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Comment by woah | Hacker News Reader

It's simply not possible for many families to live in the cramped environments of a city. How am I going to pick up 12 gallons of milk on my weekly grocery shopping trip without a pickup truck? That's about 125lb of milk. Not going to be able to get that onto a fixie in the city. How am I going to park the truck without a garage? The garage needs 3 spaces, one for the truck, one for the car, and one for my garage refrigerator to hold the 12 gallons of milk. You're not going to find a house with a 3 car garage that hasn't been built on marshland.

Sites like this one like to browbeat hardworking Americans, but the reality is that not everyone can live an eco-friendly lifestyle. I'm not sure what the solution is but shaming people isn't it.

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I'm not gonna argue with your choices in life, and I might make the same ones if I had a family that goes through 12 gallons of milk a week, but it's not impossible to pull that off with fewer cars and a smaller garage.

Scenario 1: dense urban living, somehow you can afford an apartment big enough for everyone. No car, just good transit (e.g. Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo). Grocery store is <3 minutes walk from the front door of your apartment, so you get 2 gallons every day. With a family that big, you're probably picking several items up, but you'd use a trolley (like this: https://www.argos.co.uk/product/8653909?clickPR=plp:4:6 or bigger: https://www.kmart.co.nz/product/foldable-beach-trolley-42365...)

Scenario 2: big terraced/row/town-house (shared walls on two sides), has a 1-2 car garage. Suburban-ish living, car dependent, but definitely not rural or outskirts of a city. You own a van, which you'd need anyway if your family is big enough to need 12 gallons of milk a week, and then you have your big chest freezer in the garage and you go once a week to the grocery store and get 12 gallons of milk.

The reality is that the rest of the developed world manages just fine living in houses without such garages, driving smaller cars. And having a family isn't a uniquely American concept. Of course everyone can live an eco-friendly lifestyle; for all but a tiny speck of human existence, everyone did indeed do so, and the majority of people on the earth actually still do so to a reasonable extent. It's not a "not everyone can" or "not possible", it's a "not everyone wants to".

There's no shame in my statement.

The US isn't the only country in the world with big families; there's seemingly nothing exceptional about us (in that regard) that requires the pickup truck and 3-space garage where other countries get along fine. Part of the reason they get along fine is because they allow grocery stores to be built on residential corners, so that you buy 3 gallons of milk every other night on your way home rather than driving X miles to load up weekly.

The problem is you're just overlaying suburban lifestyle on a city without adjusting it to suit your environment. The equivalent would be a city dweller moving to the suburbs and thinking they can just walk to Walmart, when it might be 10 miles away.

If you live in a city you can just pick up milk at a convenience store as you walk by, when you need it. There will probably be one within a 5 minute walk of your house.

I would also like to know more about this milk consumption. Median consumed by US milk drinkers is 1/3rd gallon per week - your family is drinking as much milk as 36 people do every week.

I think this may be a joke? https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/12-gallons-milk-mem...

But anyway, we go through a lot of milk (significantly less than 12 gallons) and have it delivered. Same thing applies to anything large that I'd rather not rent a truck for.

yes

usually, when people are promoting alternatives to the car, these things need not be in exclusion to the car. In general, when a road is over a hundred feet wide, it is really not a big deal to provide an additional twelve feet for an ADA sidewalk, and maybe another twelve for a bike lane with more protection than a strip of fading paint.

the American car dependent lifestyle has mostly happened by making other lifestyles impossible. In other places you don't buy your milk for the whole week in one go, there are convenient supermarkets where you can walk in and out on your way to and from work on foot or public transport, so stopping in more frequently is a lot easier if you're not driving 15-20 minutes on arterial roads to the big box store. In most of America, it is illegal to open even slightly smaller grocery stores in areas outside big box arterial roads.

I'm glad to see someone standing up for hardworking folks like me on this elitist site. My family has found that converting one of these allows us to do the weekly shop of not just the milk, but also the charcoal for the barbeque and the tomahawk steaks for the children at the weekend: https://www.autotrader.ca/heavy-trucks/sanitation%20truck/

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