I see not having nor needing a car as my greatest luxury in life.
Yeah that non availability of public transport is hell.
Where I live, to walk anywhere would easily take half a day
American things. Try it in a real country.
Almost like that’s the point (and not entirely US-exclusive anyway)
Cool bigotry.
Hey, we’re working on it. I’m in Seattle and we’re doing better than most in the country. People are coming around.
Biking counts?
Where I live the roads have shoulders that are roughly 6-12” from where the pavement stops, which is usually terrain that is both difficult/impossible to ride on and privately owned. These are holdovers from carriage/wagon roads during like “founding America” times (yeah Pennsylvania) and expansion would require a great deal of money, property easements, etc, so it just isn’t done.
A random spot from google street view (because I don’t need some geoguesser nerd doxxing me). The state is plagued with this and the further east you go the more you get hills, stone walls, etc right against the edge of the road.
These are also mostly back roads and as a result are not really monitored well by police or anything so drivers go absolutely wild on them, especially in rural areas. Where I live there is a T intersection that has accidents somewhat often because people will go down the (35mph) rural road insanely fast during the night, like highway speeds (70+mph). Then all of a sudden the road stops and it’s either a 90 degree left or right turn, which they fail. Sometimes they die.
All the road signs are shot up too because redneck teens and young adults drive drunk at night and shoot signs, which is a thing that coal roller types do for fun apparently.
To walk or bike to the nearest grocery store isn’t terribly far, ~3 miles, and the nearest bus stop is ~5.5, but the path there is a death trap
I hate it here
It’s refreshing to know some people are at least trying it. However they will all go back to their car after this week. They should try it for life, for an extra challenge.
Usually when I say that I live without a car, people end up telling me how they couldn’t do it, how they love their car, that it’s nonsense that I don’t have one, and eventually circle around to tell me I should get a car. Even those aware of the difficulties of living without a car end up telling me that because of all this… they cant live without one and because they can’t do it, apparently I also shouldn’t.
I can count on one hand the amount of people that told me that they are trying to reduce their car usage, be more active and use public transit. They are the ones that are getting it and have interesting points of view.
Most people unfortunately just give up and continue to use a car for anything, with their assumptions confirmed.
EDIT: There are very fine examples of this attitude in this thread.
Most people can’t even really afford their car. They are reducing their quality of life, home ownership, putting off any hope of retirement, etc for an object that has a shorter lifespan than most pets.
Of course they want you to do the same. They need constant justification for staying on this treadmill. The fact that all that time and money is being wasted, is hard on the ego. Especially for anyone that claims they live a frugal life.
They forgot the “Getting the cops called on you” obstacle.
At least in the US, there is no activity that is more likely to result in an interaction with cops than driving.
There’s a woman from a town in Québec that had CPS called on her because she is using a cargo bike to carry her kids around.
Story in French: https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/2022-06-20/signalee-a-la-dpj-a-cause-de-son-velo-cargo.php
We need laws protecting peoples right to do thus. And also children’s right to walk and bike too while we’re at it
Every week for me is a week without driving.
I honestly miss when that was my life.
I’m lucky to have any transit access in my suburban town.
I live in a suburb of a big city, not by choice, and I also live within walking distance of a bus stop… if you don’t mind walking for three hours just to get to the bus stop.
Yeah, I mapped my public transit commute out one time. For starters, it’s complicated because Google/Apple/Waze/etc have the public transit option greyed out. Like it’s not even an option. If I try, Google suggests getting a Lyft. Which is really just saying “lol get a car, scrub.” I wish I were making this shit up:
Here’s a quick visual of my daily drive, versus the public transit route I would have to take:
So my commute starts with me biking 20 minutes away from work, to get to the nearest bus stop. Then I take a 20 minutes bus ride to the nearest rail hub. Then I take a commuter rail south-south-west for an hour, to get to the connecting line. Then I make a connection. The rail times rarely line up, so I’d probably have to wait at the station for ~15 minutes for the connection. Then I take the second rail line 45 minutes northwest.
