I know the demographics around here, so I know everyone’s just going to put “nothing lol”, but please understand what I’m asking first.
I’m physically incapable of driving a car. I stand to gain immeasurably from a world that didn’t assume everyone owned one. Having loved-ones with respiratory issues aggravated by car exhaust has made me very aware of the health issues surrounding the burning of fossil fuels, and having to navigate sidewalkless suburban stroads on a regular basis and juggle poorly funded public transit has made it very clear to me that pedestrians are second class citizens. I could go on and on about the mess cars have made of urban planning, and the number of jobs I couldn’t take because they required driving, but I digress.
In short, I hate cars just as much as the rest of you. But I’m also conscious that a lot of other people feel differently. What does widespread car ownership enable that would be difficult or impossible otherwise?
As an American I’m familiar with the cultural aura that surrounds the automobile. One of the early episodes of Mythbusters explained this pretty well while digging into the folklore surrounding a particular car-related urban legend. Cars represent freedom and self determination, two qualities highly prized in American society. You can go where you want when you want, without relying on schedules and routes mandated by public transit[1].
Looking at more tangible things, I suppose hauling a bunch of stuff from point A to point B would be hard without a car.
But what else am I missing?
Ignoring the fact you can only go where there are roads, and someone has to build and maintain those roads. ↩︎
I live in a rural area over 30 miles from the nearest city in a town with a population in the low thousands. The nearest place I can get any goods is over 4 miles away. I’d be completely fucked without a car.
I know that’s not everyone’s situation, but just pointing out there are people living in remote places with no other transportation options.
The late 19th century USAmerican colonization of Native American land shows that you don’t need cars to make an industrial rural society. Trains will work just fine. This means you build towns to be walkable and centered around a train station, with agriculture surrounding each town. Modern heavily mechanized agriculture might make population densities so low that even this is not viable, but the products still need to be transported, so you can have trains that stop at each megafarm which can also carry passengers if necessary. When I was in Queensland a few years ago, I saw mechanized agriculture use a bespoke railway network to supply a factory, so clearly even now despite all the fossil fuel and car subsidies it’s economically viable.
Though as you may know, industrial agriculture is dumb and unsustainable. Desertification due to requiring too much water, climate change due to fertilizer consumption, industrial pollution that kills millions of people per year and destroys ecosystems, lack of genetic diversity causing crop blights that risk famines or global shortages, insecticides that cause cancer and destroy ecosystems, most of it being wasted on the meat industry and on maintaining massive surpluses and exports to ensure western global domination, etc.
If we want to do agriculture right, we want to do food forests. It’s more labor per calorie, but it’s resilient, local, and it doesn’t make the planet uninhabitable by the next century. Food forests are more compact too, which means that a rural population tending food forests can have a much higher population density, or can consist of large villages separated by rewilded natural landscape (and/or low density food forests for migratory communties). This makes trains even more convenient to get around because they can run more frequently.
Meanwhile if you want to live in the wilderness away from these towns, then an absence of car roads means you can live far away while only being a couple kilometers away. So you still don’t need a car because you can just hike along a trail to get to town in under an hour. Need to carry a lot of stuff? Use a Chinese wheelbarrow. Maybe a battery-powered one with stability and steering assistance if you don’t feel like getting exercise. They carry more than a modern American SUV and they don’t murder children either.
19th century rural life consisted of you and your family living on barely more than subsistence farming and not seeing or interacting with anyone outside your family or immediate neighbors for months at a time.
Some of these responses are crazy. Just because it’s the rurals doesn’t mean I don’t have a full time job, responsibilities, and limited free time, particularly in daytime hours. I need a reasonable means to haul things and go places, and to do it within reasonable time frames.
I got people suggesting horse, bikes, and now Chinese wheelbarrows for getting groceries every few weeks going around 65 miles round trip, y’all are killing me. 🤣
Please actually read my comment, thank you.
4 miles is nothing on a bike, 30 isn’t too crazy either. I think people misunderstand just how far you can travel on a bicycle. Having the infrastructure to do it is another matter though, there’s some super dangerous country roads where it’s 50+mph with no shoulders.
As I noted to the person who recommended the horse, I can’t carry 6 weeks of groceries 30-odd miles on a bike. The local store has basics but is far from everything I’d need, and generally at a hefty mark-up for a lot of things not produced locally (it’s how they can stay in business, I’m not judging).
