I can’t tell what kind of story this is supposed to be. It feels like satire but I’m not sure of what. It feels like a PR spin on not being able to afford a car. It feels like a story of achievement, but not having a car in London is pretty common.
a lot of the comments here are like a humble brag on level of misery. "i walk to work in -20F", "you get use to biking in sub-zero temps", i guess but why? Is the feeling of superiority worth the suffering? Maybe i'm just old and don't get it haha.
I got the same vibe. The only concrete stories here are ones where he was robbed while he was a pedestrian in London (really? How common is that?); there's the crazy assertion that London is unsafe for women (what?!); and he described himself as a "woke, kale-eating metrosexual", despite the word "metrosexual" being passe for about a decade and "woke" being meant in the watered-down Fox News sense (just from the other side). You can even hear it, as a joke, in the voice of Jeremy Clarkson.
And, absolutely, tons of people live in London without cars. Like you say, it's incredibly common.
This is a lot easier in a locale which has public transportation.
When my wife's car got totaled, I let her have mine, and rather than drive my truck every day, got out my daughter's bicycle for my 7 mile (one-way) commute.
Big improvement in quality-of-life, but with some caveats:
- Weather Underground's reports are quite accurate, but I had to check 3 of them each morning to be certain of avoiding a wetting (I'd drive the truck when it rained)
- maintenance was a concern, but not a big deal --- just did an "ABC" check: https://bikeleague.org/videos/basic-bike-check/ and at need, pumped up tires at a gas station along the way --- eventually got a patch kit and small pump, which was fortuitous, since shortly after had my first (and only) flat
- at 40 degrees F gloves become a necessity, but I managed to ride with the temperature as low as 17 F in pretty much normal (old) street clothes, added a heavy pair of pants, scarf, and knit cap
It was a big win health-wise --- when I had to get an annual check-up to get a reduction in my insurance rates the doctor's comment was quite flattering, "I have patients who are half your age, twice your weight, and not one-quarter as healthy as you are.".
Started commuting w/ my wife when I changed jobs and rather miss the bike.
>Started commuting w/ my wife when I changed jobs and rather miss the bike.
I did this for a while when I was first married and I missed it for a very long time after we stopped. It was a 30 minute commute each way and gave us an hour a day to catch up and just be together.
> but I managed to ride with the temperature as low as 17 F in pretty much normal (old) street clothes, added a heavy pair of pants, scarf, and knit cap
> but I had to check 3 of them each morning to be certain of avoiding a wetting (I'd drive the truck when it rained)
You were just 1 step away of discovering the magic of weatherproof clothes for biking, feeling impervious to the elements just because you got the right set of clothes is quasi magical, you simply don't care if it's raining or not, you can bike and not get wet.
Completely recommend if you ever get the chance to go back to biking as a day-to-day commute activity :)
I commuted on my bike in the Portland area for quite some time. The rain-gear kept me dry (except my feet as I lacked anything for my shoes. Always brought a dry pair of socks). And the bike never minded the rain, even though it was often left outside during the day.
I wouldn't do that with a really nice bike (more because of the likelihood of theft than rain), but there is nothing wrong with letting your bike get a bit wet.
My daily beater here in Stockholm is a fixed gear bike with a common chain, clean the chain and slap some all-weather chain oil on it every 3-6 months and it's good to go. During mid-fall/winters I swap to my wheels with gravel tyres for better traction.
There's no need to go for a belt-drive just for weatherproofing sake, a good chain oil is enough to keep your chain going pretty well.
I bike around 8-10k km per year on this bike for the past 7-8 years, mostly just doing the basics of maintenance: change brake cables and tubing, change brake pads, clean and oil the chain. The only times I needed to do more than that was after forgetting the bike outside when a snowstorm came, that can fuck you up: tyres cracking, chain rusting quickly, don't recommend it.
My US-centric issue is that while I do in fact live close enough to work to bike there, doing so is risking getting murdered by any number two ton death machines filled with impatient, irrational, distracted apes. Apes who are actively resisting a separated bike infrastructure because it will "make traffic worse" or "raise taxes".
I would love to make an active, healthy commute part of my day, but I'm worried I would only reap the benefits temporarily until I am pancaked by an Audi driven by a moron trying to catch up in Facebook.
Statistically, the gain in lifespan due to the health benefits out-weighs the risk of death by car (says the guy who was hit by a car while returning from a 52-mile round trip to buy comic books on the first day of summer vacation when he was 14, breaking jaw, elbow, a tooth, and knocking out several more teeth, as well as various other injuries the scars of which are mostly faded).
It's like driving --- ride defensively, assume you're invisible to everyone, and plan accordingly. One notable option is that at need, one can dismount and walk the bike across tricky intersections.
>It was a big win health-wise --- when I had to get an annual check-up to get a reduction in my insurance rates the doctor's comment was quite flattering, "I have patients who are half your age, twice your weight, and not one-quarter as healthy as you are.".
Not related to cars/bikes -- how common is it for people to get "annual checkup" from doctor? Does everyone do it or does it only start in middle age? Being young and healthy I'm ambivalent about it because if there's nothing obviously wrong with you, you risk getting mis-diagnosed with something and suffering iatrogenic harm.
I keep telling my son that he needs to go see a doctor (also a dentist) --- the likelihood of overall health benefit is way more likely than an unlikely wrong diagnosis which will probably only result in some expensive (to the insurance company) tests.
"...got out my daughter's bicycle for my 7 mile (one-way) commute"
I can't be the only one here who imagined a grown man riding one of those small, pink bikes for little children with training wheels and streamers on the end of the handlebars...
While a funny visual image, my self-image is too fragile for that and my knees not quite that flexible (and even my daughter didn't ride the frilly pink bike we bought for her long --- it was eventually donated to a daycare center).
I hope you eventually got a nice bike that fit you properly. People will casually spend tens of thousands on a car (that is completely reliant on fossil fuel) but baulk at the thought of spending a mere one thousand credits on a bicycle (that never requires any fuel).
I just bought a new car. Used it to go to the mountains and went hiking/camping. On the way back I visited family and brought over some furniture. In a couple of weeks I'll probably take it to a remote bit of the coast and enjoy the sunshine.
Tomorrow I get the tube to go to Oxford Street and do some shopping, the car is worse for those sorts of things, just as public transport is pretty bad for some things.
I've got a car for the same reason. My car broke down last July and I wasn't able to get a replacement until December. I rode my bike around, used ride share, got rides from friends and rented a car for one longer trip.
I only drive it a few hundred miles a month, so owning it is really expensive given that it's a $1000+ payment each month. I don't NEED it, but doing some of the outdoor activities I enjoy is difficult without a car.
For example, I enjoy paragliding. The closest site is about a 20 mile drive from here. Decisions on whether or not to fly are often last minute, so I wouldn't want to rent a car the day before because chance to fly is often 50-50. It's not feasible to rent a car a couple hours before I want to leave that day.
The problem is you very quickly adjust your lifestyle around the car and before you know it's no longer a luxury, it's a necessity. At a certain point it becomes a liability as you need to pay for repairs or pay to scrap it when it's time. It happens to people all the time and it will happen to you too if you are not careful.
I'm pretty reliant on my kettle for making coffee in the morning, it's not really a big deal to become adjusted to having a certain standard of living.
Do you mean that I might move home to somewhere where the car is more of a necessity and then feel it a burden that I can't walk to places?
At this stage of my life I probably wouldn't move to a place that didn't have public transport, unless car use is heavily restricted in London (I'd rather have both, but if I had to choose, the car is far superior to public transport in my everyday life).
A wise man once said "if you can't buy it twice, you can't afford it". Nobody allocates more than half their wealth to a kettle. Nor a toaster, oven, microwave or dishwasher. If any of them break down, you can afford to buy another one, if you still need it.
There's really only one good thing to break the rule for and that's a house. But people regularly break the rule for cars. This is part of the car trap. It's one thing to build a lifestyle around a kettle, it's quite another to build it around a car.
The dependence can start with moving somewhere. Or you could start building commitments and habits that require it, such as taking a job that is far away. That and you rapidly lose fitness and regress into a blob-like form that is no longer capable of locomotion. It's remarkable how differently people react to "walking a mile". To those who walk it's nothing. It can even be done with 20kg of baggage if necessary. To those who drive it's a long way.
Cars are nice. But you can have too much of a good thing. It's important to stay aware of it, that's all.
I don't really have issues with that stuff, if anything the car helps me keep fit. A recent example would be that I went to visit family and the gym where they live would have taken 3 hours round trip via public transport for me to get to, so the car allowed me to get a workout in.
I also cycle a ton to get places. I just also use the car for like, all of the things that can't reasonably be done via bike/train, which are a lot. Just because I live in London doesn't mean I want to spend all of my time here.
I pay maybe £2-3K a year on all car costs (excepting fuel) so it's not really a big deal. I don't get fancy new cars, to me it's a tool, it's gonna get dirty and scratched up.
But then I totally see that for most people, the path of least resistance is always there.
It really depends on what taxi service you use, but on a long run it can be cheaper and more convenient than owning a car, if you do not need to use it every day.
I have a hard time buying the convenience aspect unless you have taxis driving by your front door regularly. Having to call or use an app to schedule a ride is tedious, and occasionally I’ve had taxis and rideshare blow me off for a better fare. Owning a car is an expense, but it’s much more convenient than the alternatives IMHO.
No kids? Author clearly mentions he had a young daughter that had just out grown their child seat when they gave up their car.
Certainly living in city with good public transport is a large factor. By why can’t we build more places like that, and making living car free easy and practical for everyone? It’s ultimately cheaper and healthier for both the individuals and society as a whole, why hate on those that want see more people being able to benefit from such a lifestyle?
As for taxis, in London, the money you save on fuel, tax, congestion charges, maintenance, insurance etc etc which all come with car ownership, will pay for a lot of taxi rides each year.
Perhaps in the US but London has increasingly fantastic dedicated cycle infrastructure. Removing the need for bike to ever directly interact with cars on many journeys.
Also urban fatalities of people on bikes is driven almost entirely by people driving cars. In what world do we look at the problem of cars killing people on bikes and go “well obviously the bikes are the problem”. All the stats in this area clearly indicate that drivers are far more often at fault in these collisions than those on bikes. Same again goes for pedestrians, cars kill pedestrians regardless of how careful pedestrians are.
In the UK, there were 1300% more cycling fatalities than car fatalities in 2021 per the UK government[0], and this isn't controlling for differences in the kinds of miles traveled--most car fatalities happen on highways outside of the city, but these aren't the kind of miles that cyclists are doing; cycling primarily happens on slower city streets; if we account for these differences, the safety gap (with respect to occupants) grows even more considerably in favor of car transit.
