you know how nice it is to be able to walk like 5 minutes to a grocery store? You don't have to roll over to Costco once a week to buy $300 in groceries that need to be stored in two refrigerators. You just walk over to the store and buy some things for a day or two and if you forget something it's no big deal, it's a 5 minute walk!
Anyway I completely and uncritically believe this because getting in your car to do literally anything sucks ass. Just owning a car sucks ass. Yeah there are fun parts of having a car but you can rent a car to do the fun things and it's probably net cheaper.
Recently moved to a location that has 0 bike lanes, few if any bus routes, everything is made for cars. Nearest store is a 30 minute walk along highways. It is really depressing coming from somewhere we did have a 5 minute walk to a store. The amount of fresh veggies we eat has gone down significantly for frozen ones.
Same. I'm not in a position to move either. Frozen and canned foods are basically 97% of my diet.
I cannot go back to that. I grew up in the southeast of the US, moved to a real city after spending most my 20's completely car dependent. I can't go back
i live a 5 min walk from the grocery store but i still go once a week. grocery shopping sucks i dedicate as little time as possible to it.
“Car dependency has a threshold effect – using a car just sometimes increases life satisfaction but if you have to drive much more than this people start reporting lower levels of happiness,” said Rababe Saadaoui, an urban planning expert at Arizona State University and lead author of the study. “Extreme car dependence comes at a cost, to the point that the downsides outweigh the benefits.”
the benefits of extreme car dependence
Cars make me truly free! I pay 150 every month for car insurance+ the 70 or so per month on gas + the additional sum for maintenance. So something like 2,700 every year just to have a car as well as the comically overpriced loan I had to get when used cars became commodities in 2021
If that doesn’t make sense than you’re just anti-American
Finally a real American.
Don’t these fancy pants millennials know it’s their patriotic duty give our precious auto industry a chunk of their income? Not to mention that good ol’ porky is watching out for us by having us blow an hour each way commuting to and from work. It toughens us up by keeping us busy outside of work; idle hands are the devil’s workshop! Having time for hobbies would make us become decadent!
Ah that reminds me, I need to call the mechanic this morning because my car started making a new sound. Living in a place where a car is required to exist is so much fun
I would love to have the energy and financial wherewithal to open a small grocery shop where I live. There are no walkable grocery stores in my small downtown area. You absolutely MUST have some means of transportation if you want to get groceries.
That stat is skewed by retirees who don't drive and the existence of NYC. For "average America", I would wager that it's closer to 95% of households who use their cars daily.
Working from home can do it too. Don't always have to go somewhere every day.
Yeah 87% seems like a lowball. Where I live right now, you can't go anywhere without a car and there's no metro/passenger trains/rail line/whatever. Busses are unreliable and wait times vary between 15 minutes to an hour, so you show up an hour before you plan to leave, which just eats your time.
You can't even get around my residential neighborhood without a car because there's no bike lanes and sidewalks are missing from large sections.
I love cars, that's why I'm grinning ear to ear while typing this in an AutoZone because I ripped up my windshield wipers that were frozen to my windshield when I had to move my car off the street before it got ticketed for alternate side parking.
oh yes the consequences of the car industries corruption in the government or as they prefer to call "lobby"
I generally miss bussing, but I'd be lying if I said my sleep schedule wasn't vastly improved and my ability to do multiple errands in a day wasn't made possible by buying a car.
Hell, I once attained some unreal level of fitness cause the buses sucked so much it was faster to spend 1-4 hours a day biking everywhere.
Finally reached that sweet spot over the past few years of owning a car, but still living in a relatively walkable spot where I can just forget the car once in a while. Only filling the tank once a month is wonderful.
Realistically, chunks of Amerikkka could arguably find a sweet spot of utilizing public transit if they only worked some 30 hours a week. Then all that time spent waiting and traveling wouldn't hurt half as bad.
that mostly means real estate prices
