I get irritated when my wife suggests driving to the grocery store I can reach on foot in 13 min. Aside from the occasional big haul, where a car is really handy, I just feel like the car doesn’t really save much time and effort.
If the argument is that the car is both faster and can haul more things than on foot, then the middle ground is a bike. I use panniers and/or a bike trailer for big trips at the grocery store.
But yeah, depending where people live, sometimes cars are just the "auto"matic (hehe) thing to do, even if there are different ways to do things. I hate cars and never had one even though I come from a rural region. I moved to a metropolis but I’ve lived in a rural town without a car, and people there make a lot of excuses to justify the use of their car and even kind of force it on everyone around them. My family and friends are still living there and sometimes it’s so hard to convince them just to walk any kind of distances. When I listen to them telling me I can’t go to the corner store on foot, I feel like some sort of superhuman because somehow I can walk more than a km. “You walked all the way from the train station to here?!” they ask incredulously.
The practicality versus “losing time” and efforts, to me it’s a question of personal values. It’s like the eternal “joke” about people going to the gym with their car to run on a treadmill. I’ve never had a car so I’m just used to walking, waiting for a bus, or moving at around 20 km/h when I’m on my bicycle. It keeps me somewhat healthy, it’s cheap, it can be slow but you can often do something else with that time, or cherish it. I love touring so it makes sense to discover and use rural bike paths to get to my camping spots and see villages that I would not have seen if I zoomed by on a highway in a car. There’s no hurry because moving there by bike is the trip itself. And if I’m in a bus or in a train, I can use my phone or laptop, work, or watch a series or a movie, whatever that I could do sitting at home if I would have “saved time by having a car”.
It’s nice to have those events where people try to live without a car for a while, it brings some awareness. But it’s still disappointing to see the person in the comic reaching to someone else with a car in order not to use theirs. It expresses the slight ridiculousness of this type of event.
I already feel pretty unsafe biking next to cars, biking with added weight would feel extremely dangerous. We need to make driving unpleasant and riding a bike the “easy” option.
I get irritated when my wife suggests driving to the grocery store I can reach on foot in 13 min. Aside from the occasional big haul, where a car is really handy, I just feel like the car doesn’t really save much time and effort.
If the argument is that the car is both faster and can haul more things than on foot, then the middle ground is a bike. I use panniers and/or a bike trailer for big trips at the grocery store.
But yeah, depending where people live, sometimes cars are just the "auto"matic (hehe) thing to do, even if there are different ways to do things. I hate cars and never had one even though I come from a rural region. I moved to a metropolis but I’ve lived in a rural town without a car, and people there make a lot of excuses to justify the use of their car and even kind of force it on everyone around them. My family and friends are still living there and sometimes it’s so hard to convince them just to walk any kind of distances. When I listen to them telling me I can’t go to the corner store on foot, I feel like some sort of superhuman because somehow I can walk more than a km. “You walked all the way from the train station to here?!” they ask incredulously.
The practicality versus “losing time” and efforts, to me it’s a question of personal values. It’s like the eternal “joke” about people going to the gym with their car to run on a treadmill. I’ve never had a car so I’m just used to walking, waiting for a bus, or moving at around 20 km/h when I’m on my bicycle. It keeps me somewhat healthy, it’s cheap, it can be slow but you can often do something else with that time, or cherish it. I love touring so it makes sense to discover and use rural bike paths to get to my camping spots and see villages that I would not have seen if I zoomed by on a highway in a car. There’s no hurry because moving there by bike is the trip itself. And if I’m in a bus or in a train, I can use my phone or laptop, work, or watch a series or a movie, whatever that I could do sitting at home if I would have “saved time by having a car”.
It’s nice to have those events where people try to live without a car for a while, it brings some awareness. But it’s still disappointing to see the person in the comic reaching to someone else with a car in order not to use theirs. It expresses the slight ridiculousness of this type of event.
I already feel pretty unsafe biking next to cars, biking with added weight would feel extremely dangerous. We need to make driving unpleasant and riding a bike the “easy” option.