Article about an experiment from Brisbane, Australia.
It depends on where you live. I wouldn’t be able to get around without my whip.
10 is not a statistically significant sample size
The Brisbane public transport is pretty bad, but there are more reasons: the bus network is owned by the council while the train network is owned by the state government. As a result both tend to compete with each other. This is especially bad when the busses don’t even cover some areas. Partner went for a course there recently and their best option to reach the place on public transport was to just walk 40 minutes from the train station! I can’t think of a single area in Sydney that wouldn’t get a bus service at least once a day on a work day. (You know things are bad if you’re comparing to Sydney busses because these things are terrible)
Ive been car free my entire life and I will continue to do so for the rest of my life
Or until you start a family.
yeah, having kids in sports would be insane without a car. Practice is in two separate towns, multiple times a week, real meets are in other major cities.
You couldn’t get them to where they need to be with US public transport.
Why do kids have to go to different cities to play? There are enough kids in nearby schools
I’m car free with 2 kids. Everyone thinks it’s harder, like kids like driving in traffic. No, it’s not. We do local things or get public transport. No parking hassles.fine to have a drink with lunch.
i have a family. living with a small child in an american city without a car is entirely possible. you lose the ability to go out (either to city or to nature) but with a small child you don’t have time to do that anyway so you might as well pay more to live closer to your job. alternative is paying the difference in rent for a car loan and loosing the time you don’t have while sitting in traffic. big caveat: this works only if you earn enough to be able to afford living close to a city center in the first place. also, it is still way less comfortable than a life in a developed european city.
alternative is paying the difference in rent for a car loan
Why do you have to take an expensive loan to get a car? Is there no used car market in US? I live in a bit different reality, and here there’s thriving market at any price tag. You have to do the research, pay for paint thickness check to ensure car didn’t get wrapped around a tree, but getting very cheap used car to drive your ass from point A to point B is absolutely a thing.
Is there no used car market in US?
There is, but prices on anything that doesn’t require constant repairs is still fairly expensive.
Buying a used car is always a crap shoot, but things aren’t as bad as the old days. It used to be that you really didn’t want a car with more than 100,000 miles, but today, any car will make it well past 200,000.
I’ve bought numerous cars with over 100,000 miles, and didn’t need any more than the normal amount of maintenance for a 100k vehicle.
Nah US has used cars, got mine for like $6000 a few years ago when prices were kinda high.
Yeah, that’s bcz most towns/cities are not set up to be walkable. And nobody wants to carry groceries miles back to their house. We’ve set up society in a way that not owning a car is a nonstarter.
You get the mobility you build your cities for. Cites were not built for cars (most of them at least), they were transformed into car cities (which took decades). Thing is, cities can also be transformed back into transit oriented cities. Both takes time and commitment though.
The Dutch were on the same “train” to total car dependency in the 1960s. But during the oil crises in the 70s they put a hard stop to that and reversed course. Now half a century later, most of the country is designed to be attractive for multiple modes of mobility, among others cycling but also transit and yes even driving by car. The latter does not dominate everything however.
They don’t have miles in Brisbane.
A mile is a mile no matter where.
It’s not our fault they’re poor.
They’re rich in SI units
Amateurs…
Wish I could. I have a company work truck, and I need to dramatically downsize my personal vehicle.
I wfh so I only drive once a week and that’s to stock up on groceries. The grocery store is a number of miles away-- way too many for me to be able to bike and return with bags.
Having food shipped would just mean putting another car on the road anyways. Or has guzzling truck.
If I could afford to move, not sure how feasible it would be to have something within a mile or two anyways since I’d still need to bring back a ton of heavy bags. I’m old.
:(
Couple of miles away feels dystopian.
Imagine a video game where all activity is in one region and you need to periodically gather resources from a much different region.
This mechanic would flop hard.
European cities have grocery stores within walking distance. I walk to mine, no problem.
It is really not about Europe or US. Even the US has cities and neighbourhoods that are like that. In most places however, it is illegal to build such places new and their supply is so ridiculously low that most people could not possibly afford to live in such a place, or those places, or those places are so poor and dangerous that they aren’t good places to live for other reasons.