> Also urban fatalities of people on bikes is driven almost entirely by people driving cars. In what world do we look at the problem of cars killing people on bikes and go “well obviously the bikes are the problem”. All the stats in this area clearly indicate that drivers are far more often at fault in these collisions than those on bikes. Same again goes for pedestrians, cars kill pedestrians regardless of how careful pedestrians are.
No one is making this argument. We’re debating what mode of transit is safest for one’s children, not in what way we should remake society.
And yet despite that, if you live in any major city and cycle to work, your life expectancy is higher that if you drive, even if including the higher risk of a fatal collision on the road.
Transit shouldn’t be an arms race, we should be working towards making transit safe regardless of the mode of transport, not putting everyone in armoured boxes.
> No one is making this argument. We’re debating what mode of transit is safest for one’s children, not in what way we should remake society.
No, we’re discussing the validity of car free living and its value. Bring the argument that riding a bike is dangerous for children means we should put every child in car is a silly and intellectually dishonest argument. Just like the argument that the solution to “bad guys with guns” is more “good guys with guns”, when the answer is clearly fewer guns. The same applies to cars, the answer to children being killed by drivers isn’t “more cars for kids” it’s fewer cars and safer roads.
> And yet despite that, if you live in any major city and cycle to work, your life expectancy is higher that if you drive, even if including the higher risk of a fatal collision on the road.
Probably not causal as you're suggesting. It's probably something like "if you have the money to live near your workplace, you can probably afford great healthcare, a gym membership, great healthy food options, and other things that cause one to live longer".
> Transit shouldn’t be an arms race, we should be working towards making transit safe regardless of the mode of transport, not putting everyone in armoured boxes.
This is a straw man. I'm not advocating an arms race or "putting everyone in armoured boxes", I'm saying that a rational decision for individuals who prize their children's safety is to not allow them to cycle as a primary form of transit.
> No, we’re discussing the validity of car free living and its value. Bring the argument that riding a bike is dangerous for children means we should put every child in car is a silly and intellectually dishonest argument. Just like the argument that the solution to “bad guys with guns” is more “good guys with guns”, when the answer is clearly fewer guns. The same applies to cars, the answer to children being killed by drivers isn’t “more cars for kids” it’s fewer cars and safer roads.
Respectfully, I think you're mistaken, the comment you responded to was "I’m not sure I’d be comfortable with a young child on a bike." This is clearly not a "how should we retailor society?" claim, it's a "in our existing society, what is safest for my kid?" claim. If you manifest a society in which cycling is comparably safe to driving, I'll send my kid to school by bike.
> Respectfully, I think you're mistaken, the comment you responded to was "I’m not sure I’d be comfortable with a young child on a bike." This is clearly not a "how should we retailor society?" claim, it's a "in our existing society, what is safest for my kid?" claim. If you manifest a society in which cycling is comparably safe to driving, I'll send my kid to school by bike.
If you’re just going to cherry pick comments from a thread chain, and ignore the rest of the discussion, then there isn’t much point discussing anything with you.
I feel like we're over-optimizing in some way. Like we're set down this odd path that only leads to more "products" and more "safety" and more of our value as humans being captured by companies and people "other" than ourselves or families. To this example, we're talking about saving money by not having a car and then the consequences of having a young child, and the dangers thereof, etc. Before we started down this path, we had none of those things, and children were perfectly "safe" staying at home and being home-schooled by individuals in the house. What's next, weighing the cost of a private tutor coming to your house because school is too expensive, transportation to school is too expensive, and the whole thing is too dangerous for them? /rant
There’s quite a lot of data to backup that assertion. It’s not like nobody has bothered to study it.
It’s also kind of self evident. How can forcing everyone to buy, maintain and drag around 2 tons of machinery everywhere ever be cheaper and more efficient than using the legs you already have? Obviously there are those that physically need mechanical assistance to move around, but they’re the minority, we can accommodate them without forcing mechanical dependency on everyone.
Walk 100km to work and back each day to actually get paid and see how that efficiency works out for you. It's like everyone lives in inner cities but are just busy being lazy.
Why does everyone have to live 100km from work? Why would we want to force everyone to live a 100km from their work, why not let people live close to their work and make that pleasant and comfortable?
There are more ways to live that in single family homes in suburbs miles from everything you need to live (like work, food and entertainment). Why not live near all stuff you need for life? Wouldn’t that be much cheaper, more efficient, easier and generally just nicer?
You know that in many parts of the world, living near your work and your shops is normal right?
Only in the U.S. is such an arrangement unusual, and where living miles from everything is normal. The U.S. is like this by choice, US zoning laws make any other way of living practically illegal. The U.S. could choose to do something different, or at least give people the freedom to try something different. It is meant to be the land of the free, and the free market after all.
And in many parts of the world it's not. I think our increased mobility in recent times has also added distance to everything, but that's not the point I'm making above.
>”By why can’t we build more places like that, and making living car free easy and practical for everyone? It’s ultimately cheaper…”
This is true for new development but converting existing infrastructure is massively expensive and politically fraught. I believe people have become convinced cars are bad but haven’t truly realized the sheer amount of money and time it would take to redesign and reconstruct cities and suburbs in the US.
I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done. Just that the effort required will take generations, perhaps centuries, to actually come to fruition. In the meantime people shouldn’t be exasperated when wondering why we don’t just redevelop our cities.
The Netherlands looks at lot like the U.S. 30 years ago, and now it’s the cycling Mecca of the world.
That isn’t to argue that the U.S. can pull off the same trick in the same manner, but it clearly demonstrates that is possible to achieve in a single generation. A big part to achieving that change was simply changing laws to make it possible, and replacing car infrastructure with shared car and cycle infrastructure as part of the normal infrastructure replacement process.
In the U.S. today, it’s almost impossible to build anything except suburbs of single family home due to zoning laws. So a good first step for the U.S. would simply be changing zoning laws to make it possible to even build dense urban areas with transit, rather than only urban sprawl.
This is how most of my conversations with “ideological cyclists” (for lack of a better term) tend to go. I’m very supportive of cycling, but if you aren’t healthy or if you have kids giving up your car is enormously inconvenient. Yes, you can teach your kids to ride, but cycling is still much more dangerous than driving. Yes, you can rent a car or get an uber as needed, but it’s far more convenient to just jump in one’s own car. Yes, you can prepare for really cold or precipitous weather to a degree, but it’s way more convenient to simply not have to monitor the weather all the time and tote around your extra cycling clothes. And there’s really nothing you can do about hot weather unless your destination has a shower or you can otherwise make do with being sweaty.
When you add up all of these decently-sized inconveniences, it just doesn’t make sense to do away with your car except perhaps in certain ideal situations (healthy, no kids, urban/great public transit, close to work, not traveling out of the area to visit family often, etc). The best I can realistically do is family car + bike.
EDIT: I'm getting throttled; can't respond to any more comments for a few hours.
And good luck getting your five year old to ride 20km...
I think the sensible thing (assuming affording the car in the first place is fine), is to make good decisions about when to use a car or bike or walk or use transit. It doesn't have to be binary, much as everything except gender seems to be these days.
What's infuriating about these all or nothing articles is the exclusion of "car lite" approaches.
Over time and kind of slowly, my wife and I realized we really only needed one car. When the market moved around to make selling one of them way way too attractive, we did so (it was an older Porsche, and the market for those went UTTERLY NUTS -- I had it for nearly 20 years and sold it for about 85% what I paid for it).
That was really fine until she took a different job that was no longer public-transit friendly (ironically, it's a job working for the city). I think most couples would've sighed and bought a second car, but we really, really didn't want to -- so we bought a small motorcycle instead. While not suitable for the freeways, provides JUST ENOUGH supplemental mobility that the idea of a second car seems absurd now (especially given the price; the bike was $4800 and gets 80mpg).
(We DID think about ebikes, but they cost almost as much without providing nearly the utility.)
> "... or if you have kids giving up your car is enormously inconvenient."
> "Yes, you can teach your kids to ride, but cycling is still much more dangerous than driving."
> "Yes, you can rent a car or get an uber as needed, but it’s far more convenient to just jump in one’s own car."
> "Yes, you can prepare for really cold or precipitous weather to a degree, but it’s way more convenient to simply not have to monitor the weather all the time and tote around your extra cycling clothes."
> "And there’s really nothing you can do about hot weather unless your destination has a shower or you can otherwise make do with being sweaty."
> "The best I can realistically do is family car + bike."
I don't think I've ever seen or heard anyone before portraying the weather and transporting oneself without a car as such an ordeal and struggle. Though, if you life well outside the city I can understand the position.
When I grew up (in what was then a ~230k pop. city) only one single kid in my class had parents that cared about having a car, and all of us managed just fine getting to and from school, friends and various activities by foot, bicycle and public transport. We survived, and we turned out OK - perhaps more than OK, with a bit of the fortitude of not expecting or requiring constant conveniences or suffering the perspective that any transport without car is "enormously inconvenient".
> I don't think I've ever seen or heard anyone before portraying the weather and transporting oneself without a car as such an ordeal and struggle. Though, if you life well outside the city I can understand the position.
You probably live in a pretty mild climate. In my part of the planet, temperatures range from -20F to 110F and we get a decent amount of precipitation. Moreover, the average commute exceeds 10 miles, and low population density means public transit options are at best poor but more likely nonexistent.
Interestingly, even in countries famous for their cycling infrastructure, car ownership (and average car weight) is increasing. It seems it's hard to beat the convenience of driving. E.g.:
You rely on your car because you have a car and chose to rely on it. Of course he could afford £250. That's the price of one annual service these days.
Are you personally offended by someone sharing their experience of living without a car? Maybe people in the writers situation have never reflected about this lifestyle before because they take the car for granted and now he inspired people to try to live without a car. That doesn't mean that everybody needs to stop using their car – especially if they are dependent on it.
Whenever someone reacts strongly just because someone else share their personal experience of different life choices whether it's ditching the car or going vegetarian or anything progressive I can't help think it's their own guilt speaking.
These car conversations always go the same way. Some people just want to live their life the way they want, other people want to tell them it's wrong and they should feel bad.
> whether it's ditching the car or going vegetarian or anything progressive I can't help think it's their own guilt speaking
As a progressive, I find that sort of attitude a little grating. Can't imagine what it's like for conservatives.
(Disclosure: enjoying this kind of privileges, I ditched my car in the early 2000s, without regret. But I can see that this is only an option for a happy minority, nowadays.)
BTW, one of the benefits of a functional, socially mixed public transport system is being confronted with a diverse population, which helps with not becoming trapped in a bubble. (Which may be exactly the "failure" according to M. Thatcher.)
