Elliot

they/them, 26, I do art when I can. https://linktr.ee/tortibee [pfp ID: drawing of a crab]

[bumblebeeappletree]

Action of the day: go write a letter/email to your city council to get them to better your public transportation. (Have more routes, get to their stops on time, better pay their employees, switch to a different fuel source like hydrogen or rechargeable batteries, clean the stops, add more benches, add green rooftops to any shelters, so on.)

Maybe make a copy to send to other politicians, local, state, or even federal level, just to get them to know what you want. Maybe even advocate for public transit to go to other cities. (Extending the major train lines for example.)

[furryprovocateur]

they should allow you to report posts for being gauche or passé

[girlswater]

[elliottnotyet]

ID: tags say "girl they banned gooch and pussy on here a long time ago." End ID

[closet-keys]

this is what I mean about how right now in the united states (won't speak for elsewhere but feel free to lmk in the notes if you'd like) a lot of us trans adults who are able to access transition care can only do so at the direct expense of trans minors. this clinic would not have opened if they held the line and offered equal access to healthcare to trans minors.

"Martin announced the direct-care clinic, calling it “one of the first times a public health department has ever taken that step.” But when Cabán pushed back, pointing out that trans youth are the ones most under attack right now—noting that there are “almost no providers” left for youth the entire city—Martin indicated the clinic would not serve youth, citing the need to “strike a balance” between providing care and avoiding “clawbacks from the federal government.” This morning, EITM can directly confirm that the age cutoff is 19—matching the Trump administration’s executive order threshold, not the standard legal age of adulthood in New York."

a lot of the structural transphobia we are experiencing is hitting minors even worse. their care gets banned first. if you want a preview of what access to healthcare will look like for us trans adults in 2 years, look at what access looks like for legal minors right now.

please have the compassion to show them solidarity now. do for them what you hope a cis person will do for us. like at the very least, talk about it.

[what-even-is-thiss]

I still don’t get why people try to convince me that driving is less complicated than navigating a public transit system. With public transit I’m not doing most of the work.

[what-even-is-thiss]

What if instead of relaxing and just getting off the vehicle when it beeps at the right stop you got stuck in traffic and had to concentrate constantly on what you’re doing or else you kill somebody and started screaming at other people for not using their giant death machines correctly wouldn’t that be so much better

[patches-dark-souls]

I wonder if they're mistakenly placing the stresses of navigating an unfamiliar place and system on the public transit system rather than simply on the unfamiliarity.

I can say from personal experience that all of my public transit experiences have been much more stressful than most of my driving experiences, but this is because I do not live, nor enjoy being in, a city, so my public transit experience is almost entirely navigating an unfamiliar subway or bus network when I'm visiting without a car. This can be quite stressful if your simultaneously trying to say, learn how to pay for the system, learn how to navigate the system, figure out what lines and stops I need to use, dealing with the fact that I am around more new people than usually I see in a month, and be texting someone else trying to figure out when and where to meet them.

Whereas my personal average car experience is "Oh I want to go there -> drives there". I don't live in a place with traffic or many other people to worry about and so driving somewhere is not really anymore stressful than walking somewhere for me. But again, this is because I'm extremely familiar with it, rather than it being inherently simpler than public transit, and I' sure if I lived somewhere with a robust transit system, the mental calculus for traveling somewhere would eventually simplify to "oh i want to go there -> goes there".

[what-even-is-thiss]

Driving stresses me the hell out because every time I’m convinced that I’m gonna mess up and kill someone.

Also yeah navigating a public transit system is a skill but so is driving. Once you have that skill it’s like whatever and your personal chances of killing someone’s by accident are much lower and you can play games on your phone

[ywnmb]

I’ve been driving for half my life and spent more time in cars before adulthood than most people. I’ve only taken public transit (without someone guiding me) maybe 20 times, all in another country.

One of these makes me lock in like I’ve discovered some innate biologically-coded skill that I can intuit my way through, and the other is driving

[covid-safer-hotties]

The pandemic isn’t over—and queer people shouldn’t be acting like it is | Xtra Magazine

ANALYSIS: As a community, we talk a good talk about keeping each other safe, so why aren’t we doing it now? 

[intelligentchristianlady]

A bus may have only a couple of passengers, especially at the beginning or end of its route. But let's also take fuel efficiency into account.

[foxoftheasterisk]

If there's one person on a bus because that person cannot or doesn't want to drive, the bus is succeeding.

[luckyladylily]

I read a study once on the fuel efficiency of various types of commuter vehicles (car, bus, train) on a per person basis and the number of people needed riding public transit to match the "efficiency" of cars is shockingly low. A bus needs to carry like 3-4 people to be fuel efficient, and trains require 2-3 per train car. Both often carry two dozen or more during peak hours, more than justifying any perceived requirements for efficiency for the train or bus to provide service the entire day.

[brightlotusmoon]

[the-squeaky-junk-drawer]

Also...some of us are broke af and can't afford a car.

[elliottnotyet]

ID: tags frombookmothic-dyke say "this blog supports public transit. I can't drive due to vision problems, so public transit is how I get anywhere besides walking. Need it for work. End ID.

