The “what if you wanted to go to heaven, but god said ____” meme template, but here it says, “What if you wanted to walk to get groceries, but city planners said DRIVE”. The last panel is an image of a massive freeway full of cars.
See, there’s alot of major inconveniences with rejecting getting a car or other road legal motor vehicle. Not everyone lives in the city, therefore trying to walk or bike to places while living in a rural or even sub-urban area is not necessary ideal (if even practically possible). Having a car or bike or whatever to get you on the road efficiently lets anyone go wherever they need to go with practically and ease. Now yes I know public transport exist, but one: you are one their schedule and two: not many areas other than mainstream and urban and areas have full access to public transport.
You can have both. You can have a car and still be able to walk or bike to do small daily groceries, go to the pharmacy, get bread etc. I mean, not rural middle of the fields, but small rural villages where I lived in Germany were like that.
Only in the USA do you have to pick. The suburban sparwl with strict zoning is an abomination. All for the sake of property values.
Where I lived, in high school (age 15-16) everyone was expected to get a license and car ASAP. I was like, why? To get to your job. For what? To earn money to pay for the car, gas, insurance, etc.
So you want me to work a job I don’t need to pay for the gas for a car I don’t want, so I can be miserable in school?!
And if you looked at the driving records of my peers who had cars… Not pretty. A lot of totalled sports cars.
I get you. I used to go to school with bike. Its a 30-40 min journey in one way. That was the best time in my life. I liked to see the sunrise, fell the wind, goig anywhere I want. I don’t want a car too much stuff.
Believe it or not working at McDonalds in your “spare” time when you’re already school full time and an athlete, isnt a whole lotta fun xD
And when there was something going in, they would ask if we needed a ride, bc plenty of us didn’t have cars. Our idea of fun was like DnD or Risk on the weekends…
What I do wish is that I had found some kind of summer internship or something that could build my skills, because I was quite into coding as a hobby.
Hello, interested in life without cars but not knowledgeable. How do you transport groceries? I buy in bulk and sometimes have boxes of things, not sure how I’d get that stuff home without a moving trunk
Hm so I’m American and haven’t really used public transport in this country. I have in some Asian countries like Singapore or Japan, where in the past few I’ve been specifically keeping an eye out for groceries and haven’t seen it. It doesn’t always seem feasible to have groceries though, sometimes trains are crowded.
I was more wondering if there were no cars at all, which I believe is the ideal. For environmental reasons I would say it’s best to reduce car traffic to near zero someday, though I understand this is not necessarily possible in America. In this situation there would be no taxis though.
Admittedly this question isn’t so much for myself, but it’s my understanding that many families have a single grocery buyer and lack the funds to buy smaller quantities more often. Bulk is usually cheaper. In the American culture of minimizing worker resources, I wonder if pay wouldn’t simply decrease if cars were no longer purchased, and they’d find themselves in the situation of equally low funds but no car. Maybe not the most rational concern but the American society is not overly reassuring.
Anyway as a person who needs to breathe and live on Earth I have a vested interest in a car free society, and am just wondering about the little details.
The thing with walkable urbanized area is that you don’t have to buy in bulk for groceries, because a grocery stores are just minutes away from home. I myself shop in a traditional market which is only 5 minutes bicycle ride away from home. Plus there are many convenience stores within 1km radius.
It really depends on where you live, the infrastructure and transit available to you, and any other circumstantial factors.
First off, a big part of what !fuckcars wants to fix is the problem that many communities are simply designed with the assumption that everyone will drive everywhere, which often means most people aren’t within walking distance of shops (because it’s literally illegal to build grocery stores in many residential areas). It also often means very shoddy pedestrian infrastructure, sketchy (if even existing at all) bike infrastructure, and little to no public transit.
If you live within walking distance of a grocery store, you’re in luck! Something like a granny cart (pictured below) can allow you take pretty heavy loads of groceries on foot.
If it’s too far to walk but you have decent bike lanes or paths that you feel comfortable riding on, you can attach pannier bags and/or crates to a bike (an e-bike makes it even easier) to carry pretty big grocery hauls home.
