You've made the decision to live without a car. Congratulations! While a car is a useful solution to getting from place to place, it can also cost a lot of money to maintain. Cars can also cause a lot of unneeded stress. Without one,...
Cities are centuries older than cars though. Cars are the new thing. And yet it’s true that cars are an obvious QoL improvement for anyone in a rural area, and no reasonable person is suggesting that people in rural areas shouldn’t drive cars.
The real issue is that Americans (among others) have decided they want all the convenience and amenities of living in a city (sewer, water, energy, convenient access to most goods and services, etc.), but they want to pretend they live in a rural area, with no density whatsoever. This has resulted in the suburban sprawl that is financially ruinous and requires cars to be able to go anywhere and do anything, which creates traffic, which we solve by building bigger roads and pushing things farther apart, creating more traffic.
Thus, the answer really is that if you want city amenities, you need to live in a city. It doesn’t have to be as dense as New York. Not Just Bikes just posted a great video about the smallish town of Bergen in Norway that is not a super dense urban hellscape, it is medium density with human-centric development.
Y’all are missing the point. US had huge growth after wwii, most of it suburban and car oriented. This is how we got cities designed to sprawl, complete car dependency, and that’s all that too many people know. For all of them, too many cities, too much of the population, it’s new to want city amenities, new to think in terms other than cars and suburbs.
It’s still get odd looks talking about how much nicer things are. I still get people thinking cities are the crime ridden hellholes the 1970s told them they were
Cities are centuries older than cars though. Cars are the new thing. And yet it’s true that cars are an obvious QoL improvement for anyone in a rural area, and no reasonable person is suggesting that people in rural areas shouldn’t drive cars.
The real issue is that Americans (among others) have decided they want all the convenience and amenities of living in a city (sewer, water, energy, convenient access to most goods and services, etc.), but they want to pretend they live in a rural area, with no density whatsoever. This has resulted in the suburban sprawl that is financially ruinous and requires cars to be able to go anywhere and do anything, which creates traffic, which we solve by building bigger roads and pushing things farther apart, creating more traffic.
Thus, the answer really is that if you want city amenities, you need to live in a city. It doesn’t have to be as dense as New York. Not Just Bikes just posted a great video about the smallish town of Bergen in Norway that is not a super dense urban hellscape, it is medium density with human-centric development.
Y’all are missing the point. US had huge growth after wwii, most of it suburban and car oriented. This is how we got cities designed to sprawl, complete car dependency, and that’s all that too many people know. For all of them, too many cities, too much of the population, it’s new to want city amenities, new to think in terms other than cars and suburbs.
It’s still get odd looks talking about how much nicer things are. I still get people thinking cities are the crime ridden hellholes the 1970s told them they were