Since then, I haven't driven a single day. I walk, take the metro or get an Uber.

I haven't been happier. Driving was easily the worst part of my day.

Humorously, we have had occasion to put me on a bus for some reason while they walked to the destination in question. I would get ahead of them, then the bus would get stuck in traffic and they would get ahead of me. We all arrived at the spot in question within a couple of minutes of each other.

Unless you are driving quite a long distance and/or on the open highway, car travel is not as much faster than foot travel as some people seem to believe. Short local trips don't see as much gain in speed as Americans seem to imagine. I think this belief persists in part because so many people just don't walk anywhere at all. They drive everywhere, even if they are only going 1/4 mile or something silly like that.

I'm going to have to disagree on this one.

I can drive to my local Wal-Mart in about 5 minutes. It would take me 30 minutes to walk there. I can drive there. Do my shopping, wait in line, pay, cart my stuff back out to my vehicle and drive home in less than the amount of time it would take to walk there.

The closest WalMart to me (checking...) is 13 miles away.

The average speed limit on municipal roads in Ontario is 50 km/h, which means that anywhere within 5km will take 6 minutes and, within 10km, 12 minutes.

Running 5km takes me 18 minutes, and running 10km takes me closer to 40 minutes. Humans walk at about 5km/h, which means that 5km would take about 1 hour, and 10km would be 2 hours or more, since exhaustion starts to factor in.

Car travel is unimaginably faster than walking. I don't know anybody who wants to spend 2 hours on a round-trip to a grocery store 5km away when they could do it in 10 minutes in a car.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-...

I do groceries by walk and it never took 2 hours. The store is not 5km away pretty much from anywhere. You have to be out of city or in the middle of night for it to be that far. Unless there is some kind of law to prevent it, stores with what you need daily pop up around cities everywhere.

In any case, 5km is still nothing on bicycle which I might take for that distance. Just to kill two birds with one stone and get a bit of exercise.

* Slowdowns, sure, but many drivers also exceed the limit, and the walking:driving ratio is still massively lopsided.

* Pedestrians are not immune to red lights.

* While there are certainly pedestrian shortcuts that are faster than driving, this is definitely not the case for most combinations of start and end points. Far more often, while the pedestrian might gain distance, the car is still literally 10x faster.

* In fact, unless you live in an extremely dense city, it's highly unlikely that there will be a grocery shop, book store, electronics retailer, Italian restaurant, furniture store, etc. less than 5km from your house. Plus all of the people who you might want to visit, your school, place of work, and so on.

* A bike is not walking. Most bikes are for one person, so if you're in a group they're not much use.

* Carrying purchases home is a pain. I should know, I did this for two years.

My favourite part of visiting Amsterdam was the excessive bike usage. Pretty much everyone has 1 or more of them, you just ride together in a group or catch a tram, even out of the city everyone would either catch a train or simply ride on the side of the highway between villages.

I actually got to test this. My office was about 8km from my house. If I was to leave around my usual time, it would take me about 55-65 mins minimum to reach home.

One day I hadn't taken my car and couldn't find a cab. So I said screw it and decided to walk home.

Reached home in flat 71 minutes. Would have been faster had I taken detours that cut the distance by a kilometer or so.

Which is great for us developers, but not so much for most service industry workers.

I am a writer. I am quite poor. In fact, I am currently homeless. I have been bitching via blog here recently about my frustrations with the widespread attitudes that writers don't deserve to be paid dirt, never mind that people online expect good quality writing to be readily available on the internet. Somehow, that high quality writing should magically appear without paying anyone for it in any way.

I don't make much money. I wish I had a better income.

I am really glad I can make money online at all, but, no, I am not part of some privileged elite with money, power, mobility, etc. I do have mobility. I do cherish it and it enormously enhances my life.

But life is a great deal more complicated than those who have ALL the bennies and those who are nothing but crapped on in every way imaginable. This isn't even a case of shades of grey. Life is incredibly Technicolor and varied.

I think it is completely legitimate to give some push back against the enormous amount of assumption in both that reply and yours.

I would like to see us come up with better solutions than we currently have. That will not happen if we blithely tolerate what amounts to classist assumptions dominating any and every supposed intelligent discussion.

> most service industry workers

Those are folks that predominantly need to be physically present. We weren't assuming anything about your membership in a privileged elite, just pointing out that lots of people still need to transport themselves to work.

