Despite saving hundreds of dollars and even making new friends, none of the people who agreed to ditch their car for this Brisbane experiment wanted to go car-free permanently. This is why.
  • iByteABit@lemmy.ml
    2·
    5 hours ago

    If the city I lived in was designed for it I would sell my car the very next day, but in the current state of it it’s both very impractical and very dangerous

  • CurlyWurlies4All@slrpnk.netEnglish
    14·
    1 day ago

    I was 100% car free when I lived in London and Melbourne, but outside of the major cities there’s so little investment in public transport, (particularly in Australia) it’s almost impossible.

  • rotkehle @feddit.org
    22·
    1 day ago

    living in Berlin Germany and most of my friends never had a car nor a driver’s licence. just build the right infrastructure and people stop being dependent on cars, simple as that.

    • Professorozone@lemmy.world
      7·
      1 day ago

      Went to high school in Berlin, my favorite city, and if I lived there now I think a car would be a real annoyance. Expensive. Narrow streets. Lousy parking. There are so many ways to get around: walking, bicycling, bus,street car, subway and infrastructure for all of those things. If you really need a car you can always call an Uber or taxi.

        • Professorozone@lemmy.world
          7·
          1 day ago

          Absolutely. They have bike paths and even little traffic lights for them. The city is huge but you can put a bike on a bus, at least some of them.

          • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
            5·
            17 hours ago

            I’m always envious of people who have access to this in the places where they live.

            I live in my country’s second best bikeable city and it leaves A LOT to be desired; but I used to live on the best bikeable city and that taught me that there’s much to be desired for bikeable cities in the United States.

    • racoon@lemmy.ml
      3·
      1 day ago

      walking around is a waste of resources. If we all suddenly started walking to places, many corporations’ revenue sheets would suffer from our whimsical irresponsibility

  • humble_boatsman@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    42·
    2 days ago

    This is a bat shit premise. Why not focus on reducing dependency. Not just surprise! you can’t live your current existence without a car!

    • Panini@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      22·
      2 days ago

      That was sorta the intended result here, to emphasize that to move away from cars without heavily sacrificing their QOL, most people need better public transportation and non-car options than their city is currently providing them. So the city needs to make changes to reduce dependency.

      • Hanrahan@slrpnk.netEnglish
        53·
        2 days ago

        sure, but we deliberately chose a place we didn’t need a car, across the road from Harbour town on the Good Coast, never had an issue with traffic. A friend chose to live in bumfuck on the other side of the Freeway and complained endlessly about traffic.

    • kibiz0r@midwest.socialEnglish
      9·
      2 days ago

      Unlike most existing transport research, which has employed surveys or observations, this study applied an intervention—i.e., a deliberate action or treatment introduced by the researchers to examine its effects on participants. An intervention involves actively changing a variable (such as car use) to assess its impact. In this case, we asked ten participants in each city to live car-free for twenty days. The purpose of the intervention was twofold:

      1. Study the process of change itself. We examined the reasons why participants decided to partake in the study, what challenges they faced, how they coped with those challenges, and what factors contributed to successful change.

      2. Evaluate the effectiveness of the financial incentives that we provided. Were they sufficient to induce permanent change?

      Going car-free: an interventional study in Australia and Saudi Arabia

  • BCsven@lemmy.ca
    22·
    2 days ago

    Yeah I haven’t driven to work since COVID. We have WFH. I take transit into the city a few times a year. The time I had to drive into work to exchange a monitor, I hated it. I couldn’t believe I was doing that daily before.

    • Hanrahan@slrpnk.netEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      lived on the Good Coast over Covid. sold our car, rented the two car parks in our apartment complex, covered the cost of our body corporate fees and more. Walked, cycled, tram, train and bus where super easy. My GF used her electric scooter to get to work. Was awesome.

  • Ada@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    12·
    2 days ago

    I live in Brisbane and don’t own a car or drive (by choice). But because I don’t own a car, and never have, I have never lived somewhere where it’s an issue. There are plenty of places in the city that don’t have useful or easy connections…