I've lived this lifestyle a few different times while living in the USA, and every time it's just inconvenient enough that I need to go back to owning a car after a few weeks/months.
The time I'm able to go car free varies on location and climate, but there's still not the required infrastructure to make this a viable option for everyday life outside of a few select metro areas. It's a real shame, because the positive benefits experienced are real and quite noticeable, even in a short timespan.
It really just depends on how committed you are and what your lifestyle is.
I successfully lived in Atlanta, of all places, using nothing but an e-bike and public transit for an entire year, with a Lyft here or there as necessary. I got into better shape than I have been since I was a teenager too.
Biking in rainy sub-zero temps is a bit of PITA, but it builds character, and honestly there's something charming and invigorating about it if you've got the right gear.
Would love to do it again, and in fact am planning to at some point.
You can sometimes get a temperature inversion where the air near the ground is colder than the air further up, and then the rain doesn't have time to freeze before it hits the ground. Also surfaces can be sub-zero but the air above them is above zero and vice versa.
Ahh sorry, I interact with WAYY too many Europeans on the internet. I just meant below freezing, usually right below, Atlanta is not that cold. I think the lowest I saw during that year was about 11F.
> every time it's just inconvenient enough that I need to go back to owning a car after a few weeks/months.
This is a huge problem in many places, though particularly bad in the USA from my experience of being there (a week in Austin, TX).
It seems that the UK is following this model outside of London, unfortunately. I live in a relatively compact city (to the point you can walk to the city centre from the outer suburbs in about an hour) but the funding cuts to public transport are making it less and less feasible to live without a car.
Inter-city travel, while totally possible by train, is also going the same way. Cancellations and late trains seem to be the norm (even before the strikes) and the cost is insane. I quickly costed up a trip I drove a couple of weeks ago: £65 in diesel or £200 for the train (2 people + dog) and a lot of inconvenience.
Don't get me wrong, I'm 100% in favour of active travel and being able to live without a car. I want to see governments invest in this properly. If you follow the money, however, governments invest massively in car infrastructure, so people, unfortunately, drive cars everywhere.
> Don't get me wrong, I'm 100% in favour of active travel and being able to live without a car. I want to see governments invest in this properly. If you follow the money, however, governments invest massively in car infrastructure, so people, unfortunately, drive cars everywhere.
On the other end of it though wealthier people are designing boutique neighborhoods now.
This is just one example but I understand there's similar concepts going on elsewhere:
So maybe wealthy people wanting to live car free will push the design around more "closed" neighborhoods and limit the need for cars.
Regardless I agree with you and don't really yet see a way for (American here) placing enough incentives to promote car-less neighborhoods or at least, less cars. Outside of the U.S. maybe easier to shift that.
Something I've considered doing since I live in a relatively urban area is just using rental cars when I need to do a longer trip and leave getting things to delivery services when weather or time makes walking unfavorable.
Which, if those things combined is less than what I currently spend on having car should get me ahead.
I feel the same way. I did it for a decade. It was hard, but great.
Then I got a dog.
I want to take her hiking, or to the dog park, so I got a car. "I'll still ride", I told myself.
But taking her for walks (they're pretty long walks), while not as good as my bike rides, is just enough exercise that going on a long bike ride just doesn't feel like the right thing.
I still ride occasionally, like when I'm stuck on a code problem and need to clear my head about it, but it's not like it was. I miss it, but I also love my dog.
Dig in, I walked to work in -20 *F for five years in Troy, NY winters. One of the main benefits of that city is walkability! My wife and I still had a car between us for going outside the immediate area, but it was certainly nice not dealing with traffic and parking daily. We did live within a few miles of where we worked, a conscious choice when we moved to Troy.
> ...but there's still not the required infrastructure to make this a viable option for everyday life outside of a few select metro areas...
There's really no getting around this. Outside of many cities, the push for everything to get bigger (stores, medical providers, etc) has pushed everything to the outskirts of towns where space exists and is cheaper.
I've lived a total of about 10 years in a US city without a car. To the great surprise of friends that asked me about it, I found it liberating, not constraining. The ability to go places and a) be able to stop and explore along the way and b) not have to worry about where to put the car was very freeing. There were infrequent times where I did need a vehicle, but ZipCar or a short term rental solved that issue.
I've lived in the rural midwest almost all of my life and have never really had the option to not have a vehicle.
I lived in Mountain View, CA for six months to try a relocation experiment and was quite happy with my bike and using public transportation or renting a car as needed. It certainly helped that my employer had a shuttle service for rainy days and the availability of same day shipping from major retailers and Amazon didn't hurt. I was pretty impressed with how easy it was to do overall, though.
Moving back to my home in the midwest, it would be completely unsustainable and dangerous here. But I've found some trails and still get out on the bike regularly.
I find Midwestern cities are a good balance for that. In Milwaukee now and it's very easy/cheap to own a car (which we do) but most day to day needs are easily done without it. My wife and I combined drive a bit more than once a week on average, and most trips are either out of town or "the weather is mildly annoying and I don't feel like walking/biking today."
I know a lot of families living a similar 0-1 car life here too.
Diogenes also disliked the artificial and believed humans would do well to return to nature. A car is a key to straddle existing in the practicalities of the unavoidable modern day artificial, while also being able to get a taste of what is real once in a while by visiting maybe a forest/mountain/lake etc. Ironically, it seems he has severed his ability to achieve that trapping himself in the artificial.
This only works if you live close to truly natural spaces, and where I live even forests are urban spaces. Also, would your car get you through the desert or a virgin forest?
I can get to beaches, forests, mountains by cycling or taking the train there with the right level of infrastructure to accommodate me and my family while still feeling in nature.
For the 50-mile commute, my fitness would be amazing.
Moving closer would be maybe 30k in up front taxes and expenses and it's a HCoL area, so, now, it's probably at least another 100k in mortgage interest, even if I hammer the repayments at double my current monthly outgoings.
The train also takes 2 hours each way, plus 20 minutes walking.
Why should everyone bear the consequences of you living extremely remotely? By consequences I mean support costs of roads, congestion in the city by people outside driving in, noise, pollution, huge amount of area being wasted etc.
Why should I have to pay a huge amount of stamp duty tax to move closer to work[1]? Why should I get punished by a huge mortgage to do so because of a dysfunctional housing market[2]? For that matter, and actually I don't really think this one, I pay taxes willingly build this stuff, why should I pay for central-city public transport when I don't even commute from or to a central urban area[3]? Anyone can say things like that.
If move if I could, and originally planned to when I took the job. I can't afford it now. I'd cycle if I could (and I used to, for years, at a different job, over 20 miles a day). I'd take public transport if I could. In fact, a promised train timetable cadence increase factored into moving into where I live now. It was quietly cancelled years ago.
[1]: while I think stamp duty is a regressive tax that also prevents labour mobility and is in general a bad idea, it's especially bad when combined with inflating house prices (price to earnings ratio is now the highest in recorded history) that push everything around into higher bands.
[2]: I actually don't really think the current interest rates themselves are necessarily bad, there are benefits to higher rates. But housing being so incredibly expensive makes such rates punishing. 6% on 100k is one thing. 6% on 250k is very different.
[3]: funnily enough, though my current commute passes only a couple of miles of suburbs and the rest of it is motorway ending in an extra-urban business park, the public transport option involves trains going directly through urban cores of two cities and past rather a lot more houses. In fact, a different rail line goes within 100m of me: so why do I need to listen to those commuters? (Again, I don't actually think this).
I know many people do it out of necessity or desire to live in a certain place, but commuting that long would be a last resort for me. It turns an 8 hour day into a 10 hour day. You don't get paid for the time and it costs more in fuel and wear and tear on the car.
When comparing salaries, I always factored in the duration and cost of the commute. Jobs that were further away that paid a little more turned out not to be worth the extra pay when I took these factors into consideration.
Well, I don't really want to live here specifically, and planned to move, but cost-of-living, the general housing situation and mortgage rates don't leave many options at the moment!
Wear on the car is real and annoying, but it's still no more expensive than the train would be (and much faster). Funnily enough, working from home here and there isn't always cheaper by train: they ding you 40% of the weekly ticket price and nearly 60% of the monthly if you want a carnet of tickets (which expire within about 6 weeks). Season tickets also don't include some routes.
I have never owned a car, and plan to keep it that way. Of course it helps that I live in Copenhagen, with excellent bike infrastructure and good public transport, and that I live alone with no kids. I once calculated that with the Danish taxes on cars, it would almost be cheaper to take a taxi to work and back every day. I never did that, but I don't feel bad about taking a taxi when I need one, nor about paying for delivery of bigger items.
I tried to get food at night in Texas without car, a colleague was questioned for walking along the road and the Wendy's personnel slammed all he hatches of the drive through screaming: "There's a camera on you!!!", granted, it's a drive through, but there was no walk through.
On a conference in Galveston TA, someone told me they went to a drive through funeral... I saw drive through pharmacies and drive through ATMs. It's a special place.
> a colleague was questioned for walking along the road
That scene in the first Rambo, when he gets "picked up" by the police while just walking along a road, is fairly realistic. You're not supposed to be walking along roads, if you do there must be something wrong with you.
My favorite is the drive through daiquiri places you'll see just next door to Tx in Louisiana: Yes...you read that right. A drive-through business selling you alcoholic beverages.
During COVID, some fast food places closed their dining rooms, keeping only their drive-"thrus" open. I once tried to walk through one of these, and was denied service at the window. I didn't make a fuss about it, but I was thinking -- I'm right here talking to you; I am offering you money in exchange for goods and services; there is literally nothing that is stopping me from handing you payment right now or from you giving me my food; but you won't do it because... why?
A person in a car can't jump through the service window faster than the employee can close it. A person on foot might.
Cameras also work better against cars - even if they have no license plates, you can get a make, model, and approximate year. A pedestrian might go any which way after robbing the store; a car has to stick to paved surfaces.
Telling you to step back a few feet could solve the problem.
I had this issue where I had to get a covid test in Orlando and we walked there but they were expecting to come in a car. I ordered an Uber for that, just to sit in the car in a drive through. The whole experience was ridiculous.... The hotel we were staying at was just 5 minutes and we initially said let's just walk.
It doesn't solve the problem of how you pay them (which would be feasibly fixed with contactless methods) or get your food without exposing the employees - very few (if any) drive-through restaurants have a sliding drawer that they can use to exchange payment methods or the ordered food, the way that banks and pharmacies do.
This makes no sense, because what do the car drivers do? You're about three feet away from a person either way. They're handing you cash or a credit card either way. The only difference is that one is sitting in a vehicle with the window open, and the other is on their own two feet. Any difference in "exposure" is completely psychological, maybe due to some perception that the person in the car is "in another room". But there's no less physical contact.