If I just needed to travel somewhere that would be fine, but when I leaves home it’s generally not for a joyride.
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Edit - also, as with the horse, it’s illegal to ride a bike on interstate highways, and I wouldn’t want to with posted speed limits being 75 mph with the average speed being over 80 mph through most of the trip. There’s literally no other road leading into town, so otherwise the entire trip would involve off-roading through rolling hills and rough terrain.
I’m not saying it would be practical in your case, but you could definitely carry 6 weeks of groceries on a cargo bike (electric would be better given the load though).
Hell, you might even be able to do that on a regular bike. I can fit at least 60 liters of groceries into my Portola (a compact folding e-bike), and that isn’t even including the top rear cargo rack. In an actual mid-sized cargo bike, you could probably fit like 2+ months of groceries.
If you don’t have a safe path to get there though, it doesn’t really matter how much you can fit onto any bike. In your case, you’d need a motorcycle.
That’s how it is out here too.
Especially in the winter when we can easily have a foot of snow on the ground.
My property doesn’t even have paving, and trying to get the drive graveled was such a pain I just ended up slapping on all-terrain tires, both to deal with getting on and off the property slope in mud, and also because there’s country roads (dirt/sand) here and street tires suck on that in general and especially when it snows.
Especially since public transit is usually locally funded (at least in the US), in areas like this the tax base doesn’t exist to be able to functionally fund public transit. We would need to completely rethink and re-organize how public transit is funded and rolled out for this to functionally work in remote areas.
Or, you know, we could continue lettings cars be a thing for remote populations kind of like how in some far northern territories people use snowmobiles to get around part of the year because there’s simply too much snow to try to use another type of vehicle at all.
I think the latter, having specific types of transportation still be a thing in places where they’re needed, makes a lot more sense, honestly.
I kind of agree, but I’ll admit, I wouldn’t give up my car. I moved out here because I wanted out of city life and into more nature and quiet life. I only drive into town every 6 weeks for groceries and necessities in bulk and there’s no way I could haul all that on public transit. I want to be in the city as little as possible.
Well, like I said, I honestly think public transit doesn’t make very much sense for remote areas. I think it makes far more sense to give people the types of transportation that work best for their use case, and in remote areas: that’s cars.
Sure and that’s absolutely awful, those remote areas deserve acess to fast and reliable public transportation as well. Specifically small towns should have commuter rail linking them to the nearest city, infrastructure that prioritizes walking and micro mobility, along with just better infrastructure.
I live in a city. I live 15 miles from where I work and I can drive it in about 20 minutes. If I wanted to take the bus, it’d take 3 hours and just as many changeovers because there’s no direct run. Not even close. I already work long hours so there’s no way in hell I’d spend 6 hours commuting, even if I could. For the record, I couldn’t even if I wanted since my office is nice enough to leave me with only an hour to get home, eat and get to bed before starting all over again. Sadly, it’s one of the failings of public transport even when it does exist.
It’s like that here. I drove 15 minutes to school . My alternator died and I had to ride the bus for a week. It took over an hour, not counting the lovely walk across a 6 lane expressway and through a WalMart parking lot to reach the bus stop! I think we need a gradient. In rural areas, we have individual vehicles, cars, bikes, motorcycles, etc. In suburban areas, we offer coupled trains where cars link together into trains and drive in sync on a guideway until they break apart for last mile connectivity. In urban areas, we ban all cars, build out public transit, bike lanes, etc. Small electric cars could be permitted for special needs and for tradesmen who carry tools. This future can’t happen in the US because they would just forget about us stuck poor’s and we’d lose all mobility.
Get a horse
A horse would be even more expensive than a car, and would have way more emissions compared to my driving habits.
Plus, my car is already paid off, and a horse wouldn’t be able to carry a CUV’s worth of groceries and goods, let alone if I need to get tools or lumber.
Oh, and I probably can’t ride a horse down 35 miles of interstate highway without being arrested, let alone sheltered from the elements. Actually the more I think about this suggestion the worse it gets.
Of course it’s a terrible suggestion. It was meant sarcastically. People used horses before cars were invented and it’s no surprise that once they were, cars became the dominant mode of transportation because they are far superior.
I suspected it wasn’t a serious suggestion, but wasn’t certain and couldn’t help thinking through the logistics anyway.