lnxtx (xe/xem/xyr)A researcher asked 10 people to go car-free for 20 days. None wanted to continue
imeansurewhynotjust a suggestion
none wanted to continue “using cars afterwards”.
haha, my eye word comprehension failed me, thank you. I can guess why that happened in Australia, but now I will read the article out of idiotic shame to make sure.
agamemnonymousIn many places, using a car is really the only reasonable way. Even when you technically could bike and/or use public transit, it’s either so slow or impractical that it wouldn’t be practical for a normal person. Sometimes, anything short of an infrastructure overhaul can’t work long term.
𝕱𝖎𝖗𝖊𝖜𝖎𝖙𝖈𝖍“It demonstrates that in low-density, sprawling cities like Brisbane, people cannot be expected to permanently give up driving unless there is significant investment in public transport.”
However, researchers found given participants were likely to slightly reduce their reliance on cars, it showed experiencing car-free living, even briefly, could help people break away from automobility.
In Brisbane, 89 per cent of households own at least one car and 48 per cent of commuters drive to work.
This was essentially the goal of the study, to demonstrate that more investment is needed in public transport to increase public buy-in, and that even just being forced to try it for a few weeks increases usage and lowers car use longer term - so if there can be incentives to try public transport that could also increase its use long term and reduce cars on the road.
The headline is not what people here (myself included) wanna read, but the study succeeded in its demonstration and will hopefully drive positive govt policy outcomes.
The_Decryptorwill hopefully drive positive govt policy outcomes.
From the current city and state governments? Highly unlikely.
“However, researchers found given participants were likely to slightly reduce their reliance on cars, it showed experiencing car-free living, even briefly, could help people break away from automobility.”
I think this is an important secondary take away here. Reducing car use is still much better than continuing at current rate. (Similar to eating less meat vs going vegan cold turkey).
Owning a car does come with large sunk-costs tho - so you won’t feel the full financial benefit from just reducing car use (still have to pay rego, insurance, maintenance etc.)
I think this is an important secondary take away here. Reducing car use is still much better than continuing at current rate. (Similar to eating less meat vs going vegan cold turkey).
Owning a car does come with large sunk-costs tho - so you won’t feel the full financial benefit from just reducing car use (still have to pay rego, insurance, maintenance etc.)
teftAs someone who has been without a car for a decade now I’m not sure I could go back. I love walking and biking too much.
My understanding of the study is it is highlighting that without good public infrastructure it is difficult for most people to go car free.
For example, for me, my daily commute is ~20 minutes each way by car. Or ~3+ hours one way by bus, ~5 hours walking, ~90 minutes biking. The closest store to my house is a 20-30 minute bike ride, or hour walk, without sidewalks or bike lanes for most of it, making it rough and dangerous to traverse (Dont get me started on how its an over 1 hour bus ride [yes for a route that takes 40 minutes to walk]) It is its own chiken and the egg, poor infrastructure is justified as not even enough usage but people dont use it because there is not enough non-car infrastructure.
merc20 days isn’t really enough to judge. If you didn’t own a bike at the start of those 20 days, could you really get a bike and all the clothes, safety gear, etc. you need and get used to biking before the end of the experiment? If you’re using public transit, can you really learn the routes and schedules for the places you need to go in just 20 days?
Also, assuming these people all owned cars, they were still essentially paying for their cars the whole time. They might not have paid for gas, and the wear and tear would have been very slightly less, but any car loan they had still had to be repaid on schedule. If they rented a monthly parking pass or something, that would have to be paid. Not only that, but when you don’t own a car, you tend to make different decisions on where to live, and sometimes where to work too. So, they’re living in a place that’s car friendly (and maybe not public transit friendly).
I would bet that if you took someone who didn’t own a car and intentionally lived next to a major transit hub and asked them to get around by car for 20 days, they wouldn’t like it either. They wouldn’t have a place to park at home, rush hour traffic would probably be extremely stressful for someone who didn’t do it every day, and so-on.