If neither walking nor biking are options but public transit is, you can take a granny cart on the bus or train easily as well. Of course, a limitation is none of these three options can take nearly as big a haul in one trip as a car can, but the idea is you can make smaller, more frequent trips. For example, I live a 5-minute walk from the nearest grocery store, so I can pop on over a couple times a week to get a few items, which is light enough to carry. Of course, if you need to feed multiple people and it’s a kind of long, onerous journey to get groceries by foot/bike/transit, this might no longer be feasible, unfortunately.
If none of those are feasible, there’s no shame in having to use a car. The villain here is the system that forces people to drive even if they’d prefer not to, not the people being force by circumstance to drive.
I do like the cart suggestion. In a more ideal world with completely walkable cities, perhaps even without cars, I still don’t see a great alternative for those who need to feed large families on a budget though.
At any rate, that’s not me, so I personally see the benefit. I like cars but I’d be cool with them primarily used for track days and have no love for regular traffic driving.
If you don’t mind my asking, what’s the preference for foot or bike traffic? I don’t particularly prefer walking or biking over driving. I see the environmental impact— and that alone is enough for me to agree— but I was wondering if there was an actual preference for walking
For me at least, I like the simplicity of walking. Since I’m near the closest grocery store, I can just put on some shoes, grab my insulated grocery bag, and pop on over. You feel the weather, have a nice little walk where you can stretch your legs and not deal with traffic or parking at all. It’s hard to describe it, but being in a car just makes me feel disconnected from the world, like you’re putting yourself in this pod, moving at high speeds with other pods, then arriving at your destination. By car, doing groceries feels like a chore to me, but by foot, it feels like a treat.
Plus, by not owning a car, I save so much money it’s kinda insane. Sure, I don’t quite get costco prices (although I’m not at all paying Whole Foods prices either), but I’m not paying outrageous sums just to fill up the tank with gas. Overall, I come out way ahead monetarily by living car-free.
No argument there actually. Having lived my first couple decades in Texas, the idea of a walk for fun or to get groceries in the oppressive heat was basically unthinkable. Now in the Bay, where the weather is almost always nice, I get it.
Actually, how would people in those climates do it? Same way?
Yeah, I definitely understand the heat issue. I grew up in the San Joaquin Valley, California, where the summers are also oppressively hot. Thankfully I’m living in Canada now, which is decidedly less hot (although it’s far more humid).
I think it would come down to smarter, more localized urban design. For most of the history of human civilization, where we didn’t have cars and air conditioning and the like, we had to be clever to carry out our daily life in a variety of climates. In hot, desert climates, cities were built more like this, building narrow alleys with tons of shade and designing for natural ventilation, keeping the whole city much cooler and more comfortable than the surrounding desert, even in extreme heat.
But what we have now is desert cities looking like Phoenix does:
But yeah, these are more long-term things of course. But if we’re talking about overhauling our car-centric urban design to allow people to walk to get groceries, we might as well talk about designing for the local climate, too.
Funny enough, I used to live near the SA River Walk. Well, not really near, but less than 30 minutes away which is kind of near in TX terms.
Thanks for the responses! The links go a long way to solidifying the point. I was always interested in the concept of this community and the Reddit one before it, but always had little questions that I hadn’t bothered to ask over there. Reddit wasn’t always friendly so I didn’t interact that much, life’s too short to get in online fights haha.
Same thing with central California in terms of distances lol. The city I grew up in is basically the armpit of California, and its main selling point is being “near” more interesting places like Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Yosemite, SF, and LA. But in this context “near” means “within 4-hour drive”, of course.
But yeah, I think that’s an interesting difference between the community here on lemmy vs back on reddit. Here, it’s too small to get mostly fuckcars people, so we get a lot in from !all. The effect is generally a tampering of the circlejerk-y tendencies, although it does also sometimes mean getting more people completely opposed to reducing car dependency. In contrast, big subreddits can be so big that the main people who see content are those subscribed, so you get more of an echo chamber.
And as much as I love people who agree with me, it’s also refreshing (and healthy) to not be in a complete echo chamber.
