They forgot the “Getting the cops called on you” obstacle.
There’s a woman from a town in Québec that had CPS called on her because she is using a cargo bike to carry her kids around.
Story in French: https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/2022-06-20/signalee-a-la-dpj-a-cause-de-son-velo-cargo.php
We need laws protecting peoples right to do thus. And also children’s right to walk and bike too while we’re at it
At least in the US, there is no activity that is more likely to result in an interaction with cops than driving.
I’m lucky to have any transit access in my suburban town.
I live in a suburb of a big city, not by choice, and I also live within walking distance of a bus stop… if you don’t mind walking for three hours just to get to the bus stop.
Yeah, I mapped my public transit commute out one time. For starters, it’s complicated because Google/Apple/Waze/etc have the public transit option greyed out. Like it’s not even an option. If I try, Google suggests getting a Lyft. Which is really just saying “lol get a car, scrub.” I wish I were making this shit up:
Here’s a quick visual of my daily drive, versus the public transit route I would have to take:
So my commute starts with me biking 20 minutes away from work, to get to the nearest bus stop. Then I take a 20 minutes bus ride to the nearest rail hub. Then I take a commuter rail south-south-west for an hour, to get to the connecting line. Then I make a connection. The rail times rarely line up, so I’d probably have to wait at the station for ~15 minutes for the connection. Then I take the second rail line 45 minutes northwest.
But here’s where I run into my next problem… My house is serviced by one public transit system, and my job is serviced my another entirely separate transit system. Due to local politicians in the different cities not getting along, the two systems don’t connect. So now I need to bike 20 minutes north, to get from the northernmost station in one transit system, to the southernmost station in the other. Then I take another train 20 minutes north. Finally, I have about a 10 minute bike ride to get from the train station to my job.
All together, that’s ~50 minutes biking, ~20 minutes on a bus, and a little over 120 minutes split across three different trains. Plus the waiting time in between each connection, because the trains I need only run every 15-20 minutes. Bare minimum, I’m looking at around 3.5 hours for public transit… Or I can just take the highway 10 minutes west.
“But wait, you have walking and biking options! You could do those instead! The biking option in your screenshot is only 54 minutes!”
While this may be true on paper, I’d like to refer you to the “I had to go 2 hours out of my way to avoid certain death” panel in the posted comic. That 54 minute bike route is on a 70 MPH two lane highway, with no shoulder or sidewalk. I’d be dead before I was even halfway there.
“So take an alternate route?”
That giant loop I listed earlier is the alternate route. That 10 minute highway route cuts through a nature preserve. There are no other roads or paths parallel to it. You either take the highway, or you go all the way around.
I can’t even legally reach my grocery store without a car. I have to cross that same highway to get to the store, and there is no sidewalk that crosses it. So I’d need to break the law to walk to the grocery store.
I knew that was a SEPTA bus… Digging into her blog lightly and yup, Pennsylvania centric. Always neat to see local. Also not wrong about transit here, as I see plenty of people walk the harrowing roads around the suburb here. Pondering getting an e-bike eventually to determine viability, as my commute is relatively short. Would be nice to ditch the car a couple days a week to start.
Crossing the road is another pain
If it’s a US road it’s also much much too wide and much too fast. The country is designed to kill people who aren’t in cars.
It’s refreshing to know some people are at least trying it. However they will all go back to their car after this week. They should try it for life, for an extra challenge.
Usually when I say that I live without a car, people end up telling me how they couldn’t do it, how they love their car, that it’s nonsense that I don’t have one, and eventually circle around to tell me I should get a car. Even those aware of the difficulties of living without a car end up telling me that because of all this… they cant live without one and because they can’t do it, apparently I also shouldn’t.
I can count on one hand the amount of people that told me that they are trying to reduce their car usage, be more active and use public transit. They are the ones that are getting it and have interesting points of view.
Most people unfortunately just give up and continue to use a car for anything, with their assumptions confirmed.
EDIT: There are very fine examples of this attitude in this thread.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How far is your train station? Mine is 7-8min on foot. Gets me at least 15min of walking in my daily commute.
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”.
This comment was written on a train ;-)
How far is your train station? Mine is 7-8min on foot. Gets me at least 15min of walking in my daily commute.
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.
This comment was written on a train ;-)
I hope you enjoy not being in a car!
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.
