How Automakers Invented the Crime of “Jaywalking”
Can HN please stop it with this &quot;not owning a car is virtuous&quot; shtick? I went most of my younger life not having a car, only learning to drive at age 28. I lived in a new england suburb close enough to go to my work and shopping services at a ten minute walk at the time, and it still was horrid.<p>People here don&#x27;t get how limited your life is without a car. You are limited to a ten-fifteen mile radius for everything, unless you use inefficient public transport which tacks on a huge time tax for even basic trips. You are captive to that transport, which means something like being called in is hard to impossible, as well as many duties of your workplace; dropping deposits off to a bank after hours as a manager, for example. That transport doesn&#x27;t even expand your range that much, maybe one or two towns over; the time for further is so long as to be prohibitive.<p>Even with walking, you wind up spending far more time and expense on basic tasks. Instead of shopping one day you need to shop five, just because you can&#x27;t fit more than a couple bags of goods. If you are on the bus, you can&#x27;t even easily use perishables; 30-45 min one way is the norm. You can&#x27;t do things like buy a mattress without tacked on delivery fees and more time spent waiting to receive it. If anything happens where you simply can&#x27;t walk like doctor or dentist visits (because doctors don&#x27;t always stay in walking distance of most people) that&#x27;s an expensive cab or uber both ways. Sometimes its even worse...jury duty can be in the county courthouse 30 min by car and an hour and a half by bus.<p>You have no social life with no car. Not every town can simply cluster everything in one place; the downtown can easily be 30 minutes away from where people live. It took me an hour to walk to the comic shop one way; the bus would had made that longer, not shorter. Dates are impossible because of that; if the nearest date spot or bar isn&#x27;t within five minutes, what do you do?<p>A life without personal cars would be a rather limited and even serfish one. Everyone assumes driverless cars might save us, but they have yet to prove they can even navigate a highway during a New England winter, which is what you&#x27;d need to do to replace a commute. People talk about bicycles, but 0 degree or snowy weather makes that horrid, as well as high heat. Please stop assuming cars are this evil thing that more walking and biking will solve; they wont, not at all.