically doesn't exist outside of some major cities, but not even close to all.
If it costs more to go to work and be able to go to work, than you are paid for working, it is imminently rational to not go to work.
Just most people in general will completely lose their minds as this gets worse.
What will win?
Just get an EV or Hybrid or Motorcycle or E Bike...
Or...
No, cuz that's gay/stupid/'unreasonable'... ?
There's simple solutions for all of that:
- Fire anyone who's not essential. Poor people don't have any money to spend anyway, firing them will not have big impact on the economy
- With less workers you can transform free office space into dorms. Employees will be able to rent them for a small price.
- Unemployed people don't have money to buy food so it doesn't matter if they can drive to the store or not, another problem solved
- Put up military style camps with tents and bunk beds next to factories. Workers will be able to rent those beds and get basic food rations for a % of their salaries. No commute needed.
I mean yeah, neo/techno-feudalism is the timeline we've collectively chosen here in the US.
But that still runs into the problem of capitalism collapsing significantly when it destroys its own demand via destroying its consumer base.
And it still means that a whole lot of people are basically just going to go literally insane, as the fabled promised bullshit of 'work hard and follow the rules and you'll be a billionaire too!' is more and more obviously exposed as a fantastic lie.
The cognitive dissonance will get worse and worse.
Some will actually conclude that everything they know is wrong... many others will not be able to do this, or manage that realization well, and they will become psychotic.
There is another wrinkle to what you're describing though.
Office space could have started to get transformed into residential space since covid made it obvious remote work is a viable paradigm, and thus commerical office space itself is significantly overvalued.
But they didn't let that happen. Partly because managers and C Suite are narcissistic sociopaths who need to live a life where they get to neg their employees in person.
Partly because if you revalue downtown office space property values, well, a whole lot of rich people become significantly less rich.
So what I am trying to say is... they wont let those property values dive, to the greatest extent possible, and they can literally just do cartel style price fixing to do this.
So it'll be they'll all just keep acting like their inner downtown core properties are absurdly valuable, and you'll be offered an indentured servitude contract where your downtown accommodations are fixed and rising, but your pay is variable and performance dependant.
No one who agrees to anything like that will ever get promoted to any substantially important position (barring an occasional selected token exception that proves the rule)... though they'll create an entire internal and external 'company culture' that incredibly strongly implies that they will, reinforced with app kinds of propoganda, media, social media, etc.
... things like this will just keep occuring and get worse untill the proles basically kill these kinds of people. Otherwise, they'll just keep churning through the proles.
The city is the plantation now.
First, they are already solving the demand problem:
https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/09/17/top-10-of-earners-make-up-half-of-us-retail-spending
The very small group of people with "important" positions in corporations will still be allowed participate in the wealth and drive demand. Everyone else will be forced to buy basic products like food and water at crazy prices basically giving away all income back to the corporation. Some tariffs, couple of wars and annexations will make sure they are not losing money.
You're right about the office space property values. They will most likely not convert it into apartments. Better solution is to just allow workers to sleep under their desks. You get to keep your office space and workers don't have to drive. You wold obviously have to charge them some rent to cover the energy use during night but it wouldn't be that high. At first.
Yes you bring up good points!
I think we're both basically seeing the same kind of likely future, just from slightly different angles, or via slightly different extrapolated examples.
Yeah.
Yeah shit's lookin pretty bleak right now.
For me this was always the future presented in many American SF movies and shows. Couple of nice office building in the center, elites living the American dream and slums full of wage slaves everywhere else. Running Man, Bladerunner, Robocop, In Time, Corporate, Altered Carbon ... They all nailed it.
Basically same, I guess I was just a fool to think that people would interperet those as pointed warnings and criticisms, not fucking instruction manuals.
Or just can't afford to buy a new vehicle, ironically enough. I would love little more than to get rid of my car for an EV right now but I was barely staying afloat before gas prices started to surge, now it's just even more precarious.
I guess you could put it like this:
How do we improve traffic?
Raise gas prices, dramatically.
Anybody who cannot just stop driving will tell you the many many ways why that's a terrible idea without like 15 other things done first
Worry not, 15 year financing will save North America!
Coming soon:
"Pay for your $400 tank of gas in 8 easy payments of $60 over the next 16 weeeekkkkss!!!
Choose sharkpay today!"
