Cormac
5757
Wow! Sounds amazing. Perhaps I need to move…
As someone who lives without a car now, I don’t think people really grasp what a fundamental lifestyle change it will be. It’s relatively easy for us — no kids, no jobs — but try to e.g. imagine grocery shopping for a family before or after work without a car. You can only buy what you can carry or wheel home, or to and on the bus. You’re going to be shopping several days a week now, rather than once a week, and it’s going to become a logistical problem that eats into everything else.
Public transit isn’t going to help much. If you’re in a modern suburb, the closest supermarket will be a mile or two or three away. Close, but not walking close, and the bus isn’t going to help you.
I don’t say this to dismiss the need for the change. I just think getting rid of cars probably means rethinking how we design suburbs, neighborhoods, everything. I can walk to the supermarket here in 5 minutes, but no one I know in any conventional US suburb can.
You know, it’s funny – I was talking with my 17-year-old daughter about her work-mates (she works at a relatively high-end restaurant), and she mentioned that one of them “smokes all the time” at work and she might get fired for it.
I said that unless her smoke-breaks were unusually long or not scheduled, she’d be unlikely to be fired simply for being a smoker.
My daughter looked at me strangely for a second, and then comprehension dawned on her face and she laughed at me.
“Oh, you thought I meant cigarettes! Daddy, nobody smoke tobacco any more!”
CraigM
5760
I could probably get away with it. I bike to work every day, a little over 3 miles each way, and pass a Winco and Albertsons on the way home. Like literally 100’ out of my way to stop at the store. It is possible for me to make small trips, especially at the one 3/4 mile from home, to pick up a few items. Trouble is I have my backpack with laptop so space is minimal. Granted for that distance I could probably just carry a few bags. But things like eggs or milk would be treacherous.
But for a family of 5, even in my absolutely best case scenario, grocery shopping without a car is only minimally viable. I could go home and get the bike trailer and load that, but shopping at the Winco or Fred Meyer (my preferred choices due to several factors including price and produce) without a car is not really feasible with our shopping habits. And going every day or two is a huge drain on time, especially when the kids want to eat when I get home. Pushing that 45 minutes out more often isn’t going to work.
Taking the car to work once every week or two to grocery shop works better for me. And I am someone who actively does things to reduce my carbon footprint.
My experience growing up is that you go shopping a lot more frequently in Europe. We usually bought a fewer things on a single trip, but the store was about a 20 minute walk from my house. My parents used to send me out to the store all the time to get things all the time.
Once a week, we would go do some big shopping at the US military base but usually it was local.
Part of the problem is the US is just zoning laws. Stores are so far from where people live that you need a car to get anyway. If you had more commercial/residential mixed locations, people could get away with driving a lot less. Which would be a start.
Also, it would help if places had better infrastructure for bikes and scooters. You can save a lot of gas if people used those more often.
Anyway, there is a local Aldi employee with a cool trike bicycle thingy. It has a huge basket. I see her around town sometimes. I could probably use something like that to get most of my shopping down. If I didn’t feel so unsafe with biking in the US, I would put my youngest in a seat on the bike, like my parents used to do with me.
Nesrie
5762
There is literally no public tran in the city I live in. The largest city near me has buses, but they’re not good. They don’t work for shift work at all, and their unfortunate. I try to limit my trips or maximize them at least, and I am virtual. Even as a remote employee I need a car.
antlers
5763
Cars don’t have to contribute to global warming. If you own an electric car in France, it’s not contributing CO2 at all.
Where smoking is dying, vaping / juul are replacing it.
Enidigm
5766
With all due respect to that Independent article but the rich can buy themselves out of everything but a guillotine or gulag.
I find those kind of articles rather annoying because they lean on the “rediscovery” of obvious “facts” about the advantages of wealth on the most obscure topics.
Like these hypothetical zingers:
“Rich people live in penthouses above the smog - why aren’t people talking about this?”
“How the rich’s sunny vacations give them a Vitamin D advantage that lasts through life - what you need to know.”
“How grocery delivery services enable the rich to avoid city planning and why this matters.”
etc.
Effectively all these articles are saying is something like “Rich people have more than non-rich people, let’s talk about it, get mad and do nothing about it but share memes on social media!”
The larger point is when some try to argue that acting aggressively on climate will hurt the poor, they seem incapable of understanding that the tax the poor will ultimately pay is with their health and lives.
It’s also a useful reminder that the wealthy have both oversized control over the political and economic responses to climate change, and also less negative impacts from it.
Rich people are rich, news at 11!
We need better public transportation but in urban areas we are getting more delivery options for groceries. so that will help. All the grocery store chains have realized they need to add delivery because Amazon is trying to take over that market.
I have thought about this and I think I could live without a car once retired. I’d probably figure out how to ride a bus to the grocery store and then maybe get an uber ride home. It would add to my expense but on balance I think the added cost would be more than offset by not buying gas for a car, not paying for insurance, and not paying personal property tax and licensing fees, and not worrying about car maintenance. Depending on the area I could also ride a bike and carry home some groceries in a backpack.
Using uber doesn’t really lower emissions, though. It just shifts them to another vehicle.
Matt_W
5772
I live in a residential neighborhood in mid-city San Diego. I wouldn’t characterize it as suburban, but only because there are no big strip malls with gargantuan parking lots in it. It’s a few miles from the city center and transit is only available to my neighborhood by bus. I have a big box grocery within 10 walking minutes of my apartment, a large Mexican grocery 5 minutes away by foot, and 3 corner groceries within 2 blocks of me. I can easily (<1 mile) walk to a couple of dozen restaurants, bars, and coffee shops and I can easily (<3 miles) bike to literally hundreds. And that’s generally true for almost everyone who lives in any of the mid-city San Diego neighborhoods, an area that covers a handful of neighborhoods over maybe 10 square miles north and east of downtown. I’m not sure why that tiered model (corner->IGA->big box) can’t be exported to more typical suburban neighborhoods.
NIMBY.
My in-laws went happy when the farm land across the street was converted to a stripe mall with a grocery store. My wife used to work there as a kid and it was a great boon, but you have to remember that a lot of people hate change.
There’s a chiropractor that works in the same plaza I do; I sometimes will see him parked in his Mercedes with the engine running, seat leaned back, earphones in, meditating: ostensibly building up the courage to go and face whatever stressful office environment he must.
I’ve fantasized about and am really half tempted to sneak up to his window and yell “you’re murdering the environment!” Haven’t done it, yet.
It can, and it must, but we’ve had decades of doing the opposite, building highways through urban areas and filling the land with car parks. [insert donoteat1 videos]
Or here, forcing people to move out and small businesses to close for the dubious benefits of tourism, increasing traffic to work and shopping.
Tim_N
5776
Trigger warning for people who have empathy towards other species:
Also goes to show that our ecological crises and climate change is not so simple to be a left/right thing. Some commentators have already called the third dimension of political ideology in the 21st century to be between globalists and nationalists, but I think when people look back at the century as a whole the third ideological dimension in 21st century politics will be between conservationists and ‘destructionists’ (for lack of a better term).
