The root of it all is people saying "I just can't bike everywhere where I live [it's too car-centric]" and being absolutely right about that and then not moving to someplace where they can bike everywhere
My advice is to choose your next place based on the assumption that you don't have a car and you need to live someplace where you don't need one
Then when you get there, don't use the car that you don't need,
then sell it because you live someplace where you don't need a car
If that seems impossible, maybe because you have two cars and a family
Change the parameter from "living someplace where you don't need a car" to "living someplace where you don't need two cars" and apply the same strategy
I promise, it's not, there's a significant population of the US (the working poor) that has to figure out how to share one car among all the adult members of the household
If it can be done out of necessity because of budget constraints, it can be done through discipline by people with fewer constraints. Like the kind of people who have one car per adult in the household
@pleaseclap I’d push back on this that while many places in N America can be lived in car free, there are not many where it doesn’t suck. We need more places where having a car is less (or at least equally as) convenient than the alternative.
I've always lived in pretty car-centric places (Indiana) and had to choose housing based on not having a car (I only had one for a few years), so I think people are either under-estimating how many places are convenient to bikes or over-estimating how inconvenient biking most places is
I also think "convenience" is a misguided way to look at it, given climate change and the fact that poverty forces people to do it even when it's inconvenient. But you're right that's the primary incentive
@pleaseclap I think for meaningful reduction in car ownership, convenience trumps all. We could go car free if we had to, and I’d say few are as motivated as we are, and yet we don’t, because it would be tremendously inconvenient. If someone who hates cars as much as I do still drives, you’re never gonna win over more marginal cases until it’s easy, climate change be damned.
It doesn't matter if we all agree people should choose to do inconvenient things because it's the right thing to do: that's just functionally not how people are actually motivated
@pleaseclap@dx I do think people with the means and ability should try to do these inconvenient things (like ride an e-bike a mile or two to get your groceries, which is actually pretty damn convenient IMO, if made unnecessarily dangerous by the built environment of stroads / this is also true if you're in a car anyway but then you're stuck in traffic) at least to understand what needs to change, how close many destinations actually are + notice driving isn't faster, as you catch up over & over
@pleaseclap Also, if you can't take your bike or ebike all the way to your destination, job etc., take the bike with the car and ride whatever miles are feasible for you.
@smallen There are lots of University schmoozing events after hours at places 10-20 miles away from our workplace (the University) and yes it's both nice to just write those off and never think about them and also clear why some people think living without a car would be such a huge burden (the people approving plans for these things have household incomes 5-10x above average)
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