It's possible with a very different lifestyle, a lot of a luck or a very decent income to structure your life in a way that allows zero car usage, but for most people a better car is the best option.
The incidental-exercise aspects that are positively impacting mental health health and obesity. We need to build better places for people, not cars, and this is something that's been ingrained over legislation from the automotive industry for the past century.
Cars are part of the puzzle, and shared cars could be exceptional. They are not sustainable to produce or operate and never will be.
One company of interest for me at least is Culdesac: https://culdesac.com/
There are plenty of places in the US where this isn't true, and the number is growing.
There are far, far more cities below 200k and in those its very hard from what I understand. Even some large cities with 500k people have really bad public transport and bad bike infrastructure.
And to live a car free live, you need to live reasonably close to the center where housing is very expensive. From what I understand, the places that are best to live for walk-ability are usually the most expensive.
The summers are more or less solved with e-bikes: you spend less energy paddling, while still profiting from airflow. I hear France has a subsidy for them. Unless you're in Spain or Southern Italy I guess, or there's a heatwave going on.
I commute on a bike (at least, if I'm not going out after work) in London. I have a foldable Brompton bike fitted with an e-bike conversion kit from Swytch. I can ride in the middle of summer (ok, maybe not in those 40C days we just had) and arrive with no sweat. And if it rains, no matter, I stop, fold up my bike and jump on the Tube, or a bus.
I don't think so. Imagine: two people, each with a job not in cycling distance, and they have two kids at two schools in opposite directions. What do?
It's easy if you get lucky with locations of places you need to go to each day, or (more often) you have enough money to buy your way there, or if you have enough money to buy a place on good public transport routes, but as with most people if you don't, then cars are still the most affordable way to do it.
If you can do without, more power to you, but most people need cars. Not ebikes, not scooters, none of that electric hip stuff. They need cars.
You could run an actual public transport network there. But outside the cities and some light rail, it doesn't really exist - there's just a few bus lines that run every hour or so. Why? Because people have cars. When they tried to set up a bus line for that 5km to the light rail (which runs every 15 minutes, until late night), nobody would take it. People took the cars because they were used to it and didn't want to rely on public transport - especially since that was explicitly branded as "trial" - why change habits? And now, that bus no longer runs and people have to take the car.
Public transport thrives of network effects, but these are hard to establish. I believe it can be done, but only if you have an actual plan and the will to pull it through. It's a marathon, not a sprint as they always say.
If you're getting into regions where public transport is really hard to provide, then you're very quickly away from "most people need cars", because these regions may be large, but very few people actually live there. Let them use cars. Go for the large chunk that should not need cars.
Switzerland is somewhat exceptional with even small villages being connected by very regular trains, but its very possible.
And this is not some place where there are lots of other larger villages around.
My city is 70k people and its perfectly fine without a car or bike. Around this city, there are many smaller towns from 20k to 5k. In almost all of them its mostly feasible to live in without a car.
Before I moved out of my parents house, I lived in a 5k village about 25min by car outside of a 70k city. My parents have literally a herd of cows next to their property. And I live there just fine without a car.
The idea that you somehow need to be Paris density to have decent public transport is just not true.
And that was before E-Bike was even an option. I used to take the normal bike for all activities in the village and that was fine too. With a modern E-Bike, it would be very easy.
We structured society to depend on cars. That was largely a mistake, and one that can be solved.
Also, your (valid!) point that a horse is "wildly more inefficient than a car", how does a car stack up to an ebike, in daily use, in total lifecycle (including disposal), and in land usage?
You sweat only from thinking about moving out of the shade.
Electric bicycle are poor alternative to e-motorbikes, and even the wind at 120 km/h does little help regarding warm weather.
For the most part people walked or more recently used a train or trolley. Now we have bicycles and it turns out if you don't spend trillions designing your towns and cities for the benefit of the auto industry you can get where you're going on a bike or train faster than if you do and use a car because you don't have to spread everything out.
I live in the suburbs of a HCOL city in the US. My wife and I could absolutely afford two cars. We have one. I don't think we could go down to zero cars any time soon, but the transition to one car was a lot easier than we thought it would be.
Of course I have no idea the specifics of where you live, but I think many suburbs could make this possible within 5-10 years by:
-zoning an area to be the suburb's "downtown", i.e. a few blocks of small apartment buildings with ground floor retail including a grocery store and restaurants
-building high-quality bike lanes to get to the new downtown
-subsidizing a service like car2go to make it easy to access cars on-demand when you need to go somewhere farther
Check out this tweet series for many examples: https://twitter.com/search?q=turns%20into%20(from%3Amnolangr...
The dates there are just when the street view photos were taken. All of those smaller apartment buildings can be built in under a year, and 1-3 years for a highrise.
- electric cargo bikes can replace cars for a lot of use cases (bringing children to school, etc)
- when you need to transport heavy load like furniture, you can rent a car or a van
- trains and/or car rental for longer trips
- bikes for short distances with lighter loads
I know a few people (low to medium incomes) in rural areas that are doing this and they are not activists or anything.