Sure, I'll give a pass for some degree of paranoia at the time -- lots of us were uselessly Clorox(TM)-wiping our groceries -- though, we were well past the peak when this happened -- but at this point we all know that worrying about surfaces is almost completely pointless. So all this "contactless" stuff is just a bunch of technology providers and payment networks trying to ride in opportunistically on peoples' fears.
Which, mercifully, have subsided along with most of the threat.
You're assuming reasonable people and ignoring the original objection of "jumping through the window". A person in a car isn't going to go from a sitting position to jumping through two windows faster than someone standing.
It's not about touching the same things. It's about potential violence.
A person who is sitting in a car has to go through two windows and rise from a sitting position to attack someone inside. A pedestrian can be facing the window directly and grab with both hands.
If a driver pulls a gun, the employee can duck. A pedestrian can lean inside and shoot them anyway.
A person in a car necessarily excludes the possibility that there are accomplices hidden just outside of employee view. Pedestrians, not so much.
> A person in a car can't jump through the service window faster than the employee can close it. A person on foot might.
This just seems paranoid. Anywhere that does have a counter, anyone could theoretically put on a Hamburgler costume and jump over it with a big sack to raid the kitchen. But we don't worry about it, because it's vanishingly unlikely.
You can't run a society if you can't trust people at a basic level. You don't fortify every shop against Viking raids.
I mean, I've been in some Bad Neighborhoods where the shopkeepers all have plexiglass and bars and loudspeakers, but it's not remotely typical.
I'll also grant that there are a handful of places where basic norms have broken down, but I think that's mostly overblown by the Right.
You should be able to just interact with people like a normal human being. And mostly, you can. People have just gotten twitchy for dumb reasons.
As a counterexample. My wife and I did this many times during COVID, and were never discouraged. The only issue was when there were no cars around, we wouldn't trip the metal-detector, and thus nobody would answer the speaker. (Also, it is a little harrowing walking in front of an oversized pickup truck with a hungry driver).
I have owned a car, but that was twenty years ago. I do have a four year old kid, but it's not an issue having him in a seat on the back of my bicycle (or my wife's bicycle), and he's getting near the point where I'm comfortable training him to cycle on the road next to us on his own bicycle (he's been riding it since 3½ on the sidewalk).
Hurray for Dutch bicycle infrastructure.
Financially owning a car makes no sense for us living in a medium sized city in the Netherlands. The author of the opinion piece lives in London, where it makes even less sense to own a car.
I do grocery shopping for a week's supply on a bike and a large cargo backpack [1], you just need a large backpack to enable most of these "too much to do on a bike" situations. I have carried even some small furniture like coffee/side tables with it. Ceiling and standing lamps as well.
If you don't want the weight on your back, paniers are your friend.
We have our week's groceries delivered these days. Although personally I have no problem walking to the supermarket every day if I have to. Or I take the cargo bike, of course.
There's also a rental electric cargo bike in my street for those who don't have one of their own. A great idea.
I do all my grocery shopping online - I have not been to a supermarket in years. I can specify time between 6am and 11pm and have it delivered at that time, for free (there is some minimal amount I have to buy to get free delivery but it is so small that I always get over). I am one of those people who never owned a car and grocery shopping was a bit inconvenient years ago (although for me mostly because I hate standing in lines even if it's just for 45 seconds - there was always some decent store close enough even before online grocery shopping was a thing). Nowadays I would not bother going to the store even if I had a car that runs for free.
The Netherlands really has the traffic systems figured out in general, not just in terms of bikes. Intersections have more throughput because they actually react to traffic, light timing is based on proper science and not rule of thumb, etc.
Makes me really want to tear down the rest of Europe's half assed traffic infrastructure and rebuild it in the same style haha.
I live in Dublin, which is at least in Europe so better than many US cities, but certainly not very good on bike infra. I've never owned a car, and planned to keep it that way until... I got a (large) dog. Kids seem a reason many cite, but at least they're allowed on public transport, and the available child-carrying bike accessories are varied & plentiful. Large pets seem to be the seldom-talked about unsolved problem of a carless world - I was a bit shocked at myself at how many transport challenges I hadn't anticipated when we decided to get a dog.
Kids are one reason for a car. Hobbies are another, winter and water sports come to mind. Commuting to work yet another one, not every workplace is easily reachable by public transportation.
And no, car sharing ot renting is no real replacement.
> Commute, kids or not, a car can even be a necessity.
For most people this is only true in cases of infrastructural deficiency. I know someone who works in film who absolutely needs a car due to the remote nature of film sets, but niche roles like that aren't the "typical" commuter route. If you're commuting to an office, you shouldn't need a car unless there's been an abject failure to service that office with proper transport infrastructure.
> A lot of outdoor sports?
Which outdoor sports? If it's jetskiing, sure: you'll likely need some kind of truck/trailer to transport the jetski. But again, that's niche. I'm not aware of any popular outdoor sports with a strong vehicle need.
Objective failure? Let's take my three last jobs, door to door: currently 40 minutes by car, 1 hour public; the one before 1 hour by car and close to two hours public (and in the opposite direction of the current one); 20 minutes by car, 30 public. Then there were two where public was faster, with roughly one hour public and somewhere between 1.5 and 2 hours by car (traffic can be bitch). All of those were in different directions from where I live, and my spouse works two. Then there are two kids, sports, as I said sports requiring bulky equipment, and all of a sudden are car turns into a really nice thing to have. And no, moving for work is not always an option.
Outdoor sports, with kids: kayaking (we are talking about three of those by now), skiing (you don't use the train carrying skiing gear for three). And then there is solid public transport were I live, easily reachable from home. It is the work end, and the middle point, were things get tricky.
It is nice so that live without a car works, it just doesn't work for me.
I'm not sure how you read my comment but just to clarify, I was referring to the public transport system being substandard. I wasn't implying in any way that this is your fault (nor that of any commuter), the criticism is purely being leveled at public infrastructure planning.
If the public transport journey takes longer than the car journey, the former has room for improvement.
These are all decisions you make. You could live closer to work, work closer to home, or work closer to a train station. In Netherland, lots of office parks are close to train stations exactly for this reason.
Outdoor sports? Depends on which one, and on whether you want to bring your own gear. Cycling doesn't need a car, unless you want to do it in exotic locales. I used to take public transport to where I rented a sailing boat.
Of course every choice comes with trade-offs, but so does a car. It's good to be aware of your options.
I never had a car or a driver's license, but when my wife got pregnant, she insisted I get my license anyway, because she didn't want to be the only one to drive our kids everywhere. I didn't want to drive our kids everywhere anyway, but got my license. Now she always insists on driving whenever we use the car. I still rarely drive.
That said, I use public transport a lot less than I used to. When we visit my dad, we now drive, though my brother still uses the train for that. Our next vacation is by train, though.
> I live in Dublin, which is at least in Europe so better than many US cities, but certainly not very good on bike infra.
I live in Dublin and maybe you're comparing it with Amsterdam, but having as reference 3 EU capitals I've lived in before, Dublin is bike path heaven. 100% of all the area I usually move around has bike paths, and even in areas without, drivers are generally aware of cyclists because of this.
If anything I'd complain about certain hostility towards pedestrians, rather than cyclists. Traffic light timing is abysmal and in some crossroads a pedestrian can be waiting for solid 5 mins while cars have had 2-3 rounds of green lights.
Dublin may be improving but I still find it extremely poor; I'm curious which capitals you're comparing it to.
One extra issues with Dublin is that it's not as simple as absense of bike lanes, there's a lot of very dangerous badly designed bike lanes (put in as an afterthought by mandate to meet some quota without consideration of how a cyclist might safely traverse them) - the whole grand canal area is this: e.g. there's two-way cycle lanes both sides of Beckett bridge with no safe way to access the bridge from either side. Lots of horribly planned similar examples aroundd the city - shared centre lanes, etc.
True that traffic-light management is a nightmare for all users - as someone who now has a car, and (unfortunately) drives a lot in the city, the experience is equally awful as a cyclist, pedestrian & driver.
Me neither: I have lived in 3 continents and about a dozen cities and never owned a car. The only time the idea of owning a car ever came to my mind was when I lived in a small town in the US with almost no public transport and where the nearest grocery store was 40 minutes cycling distance, but I got used to it pretty quickly.
I mean, sure, but going carless is literally not an option for people who live in more dispersed places with poor public transit. Unfortunately that describes nearly all of the U.S. -- only a few American cities have the required infrastructure and density.
You're not wrong exactly, but this mentality gets the causation backwards and induces a kind of helplessness -- "we can't have better transport until we have higher density". But you can build good transport infrastructure first to make the place attractive for densifying development.
A while ago there were some photos that got shared around of a Chinese subway station built out in the middle of nowhere (Chongqing I think?). It was held up as some self-evident absurdity produced by a crazy top-down system. But a few years later the place was thriving with new buildings and businesses, precisely because of the station.
It's not absurd. This how things used to be done and people have just forgotten it! In the American west, railroads came first, towns later. London grew the "Metroland" suburbs out of the northwest railway expansion in the 1920s.
You're not wrong exactly, but this mentality misunderstands how cities work and grow, particularly in the US, and induces a kind of willful blindness to the needs of people today.
Would have been nice if this headline started with "As a person living in a big city, I ditched my car (...)". Now it just feels ignorant towards people living in other areas - as everybody is pointing out in the comments.
I wish we could have a conversation about smaller electric vehicles for the urban landscape rather than it be about bike vs large car, and bus vs large car, etc.
There is a middle ground for personal transportation that is hardly discussed. It's a chicken and egg issue. We need dedicated lanes for smaller, slower personal electronic vehicles.
You can live in London and never miss a car, but try it anywhere outside of big cities and it’ll be a different story. Not to mention the brutal train ticket prices.
So many people in the comments angry at the article author having the privilege of not having to drive, instead of being angry at the people who deny them this privilege.
Y'all need to visit Amsterdam and Rotterdam at least once in your life. One is an old city, the other was (re)built from scratch in 50s and 60s "for cars". Both have great cycling infrastructure and decent public transport. These things are doable.
Good luck to all who are trying to change the unsatisfying status-quo elsewhere.
Never been to Benschop, but I've just checked, and Google says it's 1h 17m driving and 1h 36m on public transport from my place. It's a bike ride to Amsterdam Centraal, then a train to Utrecht Centraal, then a bus. No big deal, if once a week.
Huh? Tried that. Dutch winters are pretty mild, still no big deal.
