That's because there's been a huge, sustained rise in pedestrian and cyclist injury and general reckless driving through the pandemic. Many cities relaxed traffic enforcement during the pandemic because cars are such an important part of the American transportation framework. This lead to predictably horrific consequences for non drivers and drivers alike.

I heard of “r/fuckcars” for the first time a few days ago, and I’ve seen it mentioned ~4 times since then, and I’ve never visited r/place. From my perspective it seems like r/place has boosted this topic’s prevalence. Kinda cool.

r/fuckcars is really suspicious

I saw it a couple of times on my semi-nightly super deep Reddit trawls, it was a sub with a few hundred people. Then suddenly a few days later it exploded and took over the site

I've only seen that happen before with political subs, and I'm pretty sure those were coordinated offsite by bot armies (at least, I'd assume it's impossible for 50,000+ people to suddenly jump into brand new subs and rocket them to the frontpage a couple of days after they're created without some coordination)

edit: Ah, maybe it is organic.. I have to admit that I do really hate cars. If the news blasted us every time someone dies in a car accident the way it does for guns, maybe more people would hate them.