Technology

I don't own a car anymore and haven't for two years now. I walk everywhere. Around 10 miles most days through the countryside and coast from town to town.

Healthiest I've ever been, I can eat what I want a lot of the time too. I've got basically no body fat and I have a ridiculous amount of energy. I feel constantly refreshed too, before I was lethargic and overweight.

I live in the UK however in a very pedestrian orientated location where I can do this without issue. Or get a bus or train if needed. I have absolutely no idea how it would be possible in a rural area or a car centric city. I guess it wouldn't be, and the people in charge are not willing to change.

Buying any car, electric or otherwise, is 'Sort of like building a horse barn in 1910’.

Let's say that it depend on where you live. In a big city maybe a car can be useless (or less usefull), but in a small town like mine a car is basically the only way to move around since public transportation is really limited.

Real sustainability comes from changing the zoning code to cease outlawing walkability.

Even if you remove all the private cars in a city, you will discover that you will substitute almost all of them with small/medium trucks to deliver all the groceries/products you (end everyone else) need in your life. And I say it living in a small town where I can almost do the day by day chores without using a car.

That would barely scratch the surface, I'm afraid. For quite a lot of America, not owning a car is simply not feasible. I don't have a large friend/family group, but in 4 cases now, we've had to relocate our families a town over because wages aren't keeping up with cost of living. So we all have long commutes now. There are no buses, trains, etc. We were priced out of housing market. When my landlord sold the property and forced my move 5-6 years ago, I could rent and pay 30% more for a smaller place, I could buy for what I was paying if I wanted to move my family of 5 into a two bed with no yard, etc, or I could move a town or two over pay a bit more, and get a decent size house for my family. Today if I had to buy a house, I couldn't even come close to affording the place I live in now, especially not at 7-9% interest compared to the 3.5% I got.

Now I guess you could still say fuck me I should have given up my dogs, moved my family into a shoe box and just walked to save the planet, but even then that's not really feasible. In a town of 60k I moved from, there is only bussing, and even then they don't run often enough to a wide enough range of places that you're not building in additional hours of the day to get where you're going. And they often don't run past 7pm or before 7am. And that's most of America. Even in large cities, public transportation is severely lacking compared to the rest of the civilized world.

Biking in the US should also help be a stopgap, but our whole society is so fucking car centric even that's even not really feasible. Aside from the fact that most of infrastructure rarely has bike lanes or even places to store bikes, its still lacking severely from "I'm just going a few blocks over to the bodega" every few days and is more like "just 5-10 miles to the grocery store." And this is just looking at my tiny little town where I live that is nowhere near as bad as somewhere like Houston, which is far more populous and also even less dense and less traversable by anything that's not a car.

In 2023, saying people shouldn't own cars is either ignorant of the issues around it or just classist. The Rivian CEO saying shit like this, with a starting price of $73k, is just more classist CEO bullshit. We don't even have the charging infrastructure at the moment to support everyone buying electric, not to mention I'd be willing to bet that 50% or more of this country can't even afford the starting price on whatever the cheapest electric is.

I hate armchair urbanists so much it's unreal