A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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Image transcript:
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.
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 [email protected] 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:
An example of hot-climate urbanism done right (in Texas, no less!), however, is the San Antonio River Walk:
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.