I ditched my car – and improved my fitness, sleep and bank balance
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 me not having to use a car === dramatic increase of quality of life.
“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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And, absolutely, tons of people live in London without cars. Like you say, it's incredibly common.
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.
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:
https://unherd.com/2020/11/why-i-had-to-leave-the-guardian/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.)