I can answer this pretty well as I grew up and lived in a pretty car dependant Minneapolis until I was 23, where then I moved to NYC with no car in 2018 and have lived here ever since.
The TL;DR to this question is that you transport everything in a grocery bag on person, but the longer answer is that your buying and cooking behavior changes.
Back in Minneapolis I relied on buying in bulk, since I wanted to limit the number of trips in the 15-20 min drive between my apt and the Costco. Variability with the weather affected this too, as I would buy extra if it was in the winter time. I’d make this trip by car around 2-3 times a month. This also affected my buying and cooking decision making as well. Buying groceries first then figuring out what I wanted to cook.
Once I moved to NYC, I would always have a grocery store several blocks away from me. At most being a short 5-10 min walk. This changed my habits as I always had a grocery store I could quickly pop in without having to think about traffic, my car, etc. So although I would go more frequently (~ 2 times a week), I would also find this a lot easier and would buy less.
Nowadays, whenever I think of wanting to cook something, I either head over to the store on my way back to the office, after the gym, etc. and then cook that very same day what I bought.
In my mind, that big fridge I used to restock with my Costco runs has been replaced by having that quick grocery store within walking distance.
Purely anecdotal, since I know some other people in the US may be living different than a single guy living in an apt in NYC, but this is also how it is in many cities I’ve traveled to in Asia and Europe.
Thanks for the in depth answer! This has me wondering whether I can live without a car here in the bay already, but our infrastructure is not nearly as good as NYC’s. Anecdotally, things here are a lot more compact than Texas so I do find myself going out more for smaller trips anyway.
Curious, did buying groceries more end up costing more?
I lived in Boston for a while (with a car, but putting low miles on it)
Curious, did buying groceries more end up costing more?
When I switched from buying in bulk periodically to buying small more often, I can say that my first few weeks definitely cost more. I had a mindset about buying for X weeks out instead of X days out that took a bit to shake. In the process I realized how much food waste I was having by purchasing in bulk and not fully using everything, and I naturally switched to purchasing less at the grocery store. Both because it meant carrying less home but also because it was cheaper. Now I buy more or less exactly what I need and I can say on average my grocery spending is less now (avg monthly) than it was when I was buying in bulk.
Hmm on my end the answer is tough because it really matters haha
In Minneapolis I was exclusively going to Costco and Cub Foods. Costco, things were cheap in bulk, while Cub Foods you always had good deals in coupons.
Estimated bill from Costco being 80-100 every 2 weeks, Cub probably 60-70 every 2 weeks (this is in 2017, so pricing has changed quite a bit haha)
In NY, my bill shifted based on where I shopped.
When I lived in midtown Manhattan on 54th and 7th in 2018, I went to the Whole Foods in Columbus Circle and would leave with a bill around $60 a week. But back then when I first moved, I was also eating out a ton.
Nowadays, I live in LIC in Queens and go to some local grocery chains and cook a whole lot more. My weekly spend is around $120 or so a week. But I’m also cooking a whole lot more than I used to and eating out a lot less.
I forgot who said it, but someone said it best “if it weren’t for rent, NY would actually be very livable cost-wise.”
A few ideas, which may or may not work out for any given situation:
Bike with panniers/baskets/trailer or a fully fledged cargo bike - these can pack a surprising amount of stuff
Order your groceries delivered
Skip buying in bulk - it’s not necessary in a context where the nearest grocery store is within walking distance.
For reference, I live in a country with decently well designed urban environments, and my nearest grocery store is less than 200m away by foot. I could just do all of my shopping there, but it’s a bit more expensive, so I bike to a cheaper store that is 3.5km away, taking me less than 10 minutes. There I fill up a basket and maybe a pannier, which gets us enough groceries to last for a week or so.
If I need to transport anything larger, I primarily look to have it delivered, or as a last resort, I rent a car. Renting a car is almost never necessary, though.
I haven’t seen this option mentioned yet but you can also order your groceries online, and have them delivered. That’s what I do at the moment, because I live outside the city and my nearest grocery store is 2 km away. I could bike or hop on a bus, and I do sometimes, but ordering online is just really convenient.