Most people can’t even really afford their car. They are reducing their quality of life, home ownership, putting off any hope of retirement, etc for an object that has a shorter lifespan than most pets.
Of course they want you to do the same. They need constant justification for staying on this treadmill. The fact that all that time and money is being wasted, is hard on the ego. Especially for anyone that claims they live a frugal life.
Every week for me is a week without driving.
Biking counts?
Where I live the roads have shoulders that are roughly 6-12” from where the pavement stops, which is usually terrain that is both difficult/impossible to ride on and privately owned. These are holdovers from carriage/wagon roads during like “founding America” times (yeah Pennsylvania) and expansion would require a great deal of money, property easements, etc, so it just isn’t done.
A random spot from google street view (because I don’t need some geoguesser nerd doxxing me). The state is plagued with this and the further east you go the more you get hills, stone walls, etc right against the edge of the road.
These are also mostly back roads and as a result are not really monitored well by police or anything so drivers go absolutely wild on them, especially in rural areas. Where I live there is a T intersection that has accidents somewhat often because people will go down the (35mph) rural road insanely fast during the night, like highway speeds (70+mph). Then all of a sudden the road stops and it’s either a 90 degree left or right turn, which they fail. Sometimes they die.
All the road signs are shot up too because redneck teens and young adults drive drunk at night and shoot signs, which is a thing that coal roller types do for fun apparently.
To walk or bike to the nearest grocery store isn’t terribly far, ~3 miles, and the nearest bus stop is ~5.5, but the path there is a death trap
I hate it here
Yeah that non availability of public transport is hell.
It just isnt realistic to have public transit in webs of suburbs that brings you to islands of stores that are only accessible by road.
There’s public transport in the webs of suburbs of Madrid or Barcelona, there’s public transport across the towns of my whole province. Come on.
It is realistic, you have been lied to.
In general there is no public bus stops near me.
I loved when I could use public transportation, and the reality is when public transportation is available people use it.
However there are the pressures from the car dealers and auto industry that do not want a good public transportation, and the fact that to get a decent public transportation you must raise up taxes, and uneducated people about public transportation will see only the tax arguments, and nobody want lose an election for that reason.
It is very difficult getting over this stale position, you need a very convinced administration that must find resources without increasing taxes and reduce services, a very difficult challenge.
Since the 90’s american cities have been successfully passing ballot initiatives to raise their own taxes to fund transit. They don’t always pass but the tide has been slowly, painfully slowly turning for a while now.
I can’t drive, and I live in New Jersey, a good place to live if you need mass transit. Even still, I have to rely on Lyft and Uber to get anywhere in a reasonable or reliable timeframe. Taking the train or the bus means I have to tack on an extra half hour, if I’m lucky. Going grocery shopping with mass transit is a nightmare, because of size and weight limits (I have to be ready to walk with that stuff for over a mile). Plus, I hurt my foot pretty badly about a month ago (walking between bus stops in an area that has no right to be as hazardous as it is), so any kind of transit is actively painful currently. Heck, even if I could drive, I couldn’t, because it was my right foot that was hurt.
I don’t see how it could be made better without having to do billions or trillions of taxpayer-funded upgrades to every road (and a lot of eminent domain to build sidewalks - very expensive and just as unpopular). I also don’t see how it can get better with the labor costs where they are, unless our taxes go up even higher.
The fact that the system exists is a positive, but improving it is such an expensive endeavor for so little impact that it would be mostly pointless. No one is going to willingly choose to take an hour to get somewhere that a car can reach in ten minutes. No one is going to willingly choose to stand out on a random corner in the snow, rain, cold, or extreme heat just to wait for a bus that might already be delayed, and whose environmental systems might be malfunctioning. I don’t see a way to incentivize people to even begin considering public transit with the time differences. I pay fees to Lyft or Uber that are an order of magnitude higher than what I’d pay NJTransit - and I’m not discouraged, because I just have to look at the difference in time.
No one is going to willingly choose to take an hour to get somewhere that a car can reach in ten minutes. No one is going to willingly choose to stand out on a random corner in the snow, rain, cold, or extreme heat just to wait for a bus that might already be delayed, and whose environmental systems might be malfunctioning.
That’s the point of improving things, then it wouldn’t be like that. But the previous sentence you said it was a pointless endeavour so I’m not sure what your point is.
If you have bad public transport you can’t argue against making it good based on the fact that it’s bad now since if it was good then it would no longer be bad. I really don’t know what else to say.
That’s why I think the focus should be on grade separated rail, a bus in normal traffic is only for people with no alternatives, whereas I have a car and I use thr park and ride and subway sometimes by choice
It doesn’t have to be an either/or; a good bus network reduces traffic and reduces the land needed to be used for roads and parking spaces, creating a nicer, safer environment to live in. Also more buses mean less traffic which mean more reliable buses. Rail has its place too of course, they complement each other.
They argued you cant make it better cause the improvements impact does not scale with costs. As an example they mentioned, implementing sidewalks would make walking safer, but cost ridiculous amounts of money that tax payers would have to fork over. Something they likely won’t do because costs will likely outweight the benefits for a lot of people
But the person is assuming the result would still be poor public transport. In a sense they’re right, spending a lot of money to still take “an hour to get somewhere that a car will reach in ten minutes” would not be worth it because that would be a failure, but assuming failure isn’t a reason to argue against it when lots of places do it well and benefit greatly from it. Reaching for an analogy, it’s a bit like saying we shouldn’t make an omelette because it’ll be raw if we don’t cook it and that would be a waste of money.
Do you understand how much roads actually cost? Do you understand how bad the ROI on road expansions is?
Besides, I will 100% take a little extra time to not drive. Google Maps will give you a door-to-door driving time which doesn’t include finding parking and walking from said parking and for the metro it gives the longest time so you can pman for waiting for the train+transfers but you can regularly go much quicker than that. I own car, I own a sportscar, and I only drive it when I absolutely need to which often means driving it just so it doesn’t sit still for too long and gather rust. Plus, a monthly metro/bus pass costs less than my insurance on a car which they know I only drive around 5,000km/year and then there’s gas, tires and oil, and any maintenance(which I do myself to save money).
Public transit is awesome and it works. We know this because we can see it working even in rural Europe, places very similar in many ways to North America. The US and Canada spread their cities out in incredibly ineffective ways and they aggressively shoot down public transit expansion. Montréal and New York are cities in North America that prove that there is no magical anti-transit field on the continent. Shit works, and it’s awesome.
TL;DR the only reason that your public transit is bad is because all levels of your governments actively resist the tried-and-true methods that make it work while burning billions of dollars on car-centric projects which are shown to never have any lasting effect on traffic(we’re talking a year or less) due to induced demand.
eminent domain to build sidewalks
Probably not. The land to either side of roads is typically owned by the road-owning entity already, in case they need to make improvements.
Even in my urban environment, the city owns the verge, the sidewalk, and something like eight inches past the sidewalk, six inches past everyone’s front fence.
I live in NJ (where this guy is coming from) and I’d say the bigger problem isn’t eminent domain. It’s homeowners who don’t want sidewalks in their neighborhood. The idea is that walking is for the poors, and we are clearly too classy for such things as basic public safety.
The wealthier the town (around here) the less likely a residential area is to have a sidewalk. They advertise and brag about “walkable” downtowns like it’s a cute novelty not a given that should apply to every street.
To be fair though, a lot of these quiet suburban streets are very safe to walk along. Pedestrian accidents on quiet suburban streets here are mostly unheard of.
Fuck that, give me my NJ sidewalks. The sidewalk fucking ENDS and it’s a crime. A crime. Let me walk to fucking wawa without dying!!
I don’t see how it could be made better without having to do billions or trillions of taxpayer-funded upgrades to every road
This seems like a good-faith comment, so I’ll try to keep the snark to a minimum. Honestly, when I hear this sentiment, I think that somebody believes that roads are naturally-occurring phenomena. They just sort of… grow? appear? form from the bedrock?
Good lord, no! Roads are highly resource-intensive structures, and roads for cars have a finite lifetime, typically figured in the range of about 30 years before they have to be re-constructed. And that’s not counting perhaps several rounds of re-surfacing and maintenance in that span. In fact, Strong Towns often points out that when businesses acquire a capital asset, they have to book the cost of future maintenance as a liability. Municipal governments, by contrast, book roads as an asset, and ignore the future maintenance liability. If they followed GAAP, most cities and towns would be bankrupt. Hence, the reason the American Society of Civil Engineers grades our roads as D+. As a country, we keep building roads that we can’t afford to fix.
