Article about an experiment from Brisbane, Australia.
Ask 10 people in Amsterdam and half would tell you they already haven’t used a car in weeks. The only ones who’d have a problem with it are those who work far away from Amsterdam.
That’ll be 1.5M€ for a 40m² apartment thanks.
That’s the big problem with nice places to live: they quickly turn into expensive places to live.
I lived in Amsterdam for 10 years and only got a car when I married someone who lived in the suburbs. Well, actually I still don’t own a car but I can borrow one as needed!
I think this small experiment simply demonstrates that ditching cars is not a matter of personal preferences, but a community effort
And a matter of traffic design. You can design places to require a car for everything, or you can design them with bike paths everywhere and a good public transit system.
We went involuntarily car-free for a month after a heavy rain flooded my family’s car. It was much more manageable than expected, due to both the walkability of our suburban neighbourhood and commutes that aligned with nearby bus routes. But if we lived even 1km further from the bus stops, it would have been unpleasant. The alternatives to driving need to exist with reasonable frequency before more suburbanites consider ditching their cars. But I also believe that people need to be receptive to trying something different that may not always be as comfortable as getting into a climate controlled, sound insulated private box to get around.
Despite how close we are to amenities, almost everyone drives to the grocery stores or to work regardless of age or physical health. One factor is 30+ minute bus headways even at peak times. Another is that 2+ buses are needed to get to the nearest commuter rail station, which has free parking and again 30+ minute headways. So to make it to the station on time, people just choose to drive there. That lack of integration with regional rail schedules is another thing that may be limiting bus ridership. An interim solution to low built densities affecting bus routes is more bike infrastructure that is transit compatible, like bike racks at bus stops instead of awkwardly using utility poles. (Also, why are we not allowed to use both bus bike rack slots when they clearly have the space for it? It seems asinine.)
While we are not really a car-lite household, many grocery and commuting trips have been replaced by transit. I realize there’s a degree of discomfort that comes with a change in travel patterns when the alternatives are not as maturely developed. Waiting 30 minutes for a bus or walking 20 minutes to another bus route because the last bus came early can be unpleasant, but on the flip side, the ride itself unlocks the ability to relax or get work done that driving does not permit. Walking or biking to the grocery store can be a workout on the way back, but it’s free cardio through ‘the gym of life,’ as Jason Slaughter of Not Just Bikes would say. We need to be okay with some discomfort before ridership can increase enough to improve transit frequencies. Or, you know, hope that 40% increases in gas prices in 2 weeks is enough of a price shock that people start embracing the alternatives on their own accord.
A combination of pandemic lockdowns and work-from-home was practically an orange-pill recipe for myself and many others. There’s no looking back now, and there hasn’t been in over five years.
10 is not a statistically significant sample size
A researcher asked people who live in car dependent areas to go without theirs for 20 days, none of them were able to overcome the poor infrastructure.
Fixed Headline for them.
I couldn’t do it where I live without just taking 20 days off work. I’ve got a grocery store a couple of blocks away so food wouldn’t really be an issue. The problem is that I work about 5 miles from my house down a road that doesn’t have sidewalks most of the way and you’d have to be crazy to ride a bike in a lane. There is no public transportation anywhere between my house and work.
With public transit, I’d have to walk / drive 5 miles to a bus stop, then hop across 2 seperate bus routes, then make it another 5 miles on foot or an uber or smth to get to work, for a combined 2 hours 40 minutes, assuming I uber the 10 miles where public transit is either non-existent, or goes too far out of the way that walking would be faster
Its only a 30 minute drive…
Ive been car free my entire life and I will continue to do so for the rest of my life
Same here!
Or until you start a family.
Ah yes, I forgot it’s impossible to ride public transport with kids…
Also you, probably: “There are no atheists in foxholes”
I’m car free with 2 kids. Everyone thinks it’s harder, like kids like driving in traffic. No, it’s not. We do local things or get public transport. No parking hassles.fine to have a drink with lunch.
yeah, having kids in sports would be insane without a car. Practice is in two separate towns, multiple times a week, real meets are in other major cities.