I like the convenience too. It’s almost “back to the roots” to the times when your local grocer/trader would deliver the goods to the local citizens, since he was the one with the car, though today this dude is replaced by a faceless webshop. And even though this option includes cars, it reduces the number on the road, since one delivery vehicle will (potentially, though not necessarily) replace one car for every household it’s delivering to. This vehicle (theoretically, at least) drives the most time/fuel-efficient route, instead of every household driving to the store(s) and back again. Funny how this is moving traffic of the roads and turning it into digital internet traffic!
If i want to buy something. The closest shop is around 10 minute from my house. If I buy in bulk put everithing into my bicicle and walk home. Its just me not everyone want this I understand, but if we didnt have cars we just solve it in other ways
I used to take the subway to work, and usually walked past a grocery store or two - one downtown, and one a block from my apartment.
Because the overhead of shopping was lower (it was at most thirty seconds out of the way, on foot), I’d stop in a couple times a week, and picked up a bag or two of groceries that I’d just carry home by hand. It made it easier to be spontaneous.
For bigger trips, you could use a cargo bike or panniers. But I rarely felt the need. Buying in bulk was much less convenient than just buying an amount I could carry by hand, because it requires a special, deliberate trip.
For trips like that, I have a fold up cart and a strap backpack thing that lets me carry the folded up cart on my back. The second part is optional. You could just pull the cart both ways.
My sister had her driver’s license suspended for a while due to a medical condition, and her neighborhood’s extremely car-dependent design made it completely impractical to walk to get groceries. The only thing that ended up working was getting an electric bike, but even that was still not great because there are absolutely no protected bike lanes in her neighborhood. No transit either.
When you advocate against ending car dependency, you’re advocating for people like my sister to be stuck at home, unable to get groceries on their own.
If anything it’s the car-dependent infrastructure that is ableist, as many people with disabilities cannot drive. I can’t, and if I didn’t live in a place where alternative modes of transport were a thing, I would either be stuck at home, or have to waste money on buying a specially made car.
Far from all disabled people use wheelchairs or have mobility issues. Some have problems with their sight, concentration, fine motor skills etc. which prevent them from driving safely. Even if you cannot walk or ride a bike, and have trouble getting on/off public transport by yourself, living in an environment that is walkable and bikeable usually means that it is also easier/safer to get around in a wheelchair or on a moped.
Stop trying to larp being an advocate for people with disabilities, it’s pathetic and extremely disingenuous. If you actually were an advocate you’d know there are plenty of disabilities that disqualify people from driving and a lack of alternatives is the actual discrimination.
Seriously, you make me so fucking mad with this shit, it’s the worst category of cowardice. Leave and don’t come back.
It’s not anti-car per se, it’s anti-car dependency. In a walkable city, you still have the choice to have a car and drive places, but it’s not a requirement.
This is a very good thing for many people with disabilities, myself included. Not everyone can drive.
Counterpoint: having a working car makes a human being have vastly more freedom to travel than not having a car.
Having a car means you can drive to anywhere that roads on your continent lead to, and even to places that don’t have roads if your car is off-road capable. Without a car, you have to hire transport to get to anywhere you can’t get to by your human body power.
I would never live without a car unless it was physically impossible. Law banning cars would not stop me, I would build my own fucking car if I had to.
Exactly. There’s a pattern I’ve noticed of people interpreting “car dependency reduces freedom” as “car ownership reduces freedom”. But the point you, I, and many others are trying to make is that building our cities in such a way that no one has a choice but to drive everywhere is counter to the idea of freedom.
Freedom is the freedom to choose how you want to get about your city and not be coerced into owning and maintaining a (rather expensive) vehicle just to get groceries. People want choices.
Not hard to explain at all. I am lazy and I enjoy the cool stuff I have at home more than I enjoy traveling frequently. But in my case it would be driving to the same 5 to 10 spots most of the time. I go to different cities to visit people or a dispensary with a better selection, etc.
It’s pretty cool to have the option to do any of the above anytime I want.
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