That being said, I used to live in Moscow before, and did have a daily 1.5h bus-and-metro commute there for a while. Not perfect, and quite anger-inducing because of the "tragedy of commons" situation: this commute would have been 1h long, if not less, if the bus didn't spend time in the traffic jams created by all those nice people in cars. But well, nowadays buses in Moscow have dedicated lanes, and that neighborhood got its own metro line, so it's getting better.
now do that four times during high summer and you forgot your keys once at you mum's place and you notice it only after half the distance but your mother goes to sleep in half an hour and may not be disturbed thereafter - and then report back o.O
> Good luck to all who are trying to change the unsatisfying status-quo elsewhere.
Thank you. I think it's important to realize that changing the status quo requires people who stay and vote for that change, as happened in the Netherlands and elsewhere. People who run away to some place where it's already better, or grew up that way and never knew anything else, generate zero net change.
Whether or not you can live without a car depends on the person and the area, so it is difficult to generalize.
I have lived in Seoul for more than 30 years, and this city has excellent public transportation and severe traffic congestion, so the utility of having a car is not great. For example, it takes about 50 minutes to get home by public transportation after work, but it usually takes 1 hour and 20 minutes by car.
In addition, I have to pay an annual insurance of $400 and a tax of $130, even if I don't use it even 1 km a year. And I actually don't use my car very often. I usually use it once a month, and my annual mileage is no more than 2000 km.
Even so, I haven't sold my car yet. This is because it is much more efficient to use a car sometimes. But I don't know if it's right to spend hundreds of dollars every year like this.
This is something that I don't think gets brought up enough. Living in a city with great public transport and bike infrastructure is excellent (especially if you like to walk and cycle).
The key sentences buried towards the end which completely refute the headline as a useful guideline for the majority:
I also realise that, living in London ... Bus, tube and rail services are all on my doorstep. For me, giving up a car has been a different proposition to pretty much anywhere else in the country.
London has brilliant public transport and is completely unrepresentative of the rest of the UK.
I live in a town in the South West of UK and the nearest train station is more than 45 mins drive away, no direct bus link with our nearest city, unreliable local buses, nothing in the way of cycle lanes, virtually no taxis, no uber etc, etc - basically 0% public transport.
It's amazing how far out of touch those in London (i.e. politicians) are with the rest of the UK.
Today is a holiday in my state in Germany and being absent minded I realized too late. If I had a car, I could just hope in and drive somewhere in the forest and have a small hike. To do the same with public transport, one needs to plan ahead and time everything perfectly. For example, the bus to take you back after the end of the hiking trip is only at the bus stop every hour, and only up till 5pm.
And owning a car does not mean you have to drive it to work everyday. I will probably buy a car in the near future, but I'll probably still commute with public transport. At least as long as I still live in a city.
EDIT: If everyone ditched their cars, the housing crisis that is currently happening in literally every city in the developed world, will only get much worse.
Renting a car has exactly the same drawback as public transport. You have to plan ahead each time, and there are the added logistics of picking up and dropping the car after use.
That's true of course, but renting an EV for like 20€ a day is way waaaay cheaper than buying/maintaining/registering a car if you only need it for occasional trips, or even taking a cab for shorter journeys. Like I don't buy an airplane if I'm gonna take 3 flights per year.
It is cheaper, not "waaay" cheaper, but it comes at the same cost of having to plan ahead, which really bothers me, because I am quite sporadic in how I plan my day.
Well the price difference obviously depends on the number of days you actually need a car, but afaik it doesn't take too much planning ahead to rent through a car sharing app these days. Anyway I asked GPT 4 with browsing to make a ballpark calculation for Germany to see roughly when it becomes more cost effective:
Based on the average costs obtained:
The average price of a new car in Germany is €37,790 1 .
The average depreciation of a new car in Germany after 36 months is 41.1% 2 .
The average cost of car insurance in Germany is around €250 per year 3 .
The average cost of vehicle tax in Germany is around €100 per year 4 .
The average cost of a car inspection in Germany is €120 every 2 years 4 .
The average cost of a parking permit in Germany (considering big cities) is €20.40 valid for 2 years 4 .
The average cost of a rental car in Germany is $55 per day, $307 per week ($44 per day), and $1,318 per month ($44 per day) 5 .
To make a comparison, we need to consider the cost of owning a car for a year versus renting a car for a number of days in a year.
The cost of owning a car per year would be:
Depreciation: €37,790 * 41.1% / 3 years = €5,168.59 per year
Insurance: €250 per year
Vehicle tax: €100 per year
Inspection: €120 / 2 years = €60 per year
Parking permit: €20.40 / 2 years = €10.20 per year
Adding up these costs gives a total cost of ownership of approximately €5,589.79 per year.
We also need to consider that while the daily rental cost is $55, the weekly and monthly rates are cheaper per day, at $44. To make a comparison, let's use the weekly rate, and assume it applies for any number of days.
Assuming an exchange rate of 1.12 USD/EUR (as of my training data cut-off in September 2021), the cost of renting a car for a day would be $44 * 1.12 = €49.28.
Therefore, the break-even point in days of car usage per year would be:
€5,589.79 / €49.28 = approximately 113 days
So if you plan to use a car for more than 113 days in a year, it would be cheaper to buy a car instead of renting, based on these average costs.
I mean 100 days? That's like going for a trip almost every third day of the year. Absolute madness to buy a car if you're not using it to drive to work every day if this is correct. I would presume that the average price is a bit skewed with high end cars moving it away from the median, but the car sharing prices I see are also more like 20-35€ per day, so that probably balances out.
> EDIT: If everyone ditched their cars, the housing crisis that is currently happening in literally every city in the developed world, will only get much worse.
Or more funding will go towards public transportation. There will be more room left from parking for new housing. Less money will be spent on infrastructure maintenance. City planners can work on walkable cities instead of drivable cities. Cities will be quieter and safer.
At the risk of repeating myself in every thread about urbanism, in asian megacities like Tokyo nature is a train ride away, at any time, any day. In Europe we've just been bad about planning and building infrastructure.
The US is even worse. It was entirely planned for people with cars. Some stores you don't even have a way to get to go in by walking, you have to go on the road at some point.
That's nice, but you still only saw a small bit around that particular mountain of of thousands that exist in japan, and you probably weren't exactly alone if there is a bus route from the city to there. It is not what I image when somebody says nature.
We typically went 100 - 200km on those bus routes, so we covered a few hundred square kilometres. Sure the start & end of those routes was more populated, but they drove through lots of unpopulated areas. Being mountainous Japan has lots of those.
We often went without seeing a single person once we got off the bus until we got to our destination (usually an onsen).
I don't claim to know all the Europe but I would disagree at least when it comes to countries I know pretty well - Czechia and Spain. Maybe not as great as Tokyo (where I've never been) but pretty decent. Comparing Czechia (where I currently live) to the US is not fair because we are much smaller and densely populated but one thing I like here is that I do not need a car - public transportation is great (incomparably better than in the US) and I can easily get anywhere I need. Sure, I cannot go to every small village at 3am but I have never needed that - the things I actually need require very little planning. Even the random unplanned trips the parent mentions; when the weather is nice and I have nothing to do, I just look at my phone while eating breakfast and look up the connection to where I want to go - usually there is a bus or train in an hour and I have just enough time to finish eating and go to the station.
judging from your username this seems to be a problem concerning you significantly.
as a car owner who got a car _specifically_ for that reason i can tell you that you don't want to visit a german forest on a holiday. if you happen to have a big forest in an acceptable driving distance you might want to take a chance but there will be people all over the place. plus loud motorcycles you hear from 2km distance and millionaires enjoying a flight with a cessna.
I camp and go backpacking too much to get rid of my car. Sure, I could take a bus that goes out to the spot once a week or so, but does that bus let me take a canoe, my dog, and all of my equipment and drive me 15 miles up a logging road to a less-used trail? Probably not.
I'm in luck: I live in the Netherlands. Even though I have two teenage kids, I do not need to own a car, as I found out when I sold mine a few months back.
My youngest literally said: I'm so glad we got rid of the car, because using trains is way more fun.
Using the public transport at age 12 is far more empowering than sitting in the back of a car.
I went without a car for decades, even in the first few years of having children, and reckon I saved >GBP200K as a result (plus kept in better shape etc.). But that was with the benefit of:
- living in cities with good public transport (as a child I lived in some remote areas and appreciate that it would be pretty much impossible without a car).
- living in the UK (some countries are even more difficult, see e.g. the food bank lines in the US where you need a car even though you can't afford food[0]).
BTW, hadn't seen that Thatcher quote before: "If a man finds himself a passenger on a bus having attained the age of 26, he can count himself a failure in life."[1] but it only re-inforces my view that, if you are ever in doubt about which viewpoint to take on any subject, simply find out what Thatcher believed (or Thatcherites believe), and the good and correct viewpoint will be the exact opposite:-)
there are many reasons to not own a car but if you can afford it then having a car is always better than not having a car.
i bought my first car in my mid-30s. if you'd have asked me a year earlier i'd have assured you that i don't need a car and don't intend to own one ever.
if i needed one i'd just rent it. but taking an hour long trip to the airport or somewhere else for the rental station got old after a while. especially the stress of having to be back at a certain time. planning traffic issues into the schedule. because overrunning the rented duration can come with disproportional cost.
then came corona, the lockdowns, restricted public transportation and i started to crave for easy access to nature while at the same time living in the city. and i don't mean crowded parks. actual forests where you are alone. away from cars.
you might say i got a car because i hate cars and i still do.
but a car provides me with a freedom that now seems so obvious that people who claim they don't want a car seem almost brainwashed.
especially because nobody says that having car means you have to use it all the time. i'd still prefer to go to work either by public transportation or by bike or even by foot. my car is standing somewhere about 5 days a week. but those 2 days i need the car or my options are limited.
as a matter of fact i bought a car because i prefer the bicycle. at first i was taking the train for more remote bike tours. but taking the train with a bike in germany is torture. it wastes a lot of time. confronts you with problems like no place left, what ticket do i need, where do i get it, train not even coming and so on.
now - i just hook up the bike and off i go.
this you-don't-need-a-car thing really feels like some manipulative agenda with the intention to reeducate the simple people towards believing it and also accepting it - because no car is going to be the future for most of us - that's already been decided ("you'll own nothing and be happy"). i'm still looking forward to this future as well as i anticipate it with horror because i fear it's not going to be so great having your movement restricted. and of course those who decide those policies will continue owning and using cars.
i'd totally ban cars from the city and certainly favor a tempolimit of 130 on the autobahn but it will need solutions that still allow people to flee from the city if they feel like it or spontaneously visit relatives whose villages can't be reached by public transportation.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 232 ms ] threadAnd, absolutely, tons of people live in London without cars. Like you say, it's incredibly common.
When my wife's car got totaled, I let her have mine, and rather than drive my truck every day, got out my daughter's bicycle for my 7 mile (one-way) commute.
