Oh wow, that’s sad. I have never owned a car.
I see not having nor needing a car as my greatest luxury in life.
What a ridiculous way to live. Imagine not having a pavement along a road people might need to travel along.
Like sure, here there’s no pavements along roads once you get outside of towns and cities to the big connecting roads, the kind nobody would want to walk down anyway, motorways, dual carriageways, and of course small country roads and the like.
But if you physically can’t get from A to B in a town without walking along an unsafe verge? The fuck is your local government doing and why haven’t they been sacked yet?
To be fair, I also live somewhere that Americans hate from what I’ve heard, the dreaded evil 15 minute neighbourhood. Everything I need, more or less, is within a short walk. That’s just how things are built in the UK, my whole area was built in the post-war 50s construction boom, so it’s hardly new.
Within 15 minutes I can walk to a newsagents, off licence, flower shop, takeaway, opticians, doctors surgery, dentists, schools, butchers, bakery, supermarkets, bicycle repair shop, barbershops and salons, cafes, etc etc. Often there’s more than one of a thing available.
There’s much more within easy reach, because there are many buses and rail trams running in various directions to get to different places in the city and in the towns surrounding the city, all stops within a 15 minute walk of my house. They run frequently and are very affordable to use.
Anyway, yeah, while I don’t expect everywhere to put such a big focus on ensuring pedestrians can live their lives without cars, I expect them to at least have PATHS, for fecks sake.
…how do their children walk to school if there’s no bloody paths? Come on. Local government should be run out of office for endangering the kids like that, nevermind everyone else. I mean… how do wheelchair users etc get around? Christ.
how do their children walk to school if there’s no bloody paths? Come on.
They don’t. There is a reason why kids are so desperate to get a driver’s license, as before they do they are effectively trapped in their house if they are unlucky enough to live away from transit (Or even if they are they are still somewhat trapped). Before then they are driven to school and to activities. That is where the stereotype of the “Soccer mom” comes from.
Local government should be run out of office for endangering the kids like that, nevermind everyone else.
There is a perception that walking is inherently dangerous and for the poor, so people would get run out of office for trying to fix things. In Canada most cities have sidewalks to most places, but not to wealthier neighbourhoods.
I mean… how do wheelchair users etc get around? Christ.
Most of the bigger busses here can ‘kneel’ to let people on if need be, and if they live far from transit then they can schedule special busses to pick them up. The trains are also very good on accessibility. All of this is in a city with fairly well funded transit, in most cities and towns they are completely dependent on others to drive them around.
https://www.calgarytransit.com/content/transit/en/home/calgary-transit-access.html
Yeah that non availability of public transport is hell.
It just isnt realistic to have public transit in webs of suburbs that brings you to islands of stores that are only accessible by road.
There’s public transport in the webs of suburbs of Madrid or Barcelona, there’s public transport across the towns of my whole province. Come on.
It is realistic, you have been lied to.
In general there is no public bus stops near me.
Actively wanting to die helps.
In California there was a strip mall five minutes from the motel so being Brits we walked over to shop and get some dinner, but there was no sidewalk.
Where I live, to walk anywhere would easily take half a day
Yeah id die in my city with no car. Cant get around at all and its very spread out. Also, -20 degrees and 30 mph winds are normal.
i like your hat
They forgot the “Getting the cops called on you” obstacle.
At least in the US, there is no activity that is more likely to result in an interaction with cops than driving.
There’s a woman from a town in Québec that had CPS called on her because she is using a cargo bike to carry her kids around.
Story in French: https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/2022-06-20/signalee-a-la-dpj-a-cause-de-son-velo-cargo.php
We need laws protecting peoples right to do thus. And also children’s right to walk and bike too while we’re at it
I’m lucky to have any transit access in my suburban town.
I live in a suburb of a big city, not by choice, and I also live within walking distance of a bus stop… if you don’t mind walking for three hours just to get to the bus stop.
