Article about an experiment from Brisbane, Australia.
Ask 10 people in Amsterdam and half would tell you they already haven’t used a car in weeks. The only ones who’d have a problem with it are those who work far away from Amsterdam.
That’ll be 1.5M€ for a 40m² apartment thanks.
That’s the big problem with nice places to live: they quickly turn into expensive places to live.
I was amazed by the transformation in Amsterdam when I visited last summer. I’ve been visiting Netherlands for 40 years and always admired their cycling culture but lately they seemed to have almost eliminated cars from the city. As a result it is incredibly quiet, serene and there is no vehicle soot on the buildings, as is the case in London. I could often choose among many different modes of alternative transport in any given location.
The English solution to this problem is ever more stringent penalties on the driver (e.g. ULEZ) which may be profitable but they have been ineffective at reducing the volume of vehicular traffic, pollution, accidents, ad nauseum. We pay a huge price for car culture.
and fat people in Amsterdam are rare, coincidence?
I lived in Amsterdam for 10 years and only got a car when I married someone who lived in the suburbs. Well, actually I still don’t own a car but I can borrow one as needed!
I think this small experiment simply demonstrates that ditching cars is not a matter of personal preferences, but a community effort
And a matter of traffic design. You can design places to require a car for everything, or you can design them with bike paths everywhere and a good public transit system.
We went involuntarily car-free for a month after a heavy rain flooded my family’s car. It was much more manageable than expected, due to both the walkability of our suburban neighbourhood and commutes that aligned with nearby bus routes. But if we lived even 1km further from the bus stops, it would have been unpleasant. The alternatives to driving need to exist with reasonable frequency before more suburbanites consider ditching their cars. But I also believe that people need to be receptive to trying something different that may not always be as comfortable as getting into a climate controlled, sound insulated private box to get around.
Despite how close we are to amenities, almost everyone drives to the grocery stores or to work regardless of age or physical health. One factor is 30+ minute bus headways even at peak times. Another is that 2+ buses are needed to get to the nearest commuter rail station, which has free parking and again 30+ minute headways. So to make it to the station on time, people just choose to drive there. That lack of integration with regional rail schedules is another thing that may be limiting bus ridership. An interim solution to low built densities affecting bus routes is more bike infrastructure that is transit compatible, like bike racks at bus stops instead of awkwardly using utility poles. (Also, why are we not allowed to use both bus bike rack slots when they clearly have the space for it? It seems asinine.)
While we are not really a car-lite household, many grocery and commuting trips have been replaced by transit. I realize there’s a degree of discomfort that comes with a change in travel patterns when the alternatives are not as maturely developed. Waiting 30 minutes for a bus or walking 20 minutes to another bus route because the last bus came early can be unpleasant, but on the flip side, the ride itself unlocks the ability to relax or get work done that driving does not permit. Walking or biking to the grocery store can be a workout on the way back, but it’s free cardio through ‘the gym of life,’ as Jason Slaughter of Not Just Bikes would say. We need to be okay with some discomfort before ridership can increase enough to improve transit frequencies. Or, you know, hope that 40% increases in gas prices in 2 weeks is enough of a price shock that people start embracing the alternatives on their own accord.
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.
With public transit, I’d have to walk / drive 5 miles to a bus stop, then hop across 2 seperate bus routes, then make it another 5 miles on foot or an uber or smth to get to work, for a combined 2 hours 40 minutes, assuming I uber the 10 miles where public transit is either non-existent, or goes too far out of the way that walking would be faster
Its only a 30 minute drive…
10 is not a statistically significant sample size
Ive been car free my entire life and I will continue to do so for the rest of my life
Same here!
Or until you start a family.
Ah yes, I forgot it’s impossible to ride public transport with kids…
Public transport has routes and stop where they are planned to stop.
Maybe you’re lucky and it will not be far from every of many places you have to be that kids can walk the rest of the way.
I knew 2 people who definitely wouldn’t get a car after getting a kid.
First one got a car almost immediately because difficult.
Second one took about a year. She ran out of people to guilt people in helping the poor single mom.
Our systems are not perfect, you can ask people in wheelchairs how difficult they have it to get around.
And I see a lot of cargo bikes now, sometimes with 3 kids.
All great in theory.
But our bike paths were not designed for these relatively huge things. It creates dangerous situations.
Not to mention how fast they can go since all of them are electric.My wife insisted I get a driver’s license when we had kids, because she didn’t want to be the only one taking them everywhere. Usually I’m the one taking them places. And still on my bike or by public transport most of the time.
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.
Also you, probably: “There are no atheists in foxholes”
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.
We got a bigger car than I would like because my stepdaughter decided that she wanted to be a hockey goalie. 🙈
we get it, you’re rich
we get it, you’re rich
everyone has their own definitions, sure are a LOT of rich people in this thread :)
Why do kids have to go to different cities to play? There are enough kids in nearby schools
There are enough kids in nearby schools
Maybe in a big city. The district I worked the most for was big enough that most matches were within the district. But when you think about most small towns, which maybe have one or two high schools, that’s not going to be true at all.