Big improvement in quality-of-life, but with some caveats:
- Weather Underground's reports are quite accurate, but I had to check 3 of them each morning to be certain of avoiding a wetting (I'd drive the truck when it rained)
- maintenance was a concern, but not a big deal --- just did an "ABC" check: https://bikeleague.org/videos/basic-bike-check/ and at need, pumped up tires at a gas station along the way --- eventually got a patch kit and small pump, which was fortuitous, since shortly after had my first (and only) flat
- at 40 degrees F gloves become a necessity, but I managed to ride with the temperature as low as 17 F in pretty much normal (old) street clothes, added a heavy pair of pants, scarf, and knit cap
It was a big win health-wise --- when I had to get an annual check-up to get a reduction in my insurance rates the doctor's comment was quite flattering, "I have patients who are half your age, twice your weight, and not one-quarter as healthy as you are.".
Started commuting w/ my wife when I changed jobs and rather miss the bike.
Sounds like a lead-in to a whiteboard interview question. =)
I did this for a while when I was first married and I missed it for a very long time after we stopped. It was a 30 minute commute each way and gave us an hour a day to catch up and just be together.
> but I had to check 3 of them each morning to be certain of avoiding a wetting (I'd drive the truck when it rained)
You were just 1 step away of discovering the magic of weatherproof clothes for biking, feeling impervious to the elements just because you got the right set of clothes is quasi magical, you simply don't care if it's raining or not, you can bike and not get wet.
Completely recommend if you ever get the chance to go back to biking as a day-to-day commute activity :)
I wouldn't do that with a really nice bike (more because of the likelihood of theft than rain), but there is nothing wrong with letting your bike get a bit wet.
There's no need to go for a belt-drive just for weatherproofing sake, a good chain oil is enough to keep your chain going pretty well.
I bike around 8-10k km per year on this bike for the past 7-8 years, mostly just doing the basics of maintenance: change brake cables and tubing, change brake pads, clean and oil the chain. The only times I needed to do more than that was after forgetting the bike outside when a snowstorm came, that can fuck you up: tyres cracking, chain rusting quickly, don't recommend it.
I would love to make an active, healthy commute part of my day, but I'm worried I would only reap the benefits temporarily until I am pancaked by an Audi driven by a moron trying to catch up in Facebook.
It's like driving --- ride defensively, assume you're invisible to everyone, and plan accordingly. One notable option is that at need, one can dismount and walk the bike across tricky intersections.
Not related to cars/bikes -- how common is it for people to get "annual checkup" from doctor? Does everyone do it or does it only start in middle age? Being young and healthy I'm ambivalent about it because if there's nothing obviously wrong with you, you risk getting mis-diagnosed with something and suffering iatrogenic harm.
I can't be the only one here who imagined a grown man riding one of those small, pink bikes for little children with training wheels and streamers on the end of the handlebars...
Sorry, I just had to say it...
Since then I went quite overboard with:
https://www.pedalroom.com/bike/montague-swissbike-x50-blacke...
I'm currently regretting not getting a Twicycle https://twicycle.com and am debating on whether I'm willing to save up for a Helix: https://helix.ca
I just bought a new car. Used it to go to the mountains and went hiking/camping. On the way back I visited family and brought over some furniture. In a couple of weeks I'll probably take it to a remote bit of the coast and enjoy the sunshine.
Tomorrow I get the tube to go to Oxford Street and do some shopping, the car is worse for those sorts of things, just as public transport is pretty bad for some things.
I only drive it a few hundred miles a month, so owning it is really expensive given that it's a $1000+ payment each month. I don't NEED it, but doing some of the outdoor activities I enjoy is difficult without a car.
For example, I enjoy paragliding. The closest site is about a 20 mile drive from here. Decisions on whether or not to fly are often last minute, so I wouldn't want to rent a car the day before because chance to fly is often 50-50. It's not feasible to rent a car a couple hours before I want to leave that day.
I'm pretty reliant on my kettle for making coffee in the morning, it's not really a big deal to become adjusted to having a certain standard of living.
Do you mean that I might move home to somewhere where the car is more of a necessity and then feel it a burden that I can't walk to places?
At this stage of my life I probably wouldn't move to a place that didn't have public transport, unless car use is heavily restricted in London (I'd rather have both, but if I had to choose, the car is far superior to public transport in my everyday life).
There's really only one good thing to break the rule for and that's a house. But people regularly break the rule for cars. This is part of the car trap. It's one thing to build a lifestyle around a kettle, it's quite another to build it around a car.
The dependence can start with moving somewhere. Or you could start building commitments and habits that require it, such as taking a job that is far away. That and you rapidly lose fitness and regress into a blob-like form that is no longer capable of locomotion. It's remarkable how differently people react to "walking a mile". To those who walk it's nothing. It can even be done with 20kg of baggage if necessary. To those who drive it's a long way.
Cars are nice. But you can have too much of a good thing. It's important to stay aware of it, that's all.
I don't really have issues with that stuff, if anything the car helps me keep fit. A recent example would be that I went to visit family and the gym where they live would have taken 3 hours round trip via public transport for me to get to, so the car allowed me to get a workout in.
I also cycle a ton to get places. I just also use the car for like, all of the things that can't reasonably be done via bike/train, which are a lot. Just because I live in London doesn't mean I want to spend all of my time here.
I pay maybe £2-3K a year on all car costs (excepting fuel) so it's not really a big deal. I don't get fancy new cars, to me it's a tool, it's gonna get dirty and scratched up.
But then I totally see that for most people, the path of least resistance is always there.
How nice to live in the perfect situation of no young kids, close transport and services and no need for frequent longer commutes away from transport.
Then the casual comment that his wife will "just use taxis."
I have a feeling he could afford the £250
It's The Guardian – not the first time, certainly won't be the last. See also:
Certainly living in city with good public transport is a large factor. By why can’t we build more places like that, and making living car free easy and practical for everyone? It’s ultimately cheaper and healthier for both the individuals and society as a whole, why hate on those that want see more people being able to benefit from such a lifestyle?
As for taxis, in London, the money you save on fuel, tax, congestion charges, maintenance, insurance etc etc which all come with car ownership, will pay for a lot of taxi rides each year.
Also urban fatalities of people on bikes is driven almost entirely by people driving cars. In what world do we look at the problem of cars killing people on bikes and go “well obviously the bikes are the problem”. All the stats in this area clearly indicate that drivers are far more often at fault in these collisions than those on bikes. Same again goes for pedestrians, cars kill pedestrians regardless of how careful pedestrians are.
> Also urban fatalities of people on bikes is driven almost entirely by people driving cars. In what world do we look at the problem of cars killing people on bikes and go “well obviously the bikes are the problem”. All the stats in this area clearly indicate that drivers are far more often at fault in these collisions than those on bikes. Same again goes for pedestrians, cars kill pedestrians regardless of how careful pedestrians are.
No one is making this argument. We’re debating what mode of transit is safest for one’s children, not in what way we should remake society.
[0]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...
Transit shouldn’t be an arms race, we should be working towards making transit safe regardless of the mode of transport, not putting everyone in armoured boxes.
> No one is making this argument. We’re debating what mode of transit is safest for one’s children, not in what way we should remake society.
No, we’re discussing the validity of car free living and its value. Bring the argument that riding a bike is dangerous for children means we should put every child in car is a silly and intellectually dishonest argument. Just like the argument that the solution to “bad guys with guns” is more “good guys with guns”, when the answer is clearly fewer guns. The same applies to cars, the answer to children being killed by drivers isn’t “more cars for kids” it’s fewer cars and safer roads.
Probably not causal as you're suggesting. It's probably something like "if you have the money to live near your workplace, you can probably afford great healthcare, a gym membership, great healthy food options, and other things that cause one to live longer".
> Transit shouldn’t be an arms race, we should be working towards making transit safe regardless of the mode of transport, not putting everyone in armoured boxes.
This is a straw man. I'm not advocating an arms race or "putting everyone in armoured boxes", I'm saying that a rational decision for individuals who prize their children's safety is to not allow them to cycle as a primary form of transit.
> No, we’re discussing the validity of car free living and its value. Bring the argument that riding a bike is dangerous for children means we should put every child in car is a silly and intellectually dishonest argument. Just like the argument that the solution to “bad guys with guns” is more “good guys with guns”, when the answer is clearly fewer guns. The same applies to cars, the answer to children being killed by drivers isn’t “more cars for kids” it’s fewer cars and safer roads.
Respectfully, I think you're mistaken, the comment you responded to was "I’m not sure I’d be comfortable with a young child on a bike." This is clearly not a "how should we retailor society?" claim, it's a "in our existing society, what is safest for my kid?" claim. If you manifest a society in which cycling is comparably safe to driving, I'll send my kid to school by bike.
If you’re just going to cherry pick comments from a thread chain, and ignore the rest of the discussion, then there isn’t much point discussing anything with you.
You are experiencing pushback because not everyone agrees with your assertion that
> It's ultimately cheaper and healthier for both the individuals and society as a whole
It’s also kind of self evident. How can forcing everyone to buy, maintain and drag around 2 tons of machinery everywhere ever be cheaper and more efficient than using the legs you already have? Obviously there are those that physically need mechanical assistance to move around, but they’re the minority, we can accommodate them without forcing mechanical dependency on everyone.
There are more ways to live that in single family homes in suburbs miles from everything you need to live (like work, food and entertainment). Why not live near all stuff you need for life? Wouldn’t that be much cheaper, more efficient, easier and generally just nicer?
Plus, real estate costs aren't exactly flat everywhere.
Only in the U.S. is such an arrangement unusual, and where living miles from everything is normal. The U.S. is like this by choice, US zoning laws make any other way of living practically illegal. The U.S. could choose to do something different, or at least give people the freedom to try something different. It is meant to be the land of the free, and the free market after all.
This is true for new development but converting existing infrastructure is massively expensive and politically fraught. I believe people have become convinced cars are bad but haven’t truly realized the sheer amount of money and time it would take to redesign and reconstruct cities and suburbs in the US.
I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done. Just that the effort required will take generations, perhaps centuries, to actually come to fruition. In the meantime people shouldn’t be exasperated when wondering why we don’t just redevelop our cities.
That isn’t to argue that the U.S. can pull off the same trick in the same manner, but it clearly demonstrates that is possible to achieve in a single generation. A big part to achieving that change was simply changing laws to make it possible, and replacing car infrastructure with shared car and cycle infrastructure as part of the normal infrastructure replacement process.
In the U.S. today, it’s almost impossible to build anything except suburbs of single family home due to zoning laws. So a good first step for the U.S. would simply be changing zoning laws to make it possible to even build dense urban areas with transit, rather than only urban sprawl.