What this really needs is something like what you get in one of those “wife swap” TV shows. Someone goes to live in a completely different place with people who live very different lives. Instead of living in the sprawling suburbs and getting around everywhere by car, you now live downtown in a high-rise right near a great public transit location. In addition, calculate how much someone would save without a car, and give that to them as a cash payment every day/week so they understand that positive side of owning a car as well.
Grail
gwl [he/him]You only need special clothes if you are a wanker, everyone else just wears their normal clothes
naeapYou need special clothes (full face helmet, kneepads, ripstop breathable clothing) if you ride downhill or enduro. But normal everyday riding you really just need a helmet unless you’re a new rider.
wankers
Yeah, I already covered that
titanicxWhat? I spent years riding a bike. You could literally go buy a bike and 2 minutes out of store. As far as special clothing or anything you don’t need any special clothing. Winter time you wear your winter stuff summertime you wear your summer stuff. That’s about it. You put on a helmet that you buy at the same place you buy your bike at. And that’s all you need to do. You can literally jump online and have it delivered same day as well. And you don’t even have to go anywhere. That’s not the issue in getting a bike and using it for those 20 days.
The same was done in Vienna. People did not use their car for 3 months.
Results
- 2/3 could imagine living without a car
- 25% have sold or are planning to sell their car
(German source)[www.autowette.at]
Considering it was founded, like, 2000 years ago, that isn’t really surprising. Turns out, being a pedestrian in a city which was established in a millennium when being a pedestrian was the norm is quite easy compared to the same effort in much more recent municipalities. Have you ever really paid attention to the plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Vienna is very walkable but also really big. The answer is, mostly, public transport, a lot of it and cheap. Public transport costs ~ 400€ per year if you have the annual pass for Vienna (you can use all public transport). Also at the moment a build out if bike lanes makes a combinatikn of bike/public transport very interesting for big parts of the city.
P.s. Can’t really remember the plot if Rodger Rabbit.
The villain of WFRR was dismantling the trolley system in order to force people to buy cars and use the freeway system.
Spotted the American.
You have very little understanding about city development and planning. Otherwise you’d know that most of the transport corridors that are in use today were started in the Industrialisation period when trams were introduced.
A city with millions of inhabitants can’t be explained by looking at the small population in the centre.
Vienna has an amazingly good and inexpensive public transport system and quite good bike routes combined with fairly inexpensive housing due to good city governance over several decades (social democratic party by and large).
Vienna is a dream for public transit. Didn’t get to use the cycle routes but it seemed I was never far away from any transit. Beautiful city to boot.
But you forget, that we’re living in forest cities with exploding trees!
That this idiot even got a single vote is beyond me…but well, who am I to talk with Kickl promoting the same kind of xenophobia.
But I’m getting a bit off topic, although all those conversatives world wide seem to love to be stuck in their cars in traffic jams…
After World War 2, the Netherlands was bombed to shit, and they rebuilt their cities For The Car! Then in the 90s they realised cars suck, and they started rebuilding their cities for people. Now it’s the best country in the world to drive a car, because there are so few cars on the road.
The moral is, Europe isn’t winning at urbanism because their cities are old, they’re winning because they’re trying hard. Brisbane isn’t trying hard.
The best country to drive in? Hmm. It’s just as busy as the surrounding countries and traffic speeds off the major roads are painfully low. The standards of driving are surprisingly poor, at least compared to neighbouring Germany. It is very well set up for car alternatives and I really enjoy going car free on my visits there, but there are many countries that are more enjoyable for driving.
The system is rigged. If you’re dependent on the bus in a city where everything is miles apart, the buses run every hour and only daytime hours, of course it’s going to suck.
I remember in Australia, trying to meet my friends in the city center. I had a bus scheduled every hour, sometimes it didn’t come though, so I could be waiting over an hour for the bus to take me to the nearest train station. The train was every forty minutes, so it would easily take me two hours to get there. Then I had to hope they showed up too.
I later found I could bike and it would take about an hour.
There’s about 4 million people in Brisbane-Gold Coast, 10 is not very representative…
You’d be able to get to work. If you have kids younger than high-school age, or if anyone in the house plays a sport, you have zero chance.
Not once have I seen someone taking a train to footy or cricket practice.