It would probably be possible to get away with a bike around here if you lived near everything you needed and really planned things out as far as getting places early in the summer and having an emergency plan if something happened and you were stuck somewhere in the freezing cold. At least you have some time in a vehicle cab before the temperature drops dangerously low.
There's definitely places where an ebike can replace a car. There's a lot of places where it would really limit your ability to get anywhere outside of walking distance.
Too hot, well, people are riding bikes in India. I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one.
Too far? That's an urban design problem. Nobody is suggesting rural people change their cars for bikes, although I do know some people who are loving their ebikes for property inspection...
It's also a scale problem. Inhabitants of dense, large cities like Paris or New York are famously considered generally rude, and I don't suppose there's anything special about those places other than density that would cause this.
Also real estate in dense cities is disproportionately more expensive.
Unclear why people believe this, but it's absolutely not true. Spend a day watching people walk to work in Manhattan vs people sitting still on the freeway in LA and it's clear who's happier and friendly. Road rage is real, and cars make people miserable.
Even taking your claim as true, you’ve confused unhappiness with rudeness in placing it here, without that conflation it's a non-sequitur.
That's not a law of nature. It's a result of deliberate choices made by city governments to restrict the supply of housing over the last few decades. Also the fact that it's so expensive and people keep moving there shows that it's an attractive way to live.
Is it even possible to build new housing when the population density is already at 20k people per square kilometre, like in the cities mentioned?
> Also the fact that it's so expensive and people keep moving there shows that it's an attractive way to live.
Did you consider that not everyone has a choice in the matter and the alternative is often unemployment? There's a trend towards urbanization because people move to where the jobs are. That alone doesn't make any place more livable.
Absolutely. The most expensive parts of Manhattan have tons of 3-4 story townhomes that would become 12+ stories practically overnight if the zoning allowed it. Not to mention all the single-family detached homes near subway, PATH, and LIRR stations nearby.
> There's a trend towards urbanization because people move to where the jobs are.
Look at how many people stayed in or moved into NYC after their jobs became fully remote in the last 2 years. It's a lot.
In Berlin these are refereed to as Kiez for example.
Very large cities don't really have a city center as such, or at least not for most people. And you can have reasonably priced apartments or townhouses in a well connected Kiez that has everything you need to live.
> Did you consider that not everyone has a choice in the matter and the alternative is often unemployment?
And about far more often its the case that people would prefer to live in the city but are forced to live some-where on the far edge and then having to buy a car to drive into the city.
This is what the real problem with the kind of low-density city surrounded by sprawl. The actual city centers are tiny to non existent and lots of cars.
Eh, I moved from a rural farming town to inner London. People in dense cities aren't rude, they're busy. If anything, city people are much more willing to help out, they just won't make a deal out of it. This twitter thread basically sums it up: https://twitter.com/jordonaut/status/1352363163686068226
Those that can afford it, quickly upgrade to motorbikes.
I rode bycicle for a couple of times in Norway and Switzerland during snowy Winters, no thanks.
I jumped of joy when I could get a green plates car, and wasn't an happy fellow when it broke down a couple of months later.
And this is a bit of a theme: anywhere close to a school - even close enough to cycle - costs more to live in. It's fine if you have a good job and can cycle the kids to school and then cycle back and work from home, or you've got enough money to buy somewhere near work and school (because you were fortunate enough to work and live on the same side of the same city) but this will not be the case for huge numbers of people. Huge numbers of people don't have that luxury.
Some people need cars to do some things. For many of them it's easier and cheaper to use taxis and rentals than to own a car. As more people give up car ownership it becomes easier for others to follow.
With wfh, it's normal that I leave walking distance twice every week. Taxis, uber, or a rental car for a trip would definitely be cheaper.
Like, its perfectly reasonable in many places to live without a car. In fact, its the opposite of what you suggest, its possible LESS INCOME then having to own a car.
Compare the total cost of living and transportation when living a car centric lifestyle, compare to a bike/public transport one. I personally don't even use a bike, walking and public transport are perfectly fine in most even small (50k) European cities.
Now of course, sadly in many places in the US, living and work is often so far separated and so badly connected that the car is the only viable option. But that is exactly what needs to change.
And as soon as kids are old enough to ride bicycles or public transport themselves you live situation changes and you can very likely get rid of your car.
And if you actually look into places like Netherlands you will see that lots of people don't have cars even with small kids. The 'Soccor mom with SUV' cliche in the US, is replaced in the Netherlands by the 'Bicycle mom' who brings here kids in on bicycles.
Certainly, but I think it still sets up a certain tendency which gives car usage a headstart.
> And if you actually look into places like Netherlands you will see that lots of people don't have cars even with small kids. The 'Soccor mom with SUV' cliche in the US, is replaced in the Netherlands by the 'Bicycle mom' who brings here kids in on bicycles.
Absolutely, I'm not arguing that. I was mainly responding to the point that the behaviours and needs of parents with small kids supposedly don't matter because at any moment in time there aren't that many of them around.
I haven’t had a car for a decade. I rent a vehicle once or twice a year when I need to transport things. Economically it’s a lot cheaper than owning a car.
Why do you need very decent income for that?