I'd lose on the sleep getting up 2 hours earlier, but gain on fitness walking a 1/4 mile to the bus stop.
When you add up all of these decently-sized inconveniences, it just doesn’t make sense to do away with your car except perhaps in certain ideal situations (healthy, no kids, urban/great public transit, close to work, not traveling out of the area to visit family often, etc). The best I can realistically do is family car + bike.
EDIT: I'm getting throttled; can't respond to any more comments for a few hours.
I think the sensible thing (assuming affording the car in the first place is fine), is to make good decisions about when to use a car or bike or walk or use transit. It doesn't have to be binary, much as everything except gender seems to be these days.
What's infuriating about these all or nothing articles is the exclusion of "car lite" approaches.
Over time and kind of slowly, my wife and I realized we really only needed one car. When the market moved around to make selling one of them way way too attractive, we did so (it was an older Porsche, and the market for those went UTTERLY NUTS -- I had it for nearly 20 years and sold it for about 85% what I paid for it).
That was really fine until she took a different job that was no longer public-transit friendly (ironically, it's a job working for the city). I think most couples would've sighed and bought a second car, but we really, really didn't want to -- so we bought a small motorcycle instead. While not suitable for the freeways, provides JUST ENOUGH supplemental mobility that the idea of a second car seems absurd now (especially given the price; the bike was $4800 and gets 80mpg).
(We DID think about ebikes, but they cost almost as much without providing nearly the utility.)
> "Yes, you can teach your kids to ride, but cycling is still much more dangerous than driving."
> "Yes, you can rent a car or get an uber as needed, but it’s far more convenient to just jump in one’s own car."
> "Yes, you can prepare for really cold or precipitous weather to a degree, but it’s way more convenient to simply not have to monitor the weather all the time and tote around your extra cycling clothes."
> "And there’s really nothing you can do about hot weather unless your destination has a shower or you can otherwise make do with being sweaty."
> "The best I can realistically do is family car + bike."
I don't think I've ever seen or heard anyone before portraying the weather and transporting oneself without a car as such an ordeal and struggle. Though, if you life well outside the city I can understand the position.
When I grew up (in what was then a ~230k pop. city) only one single kid in my class had parents that cared about having a car, and all of us managed just fine getting to and from school, friends and various activities by foot, bicycle and public transport. We survived, and we turned out OK - perhaps more than OK, with a bit of the fortitude of not expecting or requiring constant conveniences or suffering the perspective that any transport without car is "enormously inconvenient".
You probably live in a pretty mild climate. In my part of the planet, temperatures range from -20F to 110F and we get a decent amount of precipitation. Moreover, the average commute exceeds 10 miles, and low population density means public transit options are at best poor but more likely nonexistent.
Interestingly, even in countries famous for their cycling infrastructure, car ownership (and average car weight) is increasing. It seems it's hard to beat the convenience of driving. E.g.:
* Netherlands: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358798695_The_wides...
* Denmark: https://backend.orbit.dtu.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/234032816...
Whenever someone reacts strongly just because someone else share their personal experience of different life choices whether it's ditching the car or going vegetarian or anything progressive I can't help think it's their own guilt speaking.
> whether it's ditching the car or going vegetarian or anything progressive I can't help think it's their own guilt speaking
As a progressive, I find that sort of attitude a little grating. Can't imagine what it's like for conservatives.
(Disclosure: enjoying this kind of privileges, I ditched my car in the early 2000s, without regret. But I can see that this is only an option for a happy minority, nowadays.)
The time I'm able to go car free varies on location and climate, but there's still not the required infrastructure to make this a viable option for everyday life outside of a few select metro areas. It's a real shame, because the positive benefits experienced are real and quite noticeable, even in a short timespan.
I successfully lived in Atlanta, of all places, using nothing but an e-bike and public transit for an entire year, with a Lyft here or there as necessary. I got into better shape than I have been since I was a teenager too.
Biking in rainy sub-zero temps is a bit of PITA, but it builds character, and honestly there's something charming and invigorating about it if you've got the right gear.
Would love to do it again, and in fact am planning to at some point.
how does that work exactly? I've never seen rain when temps are below zero.
This is a huge problem in many places, though particularly bad in the USA from my experience of being there (a week in Austin, TX).
It seems that the UK is following this model outside of London, unfortunately. I live in a relatively compact city (to the point you can walk to the city centre from the outer suburbs in about an hour) but the funding cuts to public transport are making it less and less feasible to live without a car.
Inter-city travel, while totally possible by train, is also going the same way. Cancellations and late trains seem to be the norm (even before the strikes) and the cost is insane. I quickly costed up a trip I drove a couple of weeks ago: £65 in diesel or £200 for the train (2 people + dog) and a lot of inconvenience.
Don't get me wrong, I'm 100% in favour of active travel and being able to live without a car. I want to see governments invest in this properly. If you follow the money, however, governments invest massively in car infrastructure, so people, unfortunately, drive cars everywhere.
On the other end of it though wealthier people are designing boutique neighborhoods now.
This is just one example but I understand there's similar concepts going on elsewhere:
https://thehill.com/changing-america/524069-sprawling-city-g...
https://culdesac.com/
So maybe wealthy people wanting to live car free will push the design around more "closed" neighborhoods and limit the need for cars.
Regardless I agree with you and don't really yet see a way for (American here) placing enough incentives to promote car-less neighborhoods or at least, less cars. Outside of the U.S. maybe easier to shift that.
Something I've considered doing since I live in a relatively urban area is just using rental cars when I need to do a longer trip and leave getting things to delivery services when weather or time makes walking unfavorable. Which, if those things combined is less than what I currently spend on having car should get me ahead.
Then I got a dog.
I want to take her hiking, or to the dog park, so I got a car. "I'll still ride", I told myself.
But taking her for walks (they're pretty long walks), while not as good as my bike rides, is just enough exercise that going on a long bike ride just doesn't feel like the right thing.
I still ride occasionally, like when I'm stuck on a code problem and need to clear my head about it, but it's not like it was. I miss it, but I also love my dog.
There's really no getting around this. Outside of many cities, the push for everything to get bigger (stores, medical providers, etc) has pushed everything to the outskirts of towns where space exists and is cheaper.
I've lived a total of about 10 years in a US city without a car. To the great surprise of friends that asked me about it, I found it liberating, not constraining. The ability to go places and a) be able to stop and explore along the way and b) not have to worry about where to put the car was very freeing. There were infrequent times where I did need a vehicle, but ZipCar or a short term rental solved that issue.
I lived in Mountain View, CA for six months to try a relocation experiment and was quite happy with my bike and using public transportation or renting a car as needed. It certainly helped that my employer had a shuttle service for rainy days and the availability of same day shipping from major retailers and Amazon didn't hurt. I was pretty impressed with how easy it was to do overall, though.
Moving back to my home in the midwest, it would be completely unsustainable and dangerous here. But I've found some trails and still get out on the bike regularly.
I know a lot of families living a similar 0-1 car life here too.
I can get to beaches, forests, mountains by cycling or taking the train there with the right level of infrastructure to accommodate me and my family while still feeling in nature.
Moving closer would be maybe 30k in up front taxes and expenses and it's a HCoL area, so, now, it's probably at least another 100k in mortgage interest, even if I hammer the repayments at double my current monthly outgoings.
The train also takes 2 hours each way, plus 20 minutes walking.
If move if I could, and originally planned to when I took the job. I can't afford it now. I'd cycle if I could (and I used to, for years, at a different job, over 20 miles a day). I'd take public transport if I could. In fact, a promised train timetable cadence increase factored into moving into where I live now. It was quietly cancelled years ago.
[1]: while I think stamp duty is a regressive tax that also prevents labour mobility and is in general a bad idea, it's especially bad when combined with inflating house prices (price to earnings ratio is now the highest in recorded history) that push everything around into higher bands.
[2]: I actually don't really think the current interest rates themselves are necessarily bad, there are benefits to higher rates. But housing being so incredibly expensive makes such rates punishing. 6% on 100k is one thing. 6% on 250k is very different.
[3]: funnily enough, though my current commute passes only a couple of miles of suburbs and the rest of it is motorway ending in an extra-urban business park, the public transport option involves trains going directly through urban cores of two cities and past rather a lot more houses. In fact, a different rail line goes within 100m of me: so why do I need to listen to those commuters? (Again, I don't actually think this).
When comparing salaries, I always factored in the duration and cost of the commute. Jobs that were further away that paid a little more turned out not to be worth the extra pay when I took these factors into consideration.
Wear on the car is real and annoying, but it's still no more expensive than the train would be (and much faster). Funnily enough, working from home here and there isn't always cheaper by train: they ding you 40% of the weekly ticket price and nearly 60% of the monthly if you want a carnet of tickets (which expire within about 6 weeks). Season tickets also don't include some routes.
It helps massively. I've only been in the US for 4 months of my life, doing everything by car is horrible.
On a conference in Galveston TA, someone told me they went to a drive through funeral... I saw drive through pharmacies and drive through ATMs. It's a special place.
That scene in the first Rambo, when he gets "picked up" by the police while just walking along a road, is fairly realistic. You're not supposed to be walking along roads, if you do there must be something wrong with you.
https://www.thekitchn.com/the-drive-thru-daiquiri-a-weird-ye...
Cameras also work better against cars - even if they have no license plates, you can get a make, model, and approximate year. A pedestrian might go any which way after robbing the store; a car has to stick to paved surfaces.
I had this issue where I had to get a covid test in Orlando and we walked there but they were expecting to come in a car. I ordered an Uber for that, just to sit in the car in a drive through. The whole experience was ridiculous.... The hotel we were staying at was just 5 minutes and we initially said let's just walk.
Sure, I'll give a pass for some degree of paranoia at the time -- lots of us were uselessly Clorox(TM)-wiping our groceries -- though, we were well past the peak when this happened -- but at this point we all know that worrying about surfaces is almost completely pointless. So all this "contactless" stuff is just a bunch of technology providers and payment networks trying to ride in opportunistically on peoples' fears.
Which, mercifully, have subsided along with most of the threat.
A person who is sitting in a car has to go through two windows and rise from a sitting position to attack someone inside. A pedestrian can be facing the window directly and grab with both hands.
If a driver pulls a gun, the employee can duck. A pedestrian can lean inside and shoot them anyway.
A person in a car necessarily excludes the possibility that there are accomplices hidden just outside of employee view. Pedestrians, not so much.
This just seems paranoid. Anywhere that does have a counter, anyone could theoretically put on a Hamburgler costume and jump over it with a big sack to raid the kitchen. But we don't worry about it, because it's vanishingly unlikely.
You can't run a society if you can't trust people at a basic level. You don't fortify every shop against Viking raids.