You couldn’t get them to where they need to be with US public transport.
We got a bigger car than I would like because my stepdaughter decided that she wanted to be a hockey goalie. 🙈
we get it, you’re rich
we get it, you’re rich
everyone has their own definitions, sure are a LOT of rich people in this thread :)
Why do kids have to go to different cities to play? There are enough kids in nearby schools
There are enough kids in nearby schools
Maybe in a big city. The district I worked the most for was big enough that most matches were within the district. But when you think about most small towns, which maybe have one or two high schools, that’s not going to be true at all.
Even with that - are the nearby schools the same division? Lots of sporting leagues have restrictions on who can play who (bigger schools playing bigger schools instead of smaller ones, an attempt to be fair usually).
Heck, even leaving sports out I drove an hour out for a FIRST tournament recently.
Small towns almost always need personal transport. But the definition of a small town in US is much bigger than most other developed places (my experience is EU, SKorea, Japan)
If it’s a small town, there’s not going to be many big or small schools. Why such a weird system 😅
If significant travel is required, the school should organise travel and stay. Unless the kid is participating in state level at U-12, there is no significant travel for play in Japan and Germany (for popular sports). The kid is a kid afterall. And study is also important
But the definition of a small town in US is much bigger than most other developed places
This is the type of town that I had in mind when I was writing my comment..
Closest high school is Elk City, which you have to drive to, on the interstate. There is no public transit anywhere on this map.
When I was in high school, our track team all met at the high school and got on a bus to the other schools matches, often they were long rides. However, the school provided the bus transpo. I think that was true for all the HS sports leagues. I think the same occurred for the middle school. The elementary school? I don’t know, I don’t think they had inter-school sports. Mostly kids were in local leagues where businesses sponsored teams and they played in local parks. (At least that was how it was in a village I lived in Long Island. We had a few ballfields and just rotated through them. For winter sports like basketball, they used the church gyms and local rec center. Believe me, my parents never drove us to any activity other than a school drop off.
i have a family. living with a small child in an american city without a car is entirely possible. you lose the ability to go out (either to city or to nature) but with a small child you don’t have time to do that anyway so you might as well pay more to live closer to your job. alternative is paying the difference in rent for a car loan and loosing the time you don’t have while sitting in traffic. big caveat: this works only if you earn enough to be able to afford living close to a city center in the first place. also, it is still way less comfortable than a life in a developed european city.
alternative is paying the difference in rent for a car loan
Why do you have to take an expensive loan to get a car? Is there no used car market in US? I live in a bit different reality, and here there’s thriving market at any price tag. You have to do the research, pay for paint thickness check to ensure car didn’t get wrapped around a tree, but getting very cheap used car to drive your ass from point A to point B is absolutely a thing.
Is there no used car market in US?
There is, but prices on anything that doesn’t require constant repairs is still fairly expensive.
Nah US has used cars, got mine for like $6000 a few years ago when prices were kinda high.
It depends on where you live. I wouldn’t be able to get around without my whip.
The Brisbane public transport is pretty bad, but there are more reasons: the bus network is owned by the council while the train network is owned by the state government. As a result both tend to compete with each other. This is especially bad when the busses don’t even cover some areas. Partner went for a course there recently and their best option to reach the place on public transport was to just walk 40 minutes from the train station! I can’t think of a single area in Sydney that wouldn’t get a bus service at least once a day on a work day. (You know things are bad if you’re comparing to Sydney busses because these things are terrible)
Absolutely, although as a Sydneysider, I generally have pretty good bus services where I live. The only thing that makes my blood boil is how awful the bus drivers can be to children. There was one day I had to catch the bus to the library after school, and it was storming a fuck ton. This group of highschoolers get on, and some of them don’t tap on and go and sit down. The bus driver, an old grey haired lady yells her head off at the back of the bus, but since they had already sat down, she couldn’t find them. So she decides the only thing left for her to do, is to stand by the Opal card reader, and force every single person to tap on. You might be thinking “well fine she’s pissed, but those guys should’ve just tapped on right?”