Even with that - are the nearby schools the same division? Lots of sporting leagues have restrictions on who can play who (bigger schools playing bigger schools instead of smaller ones, an attempt to be fair usually).
Heck, even leaving sports out I drove an hour out for a FIRST tournament recently.
Small towns almost always need personal transport. But the definition of a small town in US is much bigger than most other developed places (my experience is EU, SKorea, Japan)
If it’s a small town, there’s not going to be many big or small schools. Why such a weird system 😅
If significant travel is required, the school should organise travel and stay. Unless the kid is participating in state level at U-12, there is no significant travel for play in Japan and Germany (for popular sports). The kid is a kid afterall. And study is also important
But the definition of a small town in US is much bigger than most other developed places
This is the type of town that I had in mind when I was writing my comment..
Closest high school is Elk City, which you have to drive to, on the interstate. There is no public transit anywhere on this map.
When I was in high school, our track team all met at the high school and got on a bus to the other schools matches, often they were long rides. However, the school provided the bus transpo. I think that was true for all the HS sports leagues. I think the same occurred for the middle school. The elementary school? I don’t know, I don’t think they had inter-school sports. Mostly kids were in local leagues where businesses sponsored teams and they played in local parks. (At least that was how it was in a village I lived in Long Island. We had a few ballfields and just rotated through them. For winter sports like basketball, they used the church gyms and local rec center. Believe me, my parents never drove us to any activity other than a school drop off.
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.
there is a reason they dont use a bike in the first place
Yeah, seems like a study ripe for bias.
If you ask a person who lives near decent transport infrastructure (or near work) to take public transport, it’s no big deal.
Honestly, biking is a problem for showing up to work sweaty.
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.
It’s not our fault they’re poor.
They’re rich in SI units
Australia is poor?
T’was a joke abou them lacking miles as if it were a thing they did not possess as opposed to a measurement they do not use.
A mile is a mile no matter where.
You’re in an international community. Why not use a standard unit of measure?
I’m not the person who originally made the ‘mile’ comment, but surely you can give grace to somebody using the unit they are most comfortable with when making a generic statement. Like if a Brit used the word “colour.” We get the point.
Of course, the argument that metric units should be used everywhere has merit, but way way way above the level of an internet post.
They weren’t using it to describe a specific measure, just to express a general sentiment - why take this one so personally?
Just trying to stop the further Americanisation of the internet.
The US did… develop it, it’s more the de-americanization of the internet, which itself is a noble goal sure. But while it’s a good goal to strive for, 50% of the internet is english - and of english language speakers, 23% of them are from the US. It’s probably much more useful for you to focus on promoting the use of non-US tech companies / social media / web services than to try to enforce the purity of casual language.
The “internet”, yes. But the web, http, etc was all invented by the English. You guys can claim email if you want.
I’m on a non-US instance of Lemmy on a post about a non US city.
It depends on where you live. I wouldn’t be able to get around without my whip.
A combination of pandemic lockdowns and work-from-home was practically an orange-pill recipe for myself and many others. There’s no looking back now, and there hasn’t been in over five years.
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)
Absolutely, although as a Sydneysider, I generally have pretty good bus services where I live. The only thing that makes my blood boil is how awful the bus drivers can be to children. There was one day I had to catch the bus to the library after school, and it was storming a fuck ton. This group of highschoolers get on, and some of them don’t tap on and go and sit down. The bus driver, an old grey haired lady yells her head off at the back of the bus, but since they had already sat down, she couldn’t find them. So she decides the only thing left for her to do, is to stand by the Opal card reader, and force every single person to tap on. You might be thinking “well fine she’s pissed, but those guys should’ve just tapped on right?”
Well this little kid jumps on, and he looks no older than 12 years old. He asks, in a voice I can barely make out over the raging storm outside “can I come on? My family just moved here and I don’t have a card yet” - to which the decrepit bus driver yells “Not on my watch, get out of here! No one is allowed on this bus unless everyone taps on!”, she then proceeds to shove him to the middle of the entrance before shoving him outside.
I remember kicking myself the rest of the trip to the library - I was furious at myself for not having recorded what she had done, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it for the rest of the week. No one, especially not a child, deserves to be forced out of a bus in the middle of a thunderstorm.
So every time someone praises public transport here, I’m grateful for the comfortable experience I get to enjoy. But each and every time someone praises the buses, the first thing I can think of is that little boy, and how despite confessing to the bus driver he was new to the area, was pushed into the middle of a raging thunderstorm.
The same was done in Vienna. People did not use their car for 3 months.
Results
- 2/3 could imagine living without a car
- 25% have sold or are planning to sell their car
Considering it was founded, like, 2000 years ago, that isn’t really surprising. Turns out, being a pedestrian in a city which was established in a millennium when being a pedestrian was the norm is quite easy compared to the same effort in much more recent municipalities. Have you ever really paid attention to the plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Spotted the American.
You have very little understanding about city development and planning. Otherwise you’d know that most of the transport corridors that are in use today were started in the Industrialisation period when trams were introduced.
