Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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I get irritated when my wife suggests driving to the grocery store I can reach on foot in 13 min. Aside from the occasional big haul, where a car is really handy, I just feel like the car doesn't really save much time and effort.
If the argument is that the car is both faster and can haul more things than on foot, then the middle ground is a bike. I use panniers and/or a bike trailer for big trips at the grocery store.
But yeah, depending where people live, sometimes cars are just the "auto"matic (hehe) thing to do, even if there are different ways to do things. I hate cars and never had one even though I come from a rural region. I moved to a metropolis but I've lived in a rural town without a car, and people there make a lot of excuses to justify the use of their car and even kind of force it on everyone around them. My family and friends are still living there and sometimes it's so hard to convince them just to walk any kind of distances. When I listen to them telling me I can't go to the corner store on foot, I feel like some sort of superhuman because somehow I can walk more than a km. "You walked all the way from the train station to here?!" they ask incredulously.
The practicality versus "losing time" and efforts, to me it's a question of personal values. It's like the eternal "joke" about people going to the gym with their car to run on a treadmill. I've never had a car so I'm just used to walking, waiting for a bus, or moving at around 20 km/h when I'm on my bicycle. It keeps me somewhat healthy, it's cheap, it can be slow but you can often do something else with that time, or cherish it. I love touring so it makes sense to discover and use rural bike paths to get to my camping spots and see villages that I would not have seen if I zoomed by on a highway in a car. There's no hurry because moving there by bike is the trip itself. And if I'm in a bus or in a train, I can use my phone or laptop, work, or watch a series or a movie, whatever that I could do sitting at home if I would have "saved time by having a car".
It's nice to have those events where people try to live without a car for a while, it brings some awareness. But it's still disappointing to see the person in the comic reaching to someone else with a car in order not to use theirs. It expresses the slight ridiculousness of this type of event.
My wife generally does a weekly haul on the way back from an appointment that genuinely can't be reached on foot. It's more the "we realise at 10pm that we've run out of bread" type of small trips, particularly if it's cold or rainy, where she'll offer driving me. But by the time we've embarked, gotten there, parked in the narrow lot chronically full of idiots that wouldn't know road etiquette if it smacked them in the face with an ID... yeah, the time-save there and back comes out to ten minutes, which really isn't worth the stress and risk of accident to me.
How far is your train station? Mine is 7-8min on foot. Gets me at least 15min of walking in my daily commute.
This comment was written on a train ;-)
It depends. I moved in a city with a metro system and the closest station is 3 minutes away, but I have no commute for now and I'm only using trains a few times a month. If I have to go see my sister it's about a 20 minutes walk to the central train station. Then once in her town it's about 50 minutes to walk to her house. She often wants to come pick me up but even though it's less than 10 minutes by car, she has to park at the station and wait a few minutes for my train, or I have to wait for her. Minutes are adding up and it can end up taking 30 minutes for both us of with a car anyway, so I prefer to avoid it and walk.
I hope you enjoy not being in a car!
I'll be honest: while I like not having to drive, our rail / metro services aren't exactly paragons of punctuality, reliability, cleanliness or comfort. When you're standing in a train packed with school kids, commuters, the occasional morning-drunk and the people who wanted to take the previous train (which was cancelled) as someone who's claustrophobic, sensitive to noise and grumpy in the morning, being in a car by myself sure sounds a lot more pleasant.
I still think commuting by train and metro is better. I don't have to find a parking spot, I don't have to worry about gas, I don't have worry about collisions in the hell that is our inner city traffic, the pricing is affordable (no thanks to certain lobbies bent on fucking up a good thing) and the environmental impact needs no mention.
But I can't say that it scores high on enjoyability.
I already feel pretty unsafe biking next to cars, biking with added weight would feel extremely dangerous. We need to make driving unpleasant and riding a bike the "easy" option.