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Bus lanes and trams are a symbol of “communism” and car is a sign of “freedom” until you realize that the ultimate freedom is choosing to walk, bike, take transit, or drive to your destination.
his employer won’t reimburse him for mileage once he fully transitions into his new role next month
2018 Chevy Silverado, which he uses to carry equipment and supplies for the hotels, this year.
Well, that’s a fucking problem. Don’t take a job in which you are expected to use a personal vehicle for work purposes. Work provided vehicle and submit receipts for gasoline. Insurance company won’t like it. You won’t like how fast your car goes through tires and then dies. Etc.
I feel like the legality of not reimbursing him for using his personal vehicle for work purposes is fairly dubious though I'd be lying if I said I knew the specifics of the laws there.
Employer: taps head They're a contractor and I don't pay then enough to live.
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I still don't get truck culture.
I grew up kinda out in the sticks, fair number of religious nuts and racists.
You know what they'd say about trucks, in the late 90s?
If you need a truck, like, really actually need a truck, you get it and use it only for actually hauling shit, or towing something.
Then you have a sedan or similar for everything else.
Like, ... the yokels of 20/30 years ago would all be laughing at the yokels of today.
I don't get how these people can be this aggresively stupid, its literally an insult to their 'heritage', fucked up as that heritage may or may not be.
They would! I remember my gear head uncles scoffing and laughing at the extended cab in the 90s.
They would absolutley laugh at these yuppies. Now some of them are the yuppies.
its wild.
Yep I remember that too, specifically
Extended cab? Ridiculous. Like 'hwaaaak ptooie' ridiculous.
Whatchu gonna do with that?
Take your wife down to the feed and seed, ask her for help liftin bags into the bed?
Ahhahahahah!
Swear to god I heard nearly exactly that at some point.
This implies your wife is so large she couldn’t just sit in the passenger seat to one’s right.
... correct.
Multi-stage / trap joke, they want you to walk into that one so they can start making fun of you and her from that angle too.
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Given the cost of fuel, a bus pass for me (if I still had to commute, I work from home now) for a month is now just over $800/mo.
6 years ago, that was $375/mo.
I don't think the issue is limited to car drivers, I suspect more than a few folks who took public transit with me are looking at a pretty impactful monthly cost.
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Bus lanes and trams are a symbol of “communism” and car is a sign of “freedom”
This is basically it.
I saw a post the other day that argued to the conservative mind there must be an underclass. There must be poor people whose lives suck. If you try to make things good for everyone, you're going against nature and will just make things bad for everyone.
Thus good public transit is bad. If different classes of people all mingle then it's like mixing your food up on the plate and that's just wrong!
They really are like children
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EXACTLY. GIVE A CHOICE!!
I myself am a car person but still. Give us a choice. I would be ALL FOR banning cars in our downtown area and just having to bike walk or bus to get there from farther away. Cars ruin cities.
We need them in rural. But thats far fewer people.
I'm patiently waiting to see what else it takes for Americans to overthrow this government.
From his pedophile ring to unlawful executive orders, wars, tariffs.. Trump keeps breaking the law and acts outside their beloved constitution. All with consent from the majority in both ruling parties, either by direct support (R) or silence (D).
They won't.
Despite what you hear on lemmy, the average american is not living in some kind of fascist hellscape. They are working a pretty decent job for a wage that pays their bills, and everything for them is more or less the same as it was under Biden. They are unhappy with the increased cost of things - but they aren't even close to "riot in the streets".
Instead, their strategy will be:
- ignore the federal government until the next election
- vote in opposition politicians in city and state elections in the meantime
Legally, the states can't make laws that contradict federal law. But as the case of marijuana legalization has shown, the federal government is very hesitant to push back on laws passed by states with broad popular appeal. So in the meantime, we'll likely see moves by the states to become more autonomous, and will see more anti-Trump politicians make names for themselves and get ready for the national stage.
My 60 year old dad straight up said "idk why people get so worked up, the president won't affect your life that much anyway". Even people who hate trump still have families, children, a life that while bad, is still worth holding onto for them. Better to keep their head down and try to scrape by with their loved ones than go off to die in a revolution. And who would lead them?
People like to talk about grand ideas of revolution and overthrowing government, but then reality sets in while trying to actually work out the nuts and bolts of it.
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The rich are loving it because they have more reason to fire people.
Hi, I'm Trevor Moore. Did you know that it's illegal to say "I want to kill the President of the United States of America"?
So now you're telling me that investing in a culture that denies basic physical reality might result in a situation where reality is inconvenient?
No, not commuting. Commuting in cars.
They could take public transit and spend three hours one way commuting to their eight hour shift.
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If the average American is working mostly to pay rent and commuting costs, they're less likely to look for a new job, or to try to improve conditions at their current job.
But hey. At least you know you're FREE.
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