Poor kids going to football practice having to carry a grand total of some clothes to change into, completely unthinkable to take transit/bike to the field
Jesus christ what a joke of a comment
Yes, footballers are generally a bunch of softcocks. I live next to a footy oval. 100% cars. Mostly monster trucks. It’s a 10 minute walk from the train station.
Spectators will watch from their cars. They don’t even walk to the fence. Every parent is overweight. None of them actually play.
Some of the cars come from houses so close that I can see them leave the park and pull into their driveway.
You don’t live in a place with good public transit though, so of course you haven’t
As a working Brisbane based dad with two University aged kids living with me, we use the car on average once every week or two. I intentionally got a house near a transport hub and several major routes stop at the end of my driveway. If you’re within 15km of the CBD transit is very acceptable for primary use. I’ve also got two electric scooters and bikes and yes the cycling infrastructure could use work but I did a 25km round trip for years into the CBD without too many issues.
There’s a bit of NIMBY punishing people who made bad transport choices. I chose not to be one of them.
I went without a car until my very late thirties. Then I got married, had a kid, moved to a suburb and the city I’m in can’t unfuck its public transportation to save its life and thus I was forced into buying a car.
I live in Ottawa, Canada and the polite term of our public transit (OC Transpo) is NO C Transpo or OCCasional Transpo. Seriously, they bought a train that doesn’t work in ice/snow and also doesn’t work in summer heat. They don’t have enough resources to perform proper maintenance on the buses. And final cherry on top is that they went with the decision to buy zero-emission buses (a good idea I’m supportive of) but had no plan to transition between the gasoline powered ones which are now at end of life while their replacements are still years away from becoming operational.
The only other organization I’ve seen fuck up major projects this bad is our Department of National Defense.
Hopefully they got action items out of it - what do they need to work on.
Personally I loved the freedom of not having to deal with a car on a daily basis, but there was too much I couldn’t do.
One of the shortcomings that seems to surprise people is a lack of long term car storage. There will be an extended transition where many people can not give up their cars or think they cannot. Why not help with that? At one point I was driving my car mostly to move it for street cleaning because there was no permanent place to store it.
You’ll get more people willing to try car-free if you give them a slightly inconvenient place to store their car, until they realize how little they need to use it
They do that in my town. Finding parking and garages and everything is not even an issue. I feel like you’re more in a much more Cityfied area than I live in. Well I do live in a major match politen area I was making the comment the other day that the majority of the city I live in is more valley and suburbs than actual city. However at all of the train stops throughout the valley there is free parking. And you could even leave your car there for a few days if you wanted to. And at any of the major bus hub areas there’s also large lots and free parking. They even provide random park and ride lots throughout the outer suburb areas so you are encouraged to carpool.
I mean, if you search around you can probably find someone willing to rent out driveway or garage space for cheap. Or else if you head to the outskirts of your city or near the industrial areas, you’ll find car/rv storage lots - usually near or part of storage units. So the solution already exists.
I think it’ll be a hard sell to get people to, say, approve government subsidies for parking garages to make it cheaper for people to store cars that they arent even using. Especially if street parking is already free
A researcher asked people who live in car dependent areas to go without theirs for 20 days, none of them were able to overcome the poor infrastructure.
Fixed Headline for them.
I couldn’t do it where I live without just taking 20 days off work. I’ve got a grocery store a couple of blocks away so food wouldn’t really be an issue. The problem is that I work about 5 miles from my house down a road that doesn’t have sidewalks most of the way and you’d have to be crazy to ride a bike in a lane. There is no public transportation anywhere between my house and work.
I went without a car for 8 almost 9 years. Bus, train, biking. Etc. everywhere. It’s honestly such a limited existence compared to having a car. When I can just jump in and go anywhere I want. I regularly go on long road trips I go visit multiple states. In the first year I had a car I visited probably eight different states. Where is in the previous 8 years the farthest trip I had taken was bumming a ride up into the mountains to do a camping trip and waiting in the rain for my friend to show back up to pick me back up. As much as I love my bike and as much as I love walking and I honestly don’t even mind the bus system having a car is something I’ll never go without again.