A city with millions of inhabitants can’t be explained by looking at the small population in the centre.
Vienna has an amazingly good and inexpensive public transport system and quite good bike routes combined with fairly inexpensive housing due to good city governance over several decades (social democratic party by and large).
The difference between most North American and European cities in terms of availabke transport choices is not what happened hundreds of years ago, but what city planners did in the post war period (50s to 70s).
It’s not too late however, if you look at the incredible progress Paris had in the past 5 years.
The framework was still established long before cars, which was then easier to expand upon. Absolutely governance has a huge effect, but more modern cities were developed with cars in mind, with endless suburban sprawl. It’s far easier to implement public transportation in places that were originally built around walkable city centers.
Additionally, places that weren’t bombed to hell in WWII didn’t have the opportunity to redesign for public transit mid-century. They grew with car-centric infrastructure and never reset. I’m not saying we shouldn’t develop public transit, we absolutely should, I’m just saying it’s harder to implement with existing infrastructure and layout that spread everything out over dozens of miles.
Vienna is a dream for public transit. Didn’t get to use the cycle routes but it seemed I was never far away from any transit. Beautiful city to boot.
After World War 2, the Netherlands was bombed to shit, and they rebuilt their cities For The Car! Then in the 90s they realised cars suck, and they started rebuilding their cities for people. Now it’s the best country in the world to drive a car, because there are so few cars on the road.
The moral is, Europe isn’t winning at urbanism because their cities are old, they’re winning because they’re trying hard. Brisbane isn’t trying hard.
This didnt start in the 90’s, but in the 60’s
Also, the Netherlands wasn’t bombed to shit. There was some bombing here and there with low to moderate damage. Only Rotterdam was pretty much levelled just to make the point during the invasion (and because of a number of other stupid reasons)
The point though is that, yes, the Netherlands decided that levelling Amsterdam to make it a giant car parking lot was a bad idea and they went full bicycle. And yes, its been the best decision ever.
Having said that, i live in Vancouver now and they’ve made some great strides in improving the city for bicycles. If Vancouver can do so, a y other city can do so too…it’s just a matter of wanting
In the Netherlands, this change caused a huge change in architecture as well, because when you restrict cars and push bicycles, you start also making local communities better, making sure that there are smaller local stores, bars, restaurants, within each community, at walking on cycling distances. It has transformed the country over these decades.
Here in American continent countries this can work too, even though the architecture has been messed up so badly because of so many decades of car brain designs. It will take decades to undo the damage, but it can be done
The only necessary ingredient is the will
The best country to drive in? Hmm. It’s just as busy as the surrounding countries and traffic speeds off the major roads are painfully low. The standards of driving are surprisingly poor, at least compared to neighbouring Germany. It is very well set up for car alternatives and I really enjoy going car free on my visits there, but there are many countries that are more enjoyable for driving.
Fair point. We even maintained our 2000 year old skyscrapers here.
But you forget, that we’re living in forest cities with exploding trees!
That this idiot even got a single vote is beyond me…but well, who am I to talk with Kickl promoting the same kind of xenophobia.
But I’m getting a bit off topic, although all those conversatives world wide seem to love to be stuck in their cars in traffic jams…
Los Angeles was founded in 1781. They didn’t have cars then.
Then how did they get on the 10?
Same way they do now. You just don’t.
Vienna is very walkable but also really big. The answer is, mostly, public transport, a lot of it and cheap. Public transport costs ~ 400€ per year if you have the annual pass for Vienna (you can use all public transport). Also at the moment a build out of bike lanes makes a combination of bike/public transport very interesting for big parts of the city.
P.s. Can’t really remember the plot if Rodger Rabbit.
The villain of WFRR was dismantling the trolley system in order to force people to buy cars and use the freeway system.
Yes we get it it colonists living on stolen land have all the room in the world to be able to vroemvroem their fatass everywhere
“It demonstrates that in low-density, sprawling cities like Brisbane, people cannot be expected to permanently give up driving unless there is significant investment in public transport.”
However, researchers found given participants were likely to slightly reduce their reliance on cars, it showed experiencing car-free living, even briefly, could help people break away from automobility.
In Brisbane, 89 per cent of households own at least one car and 48 per cent of commuters drive to work.
This was essentially the goal of the study, to demonstrate that more investment is needed in public transport to increase public buy-in, and that even just being forced to try it for a few weeks increases usage and lowers car use longer term - so if there can be incentives to try public transport that could also increase its use long term and reduce cars on the road.
The headline is not what people here (myself included) wanna read, but the study succeeded in its demonstration and will hopefully drive positive govt policy outcomes.
If services aren’t within 5-10 minutes maximum, people will not walk or bike there. That’s often greater than the distance just to get out of some neighborhoods.
If public transportation is not within 5 minutes or so, people will not use it.
The cost of a car can be under 10/day. If public transport is even half that for full day multistop use, people won’t use it.
will hopefully drive positive govt policy outcomes.
From the current city and state governments? Highly unlikely.
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.
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.
