Hacker News Reader

Comment by WheatMillington | Hacker News Reader

Don't you feel confined to your little area? In the weekend my wife and I drove out to a rural hike, 40mins out of town. I couldn't imagine giving up that kind of convenience and missing those kinds of opportunities.

What if you don't live near a pool? Your kids just don't learn to swim? My local pool is a 15 minute drive, but a harrowing cycle route.

View on HN

Note OP, but I'll try.

    In the weekend my wife and I drove out to a rural hike, 40mins out of town.

How do local tourists get to that hike? Probably buses or trains, which in decent systems are usually competitive with vehicles. It's how I did hikes in the rural Himalayas and Latin America.

    What if you don't live near a pool?

You build the pools where people live. They live closer together in cities designed before cars. Even rural towns used to be fairly dense and walkable. I picked a random suburb of Boston called Beverly. There are 3 public pools and a number of ponds that may or may not be swimmable. No one is more than approx 1mi from a public pool.

Also, commuter cycling should not be harrowing. It becomes harrowing when planners don't properly invest in the infrastructure and mix modes in dangerous ways. Imagine if we did the same thing with planes and used local highways as runways. Narrow the streets to reasonable, 3m lanes and even a 2-lane road can fit a dedicated cycle lane. The streets in my california neighborhood use a horrifying 12m for only 2 travel lanes, yet still can't find room for a cycle path.

I lived in a country like that. The "rural hike" was a Big Deal: you'd wake up early, pack your lunches carefully, take a bus, then train, then another train, and eventually arrive. Then hike for a nice, long time (having hike time < commute time seems such a waste), and go back home the same way. By that time, you'd be pretty exhausted, nothing else "big" would get done this day, and you'd take the next day easy too. And you probably would not want to do this too often.. maybe choose a more boring local park instead. In the dense city, one is likely only half an hour away.

Compared to that, now every time I drive to a remote hike it blows my mind how much stuff gets done -- the distance is the same, but it's just a long-ish morning trip. You can hike for a bit, then get back home, get groceries on the way, have lunch, and have the whole evening free. And you are not limited to destinations next to the train line either!

(One thing I miss however is the ability to enter into the forest on one train station, and exit on another one. It's pretty nice when you don't have to do a loop)

These are good questions. If you're a hiker/camper who needs access to a wide variety of remote locations, then that's a good reason to own a car. That said, from where I live there's plenty of green space that I can access without a car. At the end of the orange line (one of the local subway lines) is Forest Hills from which you can immediately access the Arnold Arboretum and Franklin Park (not to mention a huge quintet of adjacent cemeteries). If you want more wilderness rather than manicured greenery, then the green line terminates tantalizingly close to Middlesex Fells (not quite as close as I would like, admittedly, it's still a ten minute ride from there to the green line). If you want to range further afield, the commuter rail spiderwebs out for 30 miles in every direction. And if you don't want to ride either a subway or a train, I can ride all the way from Boston Common (in the heart of downtown) to Concord (where Walden Pond is) using nearly 20 miles of dedicated bike trails (mostly on the Minuteman bikeway), which hits up plenty of state parks along the way.

I live car free in Seattle, and with the combo of Amtrak, car rentals, and my ebike, I never feel confined. Even renting a car occasionally costs much less than if I were to own one in parking alone.

I live in Cambridge. All places I've lived in Cambridge were within a 5 minute walk of a publicly accessible pool. Before I had a car for outdoor climbing, I took the commuter rail to see local towns or got a ZipCar and split the cost with friends.

These days, most of my trips are on my bike. Anything I can round trip within 50 miles round trip is fair game. My roommate made it to Cape Cod a few weekends ago, but he's very athletic.

Sydney has metro rail lines that go out into the mountains as an alternative to driving.

Do you need a personal vehicle to carry a few sandwiches, some water and a first aid kit? If you are going camping can’t you rent a vehicle, how often do you realistically go camping that it justifies the cost of ownership over renting when you _truly_ need it?

If you really do need a car, that’s totally acceptable! But how many people don’t actually need it for anything other than weekend grocery shopping and work commutes? Hint: a very large portion of the population.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com