The problem is car centric urban design. Most people don’t get it that they do not only have to drive by car because everything is so far away but everything is so far away because everyone is expected to drive by car. You can change that but it takes a lot of time and the political will to do so.
I live in a center city area, but the problem I have is that it’s a food desert like lots of center cities are. The small independent grocery stores usually have too much shrink to remain open so it leaves me with three options that are all equidistant and not walkable. I fill a 55L messenger bag and transport it via bike but it’s quite uncomfortable carrying that much weight compared to just hopping in a car.
Sounds like part of the problem is that groceries in the US are not designed as proper full sortiment stores. By that I don’t mean being a hypermarket with 1000 flavours of yoghurt but having a broad sortiment, just like an Aldi doesn’t have all that many different products either but they do cover most of the stuff you need. In many cities you find such grocery stores that are still pretty compact on every corner. You really need to go to anything else only if you want something rather special or extraordinary.
I find it pretty strange to consider city centres to be food deserts by default but then, I guess that is the case in many cities in the US, even when they are not entirely car dependent.
One thing that is a key difference in transit oriented places, other than the stores I was talking about above is that shopping habbits are widly different. Shopping more often but buying less. This has pros and cons but as stores are more efficient (good sortiment at compact size) one does not need as long in the store and buying stuff after work means, one can have a lot fresher stuff at home, for example, fresh bread, fresh vegetables, fresh fruits …
Another aspect is drinking habits or rather infrastructure. Where I live, a lot of people don’t buy a lot of drinks, other than the occasional orange juice or and milk. Tap water is great, no need for bottled water and if you like it carbonised, something like Soda Stream is saving you a lot of schlepping.
PS: Every thought about getting an e-bike or a compact cargo e-bike? Still worlds better than wasting fuel for the car for inner urban transportation, if it is safe to ride that is.
None wanted to continue what? Driving cars? Continue the trial? I can’t read the article due to a pay wall
Here is an archive link.
Almost a dozen regular Brisbane people took on a challenge to give up their car for 20 days, but by the end of the experiment, they decided it was unrealistic for them to go totally car-free.
Urban planners from The University of Queensland recruited 10 car-owning Brisbane residents – five men and five women.
They were asked to follow their regular schedules, but use public transport, walk or ride instead.
What they found is that the city and it’s public transport options are antagonistic toward people who do not or cannot drive themselves.
The word “antagonistic” implies intent. I generally believe in human incompetence.
A researcher asked people who live in car dependent areas to go without theirs for 20 days, none of them were able to overcome the poor infrastructure.
Fixed Headline for them.
I couldn’t do it where I live without just taking 20 days off work. I’ve got a grocery store a couple of blocks away so food wouldn’t really be an issue. The problem is that I work about 5 miles from my house down a road that doesn’t have sidewalks most of the way and you’d have to be crazy to ride a bike in a lane. There is no public transportation anywhere between my house and work.
The average claim per person for all their travel expenses during the experiment in Brisbane was $125 – but they saved $300 in car costs. “I hadn’t realised how much money my car eats up,” a 43-year-old man from Brisbane said.
Those $300 for 20 days look like just fuel costs. Add the yearly depreciation value of the car (especially bad for new cars), insurance and maintenance costs and it gets even worse.
Even limiting oneself to only a financial viewpoint (which is quite reductive since the are also big Environmental, Health and Social costs), for most people (especially those who live in cities) cars are stupidly expensive for the utility value that they deliver.
It’s nice to have the OPTION. Moving from NYC to Bay Area, I definitely feel the effects of losing robust public transportation.
lmao, people were like: ‘public transit in the bay is great, we have busses and BART’
Bart and Muni are so poorly designed in terms of direction.
The trains are pretty nice but need more supervision and they need to beef up numbers of cops and station staff in 3 specific downtown stations especially in the evening.