[unlike-starlike]

Tired of the people who argue that public transportation could never work in the US because it's too spread out. Do you realize that we don't have to give up on something just because we can't make it perfect? Do you realize that even if only people in cities could benefit (which is not the case), that that's still a lot of people benefiting? Do you realize that if it were typical for people in cities to use public transportation, the majority of the people using it would be the people you consider normal and not the people you're afraid of? Do you realize it's not all-or-nothing? Good transit doesn't make cars obsolete or illegal. It just makes it feasible not to own one.

Also, even if the commute is longer by bus/train, consider that you can spend your time on the bus/train reading or zoning out or scrolling on your phone or whatever, which uses way less mental energy than driving.

[ifyouknowmeirlno]

I always forget how uncommon trains are in the US. I'm always surprised when someone I'm talking to has never been on a train or thinks it's a "rich people thing" since Amtrak is ridiculously expensive (for example, a 5 dollar trip on my state train is 50 on Amtrak)

I live in one of the few states that actually has a working, affordable train system. It's not even a good one, and only covers half the state - there's literally only 3 lines - but it's so much more than other states. We have such a culture of cars in the US that using the public transit is considered "poor" and looked down upon in my state, and not even available in others. Buses only exist in and around inner city areas, and you need to drive to/from any train stations in most cases anyway. Public transport is so convenient and affordable when done right i hate this damn country but fuck I love trains

For reference I wrote this while on the train to work having just read a post about having a train trip in the US being a luxury (My ticket was $4 for a 1.5 hour ride) and it really hit me to remember that my experience is not a universal experience and I need to be more aware of that

If I think NJ Transit is bad I really need to work on proposing a national public transit plan that's feasible and affordable - I'm going to do my best to run and fix it in NJ and then to bring it nation-wide

[elliottnotyet]

Doing a study abroad "Urban Sustainability in Berlin" and I'm the only student on this trip that uses public transit so I have no one to really talk to about this, but it feels weird that

Berlin is more diverse than Knoxville, TN but

The Knoxville Area Transit busses are more diverse than the U-Bahn

And half the class is like, I feel so comfortable riding the bus here but I would never feel safe riding it at home.

Like, I also like it better here because the stops are 5-15 minutes apart instead of 15-60 minutes and the stops are in front of places I want to go instead of parking lots, but almost all of my discomforts using transit at home happen before I get on the bus (will it actually come, will I get hit by a car, lack of seating, shelter, etc).

It feels like my experience as a visibly queer person who regularly depends on public transit doesn't quite compute in their brains.

[dingusintoxicate-uwu]

I think America is about to get bitten in the ass by the complete failure to build out transit, thanks to this oil crisis.

In other countries, people are being told to utilize trains and busses more for work commutes and daily trips in order to conserve fuel use. This just isn't possible in America. The majority of the country just does not have the infrastructure for people to seriously cut back on driving.

If my boyfriend couldn't afford to get to work by car anymore, he simply could not go to work. The bus line he needs runs hourly, requires 3 inconvenient transfers involving doubling back across two cities, and he'd still be a 20 minute walk from work. And this is GOOD by american standards the moment you leave the big city.

We funded cars instead of the train or bus, now cars are unaffordable and there's no train or bus.

[elliottnotyet]

When they generously install a lean bar at the bus stop

ID: someone sitting on a curb in front of a bus stop with a lean bar. End ID

[anistarrose]

tumblr users will say "don't leave this in the tags" and then leave the tags in an inaccessible screenshot without alt text or an image description

[elliottnotyet]

when you bite into an apple so good it reminds you apples are good

[elliottnotyet]

Putting on sunscreen before walking to work like, PPE

[tinyyellowflowers-blog]

Went to the grocery store with my kindergartener. We weighed some bananas: 2 pounds even. We weighed a watermelon: 4 pounds even. We weighed some mangos: a little over 1 pound. We weighed the watermelon AND the bananas: 6 pounds even.

“That’s funny” said the child “because 2+4=6 and two pounds and four pounds is six pounds. It’s like the same as math!”

“What happens if you add 6+1?”

“SEVEN”

“What if we put one pound of mangos on the scale?” <mangos added>

“IT’S THE SAME!!”

“OK, what’s 7-4?”

“Three?”

“What if we take the four pound watermelon off the scale?” <watermelon removed>

“Mama! Are you telling me math works In Real Life? Think of all the things you could measure!!”

[ghostlythinglady-deactivated202]

A lot of fantasy goes with Tolkien explanation of fantasy racism being the result of ancestral grudge.

Then you got Dungeon Meshi which is like:

"Elves and Dwarves hate each other because their respective empires make up 2/3 of the imperial core and are stuck in a cold war as the planet runs out of uncolonized land to grab. Elves are able to live in pastoral paradise because they've horded most of the settings farm-able land and natural capital, displacing and mass murdering any natives in the process. Orcs and goblins are hostile to other races because there the primary targets of an ongoing slavery and genocide campaign. The dividing line between human and inhuman is arbitrarily assigned via a phrenological pseudo-science that quickly falls apart when questioned by anyone who wasn't indoctrinated into it since birth."

[elliottnotyet]

Currently suppressing the leftist urge to take my anger for Republicans out on other leftists who aren't fighting back the same way as I am