I mean, I've been in some Bad Neighborhoods where the shopkeepers all have plexiglass and bars and loudspeakers, but it's not remotely typical.
I'll also grant that there are a handful of places where basic norms have broken down, but I think that's mostly overblown by the Right.
You should be able to just interact with people like a normal human being. And mostly, you can. People have just gotten twitchy for dumb reasons.
Hurray for Dutch bicycle infrastructure.
Financially owning a car makes no sense for us living in a medium sized city in the Netherlands. The author of the opinion piece lives in London, where it makes even less sense to own a car.
If you don't want the weight on your back, paniers are your friend.
[1] https://chromeindustries.com/products/barrage-pro-backpack
There's also a rental electric cargo bike in my street for those who don't have one of their own. A great idea.
Makes me really want to tear down the rest of Europe's half assed traffic infrastructure and rebuild it in the same style haha.
I live in Dublin, which is at least in Europe so better than many US cities, but certainly not very good on bike infra. I've never owned a car, and planned to keep it that way until... I got a (large) dog. Kids seem a reason many cite, but at least they're allowed on public transport, and the available child-carrying bike accessories are varied & plentiful. Large pets seem to be the seldom-talked about unsolved problem of a carless world - I was a bit shocked at myself at how many transport challenges I hadn't anticipated when we decided to get a dog.
And no, car sharing ot renting is no real replacement.
It requires good public transport, and bicycles, of course.
But merely 'kids' is in no way a 'reson for a car'.
For most people this is only true in cases of infrastructural deficiency. I know someone who works in film who absolutely needs a car due to the remote nature of film sets, but niche roles like that aren't the "typical" commuter route. If you're commuting to an office, you shouldn't need a car unless there's been an abject failure to service that office with proper transport infrastructure.
> A lot of outdoor sports?
Which outdoor sports? If it's jetskiing, sure: you'll likely need some kind of truck/trailer to transport the jetski. But again, that's niche. I'm not aware of any popular outdoor sports with a strong vehicle need.
Outdoor sports, with kids: kayaking (we are talking about three of those by now), skiing (you don't use the train carrying skiing gear for three). And then there is solid public transport were I live, easily reachable from home. It is the work end, and the middle point, were things get tricky.
It is nice so that live without a car works, it just doesn't work for me.
If the public transport journey takes longer than the car journey, the former has room for improvement.
I’ve tried load a kayak onto a cargo bike, it went terribly with anything larger than a very small play boat.
Outdoor sports? Depends on which one, and on whether you want to bring your own gear. Cycling doesn't need a car, unless you want to do it in exotic locales. I used to take public transport to where I rented a sailing boat.
Of course every choice comes with trade-offs, but so does a car. It's good to be aware of your options.
That said, I use public transport a lot less than I used to. When we visit my dad, we now drive, though my brother still uses the train for that. Our next vacation is by train, though.
I live in Dublin and maybe you're comparing it with Amsterdam, but having as reference 3 EU capitals I've lived in before, Dublin is bike path heaven. 100% of all the area I usually move around has bike paths, and even in areas without, drivers are generally aware of cyclists because of this.
If anything I'd complain about certain hostility towards pedestrians, rather than cyclists. Traffic light timing is abysmal and in some crossroads a pedestrian can be waiting for solid 5 mins while cars have had 2-3 rounds of green lights.
One extra issues with Dublin is that it's not as simple as absense of bike lanes, there's a lot of very dangerous badly designed bike lanes (put in as an afterthought by mandate to meet some quota without consideration of how a cyclist might safely traverse them) - the whole grand canal area is this: e.g. there's two-way cycle lanes both sides of Beckett bridge with no safe way to access the bridge from either side. Lots of horribly planned similar examples aroundd the city - shared centre lanes, etc.
True that traffic-light management is a nightmare for all users - as someone who now has a car, and (unfortunately) drives a lot in the city, the experience is equally awful as a cyclist, pedestrian & driver.
“Enjoying coffee with my husband!” And gets replies about how not everyone has the privilege of affording coffee and being married.
A while ago there were some photos that got shared around of a Chinese subway station built out in the middle of nowhere (Chongqing I think?). It was held up as some self-evident absurdity produced by a crazy top-down system. But a few years later the place was thriving with new buildings and businesses, precisely because of the station.
It's not absurd. This how things used to be done and people have just forgotten it! In the American west, railroads came first, towns later. London grew the "Metroland" suburbs out of the northwest railway expansion in the 1920s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit-oriented_development
Build it and they will come!
There is a middle ground for personal transportation that is hardly discussed. It's a chicken and egg issue. We need dedicated lanes for smaller, slower personal electronic vehicles.
Y'all need to visit Amsterdam and Rotterdam at least once in your life. One is an old city, the other was (re)built from scratch in 50s and 60s "for cars". Both have great cycling infrastructure and decent public transport. These things are doable.
Good luck to all who are trying to change the unsatisfying status-quo elsewhere.
So what's your question?
That being said, I used to live in Moscow before, and did have a daily 1.5h bus-and-metro commute there for a while. Not perfect, and quite anger-inducing because of the "tragedy of commons" situation: this commute would have been 1h long, if not less, if the bus didn't spend time in the traffic jams created by all those nice people in cars. But well, nowadays buses in Moscow have dedicated lanes, and that neighborhood got its own metro line, so it's getting better.
Still not sure what exactly you are implying.
Thank you. I think it's important to realize that changing the status quo requires people who stay and vote for that change, as happened in the Netherlands and elsewhere. People who run away to some place where it's already better, or grew up that way and never knew anything else, generate zero net change.
I have lived in Seoul for more than 30 years, and this city has excellent public transportation and severe traffic congestion, so the utility of having a car is not great. For example, it takes about 50 minutes to get home by public transportation after work, but it usually takes 1 hour and 20 minutes by car.
In addition, I have to pay an annual insurance of $400 and a tax of $130, even if I don't use it even 1 km a year. And I actually don't use my car very often. I usually use it once a month, and my annual mileage is no more than 2000 km.
Even so, I haven't sold my car yet. This is because it is much more efficient to use a car sometimes. But I don't know if it's right to spend hundreds of dollars every year like this.
It is even better if you have a car.
I also realise that, living in London ... Bus, tube and rail services are all on my doorstep. For me, giving up a car has been a different proposition to pretty much anywhere else in the country.
London has brilliant public transport and is completely unrepresentative of the rest of the UK.
Clickbait.
I live in a town in the South West of UK and the nearest train station is more than 45 mins drive away, no direct bus link with our nearest city, unreliable local buses, nothing in the way of cycle lanes, virtually no taxis, no uber etc, etc - basically 0% public transport.
It's amazing how far out of touch those in London (i.e. politicians) are with the rest of the UK.
EDIT: If everyone ditched their cars, the housing crisis that is currently happening in literally every city in the developed world, will only get much worse.
Full convo with references: https://chat.openai.com/share/4d6868a2-2862-465d-be72-eef3bb...
Or more funding will go towards public transportation. There will be more room left from parking for new housing. Less money will be spent on infrastructure maintenance. City planners can work on walkable cities instead of drivable cities. Cities will be quieter and safer.
Only if you consider nature to be like a city park crowded with people. Real nature doesn't start at train stations.
We went mountain hiking every second weekend or so when I lived there. We always took transit.
We often went without seeing a single person once we got off the bus until we got to our destination (usually an onsen).
as a car owner who got a car _specifically_ for that reason i can tell you that you don't want to visit a german forest on a holiday. if you happen to have a big forest in an acceptable driving distance you might want to take a chance but there will be people all over the place. plus loud motorcycles you hear from 2km distance and millionaires enjoying a flight with a cessna.
For me not having to use a car === dramatic increase of quality of life.
My youngest literally said: I'm so glad we got rid of the car, because using trains is way more fun.
Using the public transport at age 12 is far more empowering than sitting in the back of a car.
- living in cities with good public transport (as a child I lived in some remote areas and appreciate that it would be pretty much impossible without a car).
- living in the UK (some countries are even more difficult, see e.g. the food bank lines in the US where you need a car even though you can't afford food[0]).
BTW, hadn't seen that Thatcher quote before: "If a man finds himself a passenger on a bus having attained the age of 26, he can count himself a failure in life."[1] but it only re-inforces my view that, if you are ever in doubt about which viewpoint to take on any subject, simply find out what Thatcher believed (or Thatcherites believe), and the good and correct viewpoint will be the exact opposite:-)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22886064
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/jun/07/a-momen...
i bought my first car in my mid-30s. if you'd have asked me a year earlier i'd have assured you that i don't need a car and don't intend to own one ever.
if i needed one i'd just rent it. but taking an hour long trip to the airport or somewhere else for the rental station got old after a while. especially the stress of having to be back at a certain time. planning traffic issues into the schedule. because overrunning the rented duration can come with disproportional cost.
then came corona, the lockdowns, restricted public transportation and i started to crave for easy access to nature while at the same time living in the city. and i don't mean crowded parks. actual forests where you are alone. away from cars.
you might say i got a car because i hate cars and i still do.
but a car provides me with a freedom that now seems so obvious that people who claim they don't want a car seem almost brainwashed.
especially because nobody says that having car means you have to use it all the time. i'd still prefer to go to work either by public transportation or by bike or even by foot. my car is standing somewhere about 5 days a week. but those 2 days i need the car or my options are limited.
as a matter of fact i bought a car because i prefer the bicycle. at first i was taking the train for more remote bike tours. but taking the train with a bike in germany is torture. it wastes a lot of time. confronts you with problems like no place left, what ticket do i need, where do i get it, train not even coming and so on.
now - i just hook up the bike and off i go.
this you-don't-need-a-car thing really feels like some manipulative agenda with the intention to reeducate the simple people towards believing it and also accepting it - because no car is going to be the future for most of us - that's already been decided ("you'll own nothing and be happy"). i'm still looking forward to this future as well as i anticipate it with horror because i fear it's not going to be so great having your movement restricted. and of course those who decide those policies will continue owning and using cars.
i'd totally ban cars from the city and certainly favor a tempolimit of 130 on the autobahn but it will need solutions that still allow people to flee from the city if they feel like it or spontaneously visit relatives whose villages can't be reached by public transportation.
Especially if it’s financed.
I’m not even sure it’s a decision they make of free will. It’s sold to them as an essential step along the road to adulthood.
Car ownership is a prison.
I’m sure many people will argue that cars are essential, and that where they live you can’t do without one.
Which is mostly true of where I live.
But the broader issue is that we’ve done this to ourselves.
One of the ways to build a better more social living existence is to deny car ownership.
I don’t believe the world was better in the olden days l, before cars. But I do believe it can be better in the future with less of them.