Well this little kid jumps on, and he looks no older than 12 years old. He asks, in a voice I can barely make out over the raging storm outside “can I come on? My family just moved here and I don’t have a card yet” - to which the decrepit bus driver yells “Not on my watch, get out of here! No one is allowed on this bus unless everyone taps on!”, she then proceeds to shove him to the middle of the entrance before shoving him outside.
I remember kicking myself the rest of the trip to the library - I was furious at myself for not having recorded what she had done, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it for the rest of the week. No one, especially not a child, deserves to be forced out of a bus in the middle of a thunderstorm.
So every time someone praises public transport here, I’m grateful for the comfortable experience I get to enjoy. But each and every time someone praises the buses, the first thing I can think of is that little boy, and how despite confessing to the bus driver he was new to the area, was pushed into the middle of a raging thunderstorm.
The same was done in Vienna. People did not use their car for 3 months.
Results
- 2/3 could imagine living without a car
- 25% have sold or are planning to sell their car
“It demonstrates that in low-density, sprawling cities like Brisbane, people cannot be expected to permanently give up driving unless there is significant investment in public transport.”
However, researchers found given participants were likely to slightly reduce their reliance on cars, it showed experiencing car-free living, even briefly, could help people break away from automobility.
In Brisbane, 89 per cent of households own at least one car and 48 per cent of commuters drive to work.
This was essentially the goal of the study, to demonstrate that more investment is needed in public transport to increase public buy-in, and that even just being forced to try it for a few weeks increases usage and lowers car use longer term - so if there can be incentives to try public transport that could also increase its use long term and reduce cars on the road.
The headline is not what people here (myself included) wanna read, but the study succeeded in its demonstration and will hopefully drive positive govt policy outcomes.
If services aren’t within 5-10 minutes maximum, people will not walk or bike there. That’s often greater than the distance just to get out of some neighborhoods.
If public transportation is not within 5 minutes or so, people will not use it.
The cost of a car can be under 10/day. If public transport is even half that for full day multistop use, people won’t use it.
will hopefully drive positive govt policy outcomes.
From the current city and state governments? Highly unlikely.
The average claim per person for all their travel expenses during the experiment in Brisbane was $125 – but they saved $300 in car costs. “I hadn’t realised how much money my car eats up,” a 43-year-old man from Brisbane said.
Those $300 for 20 days look like just fuel costs. Add the yearly depreciation value of the car (especially bad for new cars), insurance and maintenance costs and it gets even worse.
Even limiting oneself to only a financial viewpoint (which is quite reductive since the are also big Environmental, Health and Social costs), for most people (especially those who live in cities) cars are stupidly expensive for the utility value that they deliver.
I went without a car until my very late thirties. Then I got married, had a kid, moved to a suburb and the city I’m in can’t unfuck its public transportation to save its life and thus I was forced into buying a car.
I live in Ottawa, Canada and the polite term of our public transit (OC Transpo) is NO C Transpo or OCCasional Transpo. Seriously, they bought a train that doesn’t work in ice/snow and also doesn’t work in summer heat. They don’t have enough resources to perform proper maintenance on the buses. And final cherry on top is that they went with the decision to buy zero-emission buses (a good idea I’m supportive of) but had no plan to transition between the gasoline powered ones which are now at end of life while their replacements are still years away from becoming operational.
The only other organization I’ve seen fuck up major projects this bad is our Department of National Defense.
I wfh so I only drive once a week and that’s to stock up on groceries. The grocery store is a number of miles away-- way too many for me to be able to bike and return with bags.
Having food shipped would just mean putting another car on the road anyways. Or has guzzling truck.
If I could afford to move, not sure how feasible it would be to have something within a mile or two anyways since I’d still need to bring back a ton of heavy bags. I’m old.
:(
If one delivery truck is making 100+ deliveries a day, it should be partly or fully eliminating dozens of vehicle trips. Even if that truck pollutes more than the typical car, I’m sure the decrease in vehicle miles traveled more than compensates for it.
Is there a place you could live that has half-decent biking infrastructure and groceries within a few miles? An electric cargo bike or even mobility scooter could handle those trips. While a good one may cost a few grand, that’s still cheaper than operating a car for a few months.