But here’s where I run into my next problem… My house is serviced by one public transit system, and my job is serviced my another entirely separate transit system. Due to local politicians in the different cities not getting along, the two systems don’t connect. So now I need to bike 20 minutes north, to get from the northernmost station in one transit system, to the southernmost station in the other. Then I take another train 20 minutes north. Finally, I have about a 10 minute bike ride to get from the train station to my job.
All together, that’s ~50 minutes biking, ~20 minutes on a bus, and a little over 120 minutes split across three different trains. Plus the waiting time in between each connection, because the trains I need only run every 15-20 minutes. Bare minimum, I’m looking at around 3.5 hours for public transit… Or I can just take the highway 10 minutes west.
“But wait, you have walking and biking options! You could do those instead! The biking option in your screenshot is only 54 minutes!”
While this may be true on paper, I’d like to refer you to the “I had to go 2 hours out of my way to avoid certain death” panel in the posted comic. That 54 minute bike route is on a 70 MPH two lane highway, with no shoulder or sidewalk. I’d be dead before I was even halfway there.
“So take an alternate route?”
That giant loop I listed earlier is the alternate route. That 10 minute highway route cuts through a nature preserve. There are no other roads or paths parallel to it. You either take the highway, or you go all the way around.
I can’t even legally reach my grocery store without a car. I have to cross that same highway to get to the store, and there is no sidewalk that crosses it. So I’d need to break the law to walk to the grocery store.
This kind of design sounds completely insane. You could walk half way to Cockfosters along the Piccadilly line in that time. Any other city I can think of here you could walk the entire diameter of the city within 3 hours.
I don’t even need public transport because I live in a town, usually quicker to walk and always quicker to cycle compared to waiting for a bus. Not sure if its better to swim than take the ferry, maybe I need an amphibious bike?
This kind of design sounds completely insane.
That’s American city design for you. The cities are designed expecting that everybody has a car, so they’re sprawling, especially in the suburbs. Public transit is simply tacked on later and is very limited in range, and is almost always buses, very few trains. You’d have to be seriously lucky to live near a bus stop in the suburbs.
By the way, I can walk to the nearest grocery store in less than 15 minutes, so I feel good about that, at least. It’s very rare for the suburbs to be in walking distance of a grocery store.
I knew that was a SEPTA bus… Digging into her blog lightly and yup, Pennsylvania centric. Always neat to see local. Also not wrong about transit here, as I see plenty of people walk the harrowing roads around the suburb here. Pondering getting an e-bike eventually to determine viability, as my commute is relatively short. Would be nice to ditch the car a couple days a week to start.
I loved when I could use public transportation, and the reality is when public transportation is available people use it.
However there are the pressures from the car dealers and auto industry that do not want a good public transportation, and the fact that to get a decent public transportation you must raise up taxes, and uneducated people about public transportation will see only the tax arguments, and nobody want lose an election for that reason.
It is very difficult getting over this stale position, you need a very convinced administration that must find resources without increasing taxes and reduce services, a very difficult challenge.
Since the 90’s american cities have been successfully passing ballot initiatives to raise their own taxes to fund transit. They don’t always pass but the tide has been slowly, painfully slowly turning for a while now.
Crossing the road is another pain
Carry a brick and make eye contact with anyone in a car. Crossing the road gets much easier.
From tomorrow😁
If it’s a US road it’s also much much too wide and much too fast. The country is designed to kill people who aren’t in cars.
Haha loved it
@ThefuzzyFurryComrade I’m the kind of person who usually drives from home to the bus stop and from the bus stop from home (and I’m sure that without driving I’ll miss all my buses to work, which is something I can’t afford, otherwise it’s 1km more or less, it could be done) or when I have to carry something heavy.
I’m aware of most of the challenges that non-drivers meet, the absence of street lights in the first place (this makes walking quite dangerous in the part of town where I live)I live like 20 miles from my school, there’s no shot I’m walking and using public transit to get to school and work for a week