This kind of design sounds completely insane. You could walk half way to Cockfosters along the Piccadilly line in that time. Any other city I can think of here you could walk the entire diameter of the city within 3 hours.
I don’t even need public transport because I live in a town, usually quicker to walk and always quicker to cycle compared to waiting for a bus. Not sure if its better to swim than take the ferry, maybe I need an amphibious bike?
This kind of design sounds completely insane.
That’s American city design for you. The cities are designed expecting that everybody has a car, so they’re sprawling, especially in the suburbs. Public transit is simply tacked on later and is very limited in range, and is almost always buses, very few trains. You’d have to be seriously lucky to live near a bus stop in the suburbs.
By the way, I can walk to the nearest grocery store in less than 15 minutes, so I feel good about that, at least. It’s very rare for the suburbs to be in walking distance of a grocery store.
Yeah, I mapped my public transit commute out one time. For starters, it’s complicated because Google/Apple/Waze/etc have the public transit option greyed out. Like it’s not even an option. If I try, Google suggests getting a Lyft. Which is really just saying “lol get a car, scrub.” I wish I were making this shit up:
Here’s a quick visual of my daily drive, versus the public transit route I would have to take:
So my commute starts with me biking 20 minutes away from work, to get to the nearest bus stop. Then I take a 20 minutes bus ride to the nearest rail hub. Then I take a commuter rail south-south-west for an hour, to get to the connecting line. Then I make a connection. The rail times rarely line up, so I’d probably have to wait at the station for ~15 minutes for the connection. Then I take the second rail line 45 minutes northwest.
But here’s where I run into my next problem… My house is serviced by one public transit system, and my job is serviced my another entirely separate transit system. Due to local politicians in the different cities not getting along, the two systems don’t connect. So now I need to bike 20 minutes north, to get from the northernmost station in one transit system, to the southernmost station in the other. Then I take another train 20 minutes north. Finally, I have about a 10 minute bike ride to get from the train station to my job.
All together, that’s ~50 minutes biking, ~20 minutes on a bus, and a little over 120 minutes split across three different trains. Plus the waiting time in between each connection, because the trains I need only run every 15-20 minutes. Bare minimum, I’m looking at around 3.5 hours for public transit… Or I can just take the highway 10 minutes west.
“But wait, you have walking and biking options! You could do those instead! The biking option in your screenshot is only 54 minutes!”
While this may be true on paper, I’d like to refer you to the “I had to go 2 hours out of my way to avoid certain death” panel in the posted comic. That 54 minute bike route is on a 70 MPH two lane highway, with no shoulder or sidewalk. I’d be dead before I was even halfway there.
“So take an alternate route?”
That giant loop I listed earlier is the alternate route. That 10 minute highway route cuts through a nature preserve. There are no other roads or paths parallel to it. You either take the highway, or you go all the way around.
I can’t even legally reach my grocery store without a car. I have to cross that same highway to get to the store, and there is no sidewalk that crosses it. So I’d need to break the law to walk to the grocery store.
I knew that was a SEPTA bus… Digging into her blog lightly and yup, Pennsylvania centric. Always neat to see local. Also not wrong about transit here, as I see plenty of people walk the harrowing roads around the suburb here. Pondering getting an e-bike eventually to determine viability, as my commute is relatively short. Would be nice to ditch the car a couple days a week to start.
American things. Try it in a real country.
Almost like that’s the point (and not entirely US-exclusive anyway)
Hey, we’re working on it. I’m in Seattle and we’re doing better than most in the country. People are coming around.
Cool bigotry.
Every week for me is a week without driving.
I honestly miss when that was my life.
Crossing the road is another pain
If it’s a US road it’s also much much too wide and much too fast. The country is designed to kill people who aren’t in cars.
Carry a brick and make eye contact with anyone in a car. Crossing the road gets much easier.
From tomorrow😁