Couple of miles away feels dystopian.
Imagine a video game where all activity is in one region and you need to periodically gather resources from a much different region.
This mechanic would flop hard.
European cities have grocery stores within walking distance. I walk to mine, no problem.
It is really not about Europe or US. Even the US has cities and neighbourhoods that are like that. In most places however, it is illegal to build such places new and their supply is so ridiculously low that most people could not possibly afford to live in such a place, or those places, or those places are so poor and dangerous that they aren’t good places to live for other reasons.
The problem is car centric urban design. Most people don’t get it that they do not only have to drive by car because everything is so far away but everything is so far away because everyone is expected to drive by car. You can change that but it takes a lot of time and the political will to do so.
I live in a center city area, but the problem I have is that it’s a food desert like lots of center cities are. The small independent grocery stores usually have too much shrink to remain open so it leaves me with three options that are all equidistant and not walkable. I fill a 55L messenger bag and transport it via bike but it’s quite uncomfortable carrying that much weight compared to just hopping in a car.
Sounds like part of the problem is that groceries in the US are not designed as proper full sortiment stores. By that I don’t mean being a hypermarket with 1000 flavours of yoghurt but having a broad sortiment, just like an Aldi doesn’t have all that many different products either but they do cover most of the stuff you need. In many cities you find such grocery stores that are still pretty compact on every corner. You really need to go to anything else only if you want something rather special or extraordinary.
I find it pretty strange to consider city centres to be food deserts by default but then, I guess that is the case in many cities in the US, even when they are not entirely car dependent.
One thing that is a key difference in transit oriented places, other than the stores I was talking about above is that shopping habbits are widly different. Shopping more often but buying less. This has pros and cons but as stores are more efficient (good sortiment at compact size) one does not need as long in the store and buying stuff after work means, one can have a lot fresher stuff at home, for example, fresh bread, fresh vegetables, fresh fruits …
Another aspect is drinking habits or rather infrastructure. Where I live, a lot of people don’t buy a lot of drinks, other than the occasional orange juice or and milk. Tap water is great, no need for bottled water and if you like it carbonised, something like Soda Stream is saving you a lot of schlepping.
PS: Every thought about getting an e-bike or a compact cargo e-bike? Still worlds better than wasting fuel for the car for inner urban transportation, if it is safe to ride that is.
I live in an area where you don’t have to have a car, you can do most things without. But you’ll have to pry my car keys from my cold dead hands because it is so incredibly more convenient and faster to have one.
Edit: noticed the community. To be clear, I’m all for good infrastructure for people who don’t own one, I just wouldn’t go back to the days where I didn’t have one.
People like you ruined my life. I have a long term disease because of all the fine particle from idiot vroomists. I hope you get lung cancer
The real question is would you ditch your car if it were more convenient and faster to go by bike or transit, or with a shared car service for extra and week-end trips?
Myself, and probably a good percentage of this community dont just have a blanket hatred of cars. It’s mainly about how car-centric design sucks, even for people who drive cars.
Many cities that are designed with good public transit are also way easier to drive in. If 99% of people have to drive into a city center for work, or school, or groceries, or whatever, everything has to be really spread out for enough parking, roads need a lot of lanes and a lot of entrances/exits, so driving is stressful, and you still end up spending a lot of time in traffic.
With competent infrastructure for walking/biking/public transit, the mode share for cars drops, and driving actually gets easier since you aren’t competing with everyone else.
Yeah, I have a kid. From groceries to doctors appointments and camp and activities, doing all this without a car would be a nightmare. That said, I buy used, pay cash, and own a little Honda hatchback that sips gas.
I was a kid when i was poisonned by idiots drivers
This is what people don’t get. Having a car changes everything. It’s much more convenient.
Yeah I’m also all for good public transport and as many options as there can be. However that doesn’t change the fact that having your own var is much more convenient. Especially in an emergency.
Yes because your own life is the measurement of what’s right and wrong. Everything revolves around you and your ability to vroomvroom your fatass around