Good luck with your writing! I agree that we need better business models to reward it.

I know there are a lot of options for basic online work that isn't developer based, but I'm not sure what is available that truly pays a decent living wage.

I can make better than minimum wage in fits and spurts, but I currently don't have much earned income. A large part of this is rooted in my medical situation. The details probably aren't really of interest to you.

Due to the societal and environmental effects, I think it's pretty clear roads should be in no way subsidized like they currently are. If the "suburbs" had to carry their full economic costs, they would be unaffordable.

It is a combination of population density being artificially lowered through cheap road subsidies, constant pressure to eliminate taxes, and gutting alternative transport meaning roads need to satiate all human mobility and thus need huge capacity.

The light rail lines in my state (MN) don't even make enough from fares to cover their day-to-day operating costs, much less maintenance, and of course tax payers were 100% on the hook for initial construction - with a large chunk of the money coming from automobile taxes.

So yes, I would be fine with the costs of roads coming more directly from the people using them, but then we are going to do the same with transit. Deal?

Building to support multiple modes of transportation is the freedom-loving thing to do. Want to walk? Go for it! Transit? Sure! Biking? Why not? Driving? Works for me!

Want walkable, bikeable, mass transit, etc? Live downtown. Want bigger homes, yards, quite, etc? Live in the suburbs.

Obviously there's a limit to how reasonable multimodal transportation is. Nobody's expecting decent transit among rural farmland. But we could do better than we're doing now -- MUCH better.

> Want bigger homes, yards, quite, etc? Live in the suburbs.

The biggest problem with this is that in the US you usually have to choose between one of two extremes which dovetail with your examples. You're either in a big ugly apartment block downtown (or in a downtown-ish area) or you're in a super low density suburb where Cars Are Law.

Plenty of countries manage to have more of a gradient, where you can have, say, suburbs of middling density, where driving is easy, but so is walking, biking, and taking the train to the city. I live in Munich at the moment and the suburbs nearby fit this mold perfectly, but in the US such towns are extremely rare.

There are still plenty of cars in Munich proper, for that matter. There are just lots of other options too.

* Also in most American cities even the downtown still isn't very walkable, definitely isn't bikable, and has crappy transit. There really are only a handful of cities in the US where these things all work reasonably well.

But really really really, biking is not incredibly dangerous.

Everyone I know has been in an accident of some sort. Hit & runs, side swipes, doored, pushed (deliberately), etc.

After better infrastructure, the most effective way to improve safety is to have more cyclists. I think we're in a rough transition period, but things are definitely getting better.

One of my bike buddies thinks things will really change once moms start cycling en masse. That'd change the perception from gonzo bike dudes to totally uncool in a heartbeat, evoking much less hostility.

These are both avid riders with professional-grade equipment taking a short Mission-FiDi route.

Regardless of its "project zero" marketing, SFMTA has bikes last on its priority list. It has to be pushed by guerrilla infrastructure groups to do anything meaningful.

I used to ride bikes all the time as a kid but I would not make a habit of riding on our roads. It's too much of a gamble.

I am talking about opening up options, not putting a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to give up their car. We currently have many people who feel they have a gun to their head in terms of being forced into needing a car they don't want. Where is your sympathy for their right to choose?

Only one of us wants to "change this substantially."

Urban cores are often insanely expensive and not necessarily where someone wants to live just because they don't want a car. I am wholly unimpressed with your hypocritical comments here that boil down to "Don't tread on ME or interfere with my right to own a car and drive all over the place while the world bends over backwards to make that convenient, but your lifestyle preferences? Oh, fuck you."

This is dismissive, insulting of my preference to live without a car and rather hostile. If you were intending to say that you support my right to choose, you failed to communicate that. It came across as contemptuous and is in no way sympathetic to the fact that walkable neighborhoods and public transit are not hostile to drivers the way the current car centric American landscape is hostile to pedestrians.

And before you say, "well then just move to the city center!" perhaps you should consider that we're talking about a very common urban form across the world that is strikingly uncommon in the US due to government forces? Not exactly "people making their lifestyle preferences", more like "government imposing lifestyle preferences", and it's mostly just due to cultural momentum at this point.

As opposed to being completely dependent on public roads for transportation? Or out away from the "urban core" do you just get around on four-wheelers and snowmobiles? If so, maybe we can stop spending so much of our taxