this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2025
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I'd like to note that there's nothing stopping you from buying, owning, or operating a car anywhere but public roads. Operating either one in a negligent manner is a crime.
So I can still hit up track day and ruin it for everyone? Nice
I actually still own my car. I’ll soapbox for a minute here. I live in a less urban area. The closest grocery store isn’t far, about a mile, but the path to get there is completely unnavigable. It’s eastern PA and the roads are antiquated, old carriage roads that have a shoulder of about 6” on either side and no sidewalks whatsoever. The closest bus stop is, you guessed it, at the small town center with the grocery store, gas station, and a few other shops. It’s not exactly rural but it’s not that far from it
Anyway! They take your license and thankfully there are some supports and they are pretty great. The division of the blind will hook you up with all kinds of shit to help you and train you to use it. I’m fairly tech oriented so I can set up screen readers and such but they have all these neat things like bumps on my stove knobs and all sorts of tactile things.
But the nightmare situation is transportation. Thankfully I’m in a privileged position where I work from home in a position that pays me a solid wage. But if I didn’t or if I ever changed jobs I would be fucked. As mentioned I have no bus stop I can safely get to and there’s no rail service for miles here. So the solution is that I schedule rides.
This is a terrrrible solution. It means that I have to contact the dot in advance, schedule a ride, hope they show up (they have flaked before) and then they come all the way out here to pick me up for a doctors appointment or whatever. It’s super wasteful and it’s basically making the state my uber (with none of the benefits, I still end up waiting around for ages often). It also means if there is a last minute need for transportation I am fucked. In an emergency I am reliant on services like ambulances, which is obscenely expensive. (Pro tip: your local ambulance company will often have a subscription fee, if you pay it they will waive a lot of billing fees. This is a bullshit system that should be illegal. I am a medical provider. If I bill your insurance $500 and they pay me $100 I write off the $400 because that’s the contracted rate. But ambulance companies will often charge thousands over what your insurance pays intentionally and will bill you this amount if you don’t pay their subscription bullshit. It’s literally extortion of people experiencing the worst moment of their lives)
wonderful infrastructure, america #1
I am currently having trouble wrapping my mind around this. That's so completely fucked up.
To be fair it’s not actually a subscription but a “strongly suggested donation”. Just one with financial penalties if you don’t pay it and ever get an ambulance ride.
What makes it extra fucked up is the housing system in the USA (and many places) means that most people don’t own their homes and a large amount of people move frequently.
As a result they are completely unaware of this because often the notice that it even exists is mailed out either to property owners based on tax records (meaning renters don’t get notified), at least where I live now. People I know here who live in apartment buildings or even my next door neighbor who rents his house had no idea because they don’t get the begging letter every year
Depends on locale though, where I used to live (which was far more urban and densely populated) they just mailed it to everyone but then it just came randomly addressed to “resident” and looked like junk mail. But then they got apartment complexes and stuff. That’s how I first found out, I got it at my old apartment (funny enough a few weeks after I used an ambulance for the first time in my life and had gotten a bill for like $1700 for a 7 minute ride with some medical care but that was over a decade ago. I did have decent insurance at the time too)