I went without a car until my very late thirties. Then I got married, had a kid, moved to a suburb and the city I’m in can’t unfuck its public transportation to save its life and thus I was forced into buying a car.
I live in Ottawa, Canada and the polite term of our public transit (OC Transpo) is NO C Transpo or OCCasional Transpo. Seriously, they bought a train that doesn’t work in ice/snow and also doesn’t work in summer heat. They don’t have enough resources to perform proper maintenance on the buses. And final cherry on top is that they went with the decision to buy zero-emission buses (a good idea I’m supportive of) but had no plan to transition between the gasoline powered ones which are now at end of life while their replacements are still years away from becoming operational.
The only other organization I’ve seen fuck up major projects this bad is our Department of National Defense.
I live in an area where you don’t have to have a car, you can do most things without. But you’ll have to pry my car keys from my cold dead hands because it is so incredibly more convenient and faster to have one.
Edit: noticed the community. To be clear, I’m all for good infrastructure for people who don’t own one, I just wouldn’t go back to the days where I didn’t have one.
The real question is would you ditch your car if it were more convenient and faster to go by bike or transit, or with a shared car service for extra and week-end trips?
Myself, and probably a good percentage of this community dont just have a blanket hatred of cars. It’s mainly about how car-centric design sucks, even for people who drive cars.
Many cities that are designed with good public transit are also way easier to drive in. If 99% of people have to drive into a city center for work, or school, or groceries, or whatever, everything has to be really spread out for enough parking, roads need a lot of lanes and a lot of entrances/exits, so driving is stressful, and you still end up spending a lot of time in traffic.
With competent infrastructure for walking/biking/public transit, the mode share for cars drops, and driving actually gets easier since you aren’t competing with everyone else.
Yeah, I have a kid. From groceries to doctors appointments and camp and activities, doing all this without a car would be a nightmare. That said, I buy used, pay cash, and own a little Honda hatchback that sips gas.
This is what people don’t get. Having a car changes everything. It’s much more convenient.
Yeah I’m also all for good public transport and as many options as there can be. However that doesn’t change the fact that having your own var is much more convenient. Especially in an emergency.
Hopefully they got action items out of it - what do they need to work on.
Personally I loved the freedom of not having to deal with a car on a daily basis, but there was too much I couldn’t do.
One of the shortcomings that seems to surprise people is a lack of long term car storage. There will be an extended transition where many people can not give up their cars or think they cannot. Why not help with that? At one point I was driving my car mostly to move it for street cleaning because there was no permanent place to store it. We want the cars off the street to make room for more important road users. Garages in apartment blocks are too convenient and for-profit garages too expensive
You’ll get more people willing to try car-free if you give them a slightly inconvenient place to store their car, until they realize how little they need to use it. I wonder if making it cheap and easy to leave your car at a park and ride at the end of a transit line would work
I used to do this when I lived in New York state and would occasionally travel down to New York city. It was stupidly cheaper to drive (and faster - which WTF whhhhhy). So I would rent a cheap spot in a garage near the outskirts of the city for the day and use public transport for the rest of the day. I remember being mad that it was cheaper and faster to drive and pay to store my car then it would have been to take the train. That’s a problem. Especially when I had a train station in biking distance to my apartment at the time.
I mean, if you search around you can probably find someone willing to rent out driveway or garage space for cheap. Or else if you head to the outskirts of your city or near the industrial areas, you’ll find car/rv storage lots - usually near or part of storage units. So the solution already exists.
I think it’ll be a hard sell to get people to, say, approve government subsidies for parking garages to make it cheaper for people to store cars that they arent even using. Especially if street parking is already free
They do that in my town. Finding parking and garages and everything is not even an issue. I feel like you’re more in a much more Cityfied area than I live in. Well I do live in a major match politen area I was making the comment the other day that the majority of the city I live in is more valley and suburbs than actual city. However at all of the train stops throughout the valley there is free parking. And you could even leave your car there for a few days if you wanted to. And at any of the major bus hub areas there’s also large lots and free parking. They even provide random park and ride lots throughout the outer suburb areas so you are encouraged to carpool.