That is a long way of saying, “We have a backlog of trillions of dollars of maintenance to roads already!” They have to be re-built regularly, anyway, and lots are overdue. One of the major reasons that we can’t afford to do it, and the reason that there are so many lane-miles of road to maintain, is cars. The simple geometry of the space needed for cars means that everything has to be far apart in order to fit the roads, and the parking lots, and the drive-thrus in between.
So, we’re on the hook for a backlog of trillions of dollars of taxpayer-funded basic maintenance to roads, and we can’t afford it. Wouldn’t it be better to re-construct our cities and towns—which again, have to be re-constructed no matter what—around more opportunities for walking, biking, or transit? It would be way cheaper. And without all that pavement for cars, we could put things closer together. Walking to the local grocery would be convenient, because the nearest grocery wouldn’t have to be 5 miles away, on the edge of town, where land for a parking lot is cheap enough. We could be healthier, stopping by the grocery for a few minutes on the way home a couple of times a week to pick up fresh, healthy ingredients, instead of loading up the car with a pallet of highly-processed food from CostCo every two weeks. We could have better weak ties with neighbors by seeing them from time to time at nearby places, which science shows is critical to addressing our mental health crisis. We could let our children, elderly, and disabled people have independence again. And the buses could be fast and convenient, if they didn’t have to go so far and get stuck in private car traffic all the way.
Anyway, I’ve gone on long enough, but I hope that this is a peek at just how bad our car-based system is, and how it could be made better, and for cheaper.
Imagine if we had to pass ballot initiatives and debate the cost and alternatives for freeways the same as we do for transit. Instead it’s always a Blank check
Here is something good to read from an organization that is actually trying to improve things.
What a ridiculous way to live. Imagine not having a pavement along a road people might need to travel along.
Like sure, here there’s no pavements along roads once you get outside of towns and cities to the big connecting roads, the kind nobody would want to walk down anyway, motorways, dual carriageways, and of course small country roads and the like.
But if you physically can’t get from A to B in a town without walking along an unsafe verge? The fuck is your local government doing and why haven’t they been sacked yet?
To be fair, I also live somewhere that Americans hate from what I’ve heard, the dreaded evil 15 minute neighbourhood. Everything I need, more or less, is within a short walk. That’s just how things are built in the UK, my whole area was built in the post-war 50s construction boom, so it’s hardly new.
Within 15 minutes I can walk to a newsagents, off licence, flower shop, takeaway, opticians, doctors surgery, dentists, schools, butchers, bakery, supermarkets, bicycle repair shop, barbershops and salons, cafes, etc etc. Often there’s more than one of a thing available.
There’s much more within easy reach, because there are many buses and rail trams running in various directions to get to different places in the city and in the towns surrounding the city, all stops within a 15 minute walk of my house. They run frequently and are very affordable to use.
Anyway, yeah, while I don’t expect everywhere to put such a big focus on ensuring pedestrians can live their lives without cars, I expect them to at least have PATHS, for fecks sake.
…how do their children walk to school if there’s no bloody paths? Come on. Local government should be run out of office for endangering the kids like that, nevermind everyone else. I mean… how do wheelchair users etc get around? Christ.
how do their children walk to school if there’s no bloody paths? Come on.
They don’t. There is a reason why kids are so desperate to get a driver’s license, as before they do they are effectively trapped in their house if they are unlucky enough to live away from transit (Or even if they are they are still somewhat trapped). Before then they are driven to school and to activities. That is where the stereotype of the “Soccer mom” comes from.
Local government should be run out of office for endangering the kids like that, nevermind everyone else.
There is a perception that walking is inherently dangerous and for the poor, so people would get run out of office for trying to fix things. In Canada most cities have sidewalks to most places, but not to wealthier neighbourhoods.
I mean… how do wheelchair users etc get around? Christ.
Most of the bigger busses here can ‘kneel’ to let people on if need be, and if they live far from transit then they can schedule special busses to pick them up. The trains are also very good on accessibility. All of this is in a city with fairly well funded transit, in most cities and towns they are completely dependent on others to drive them around.
https://www.calgarytransit.com/content/transit/en/home/calgary-transit-access.html
Actively wanting to die helps.
Where I live, to walk anywhere would easily take half a day
In California there was a strip mall five minutes from the motel so being Brits we walked over to shop and get some dinner, but there was no sidewalk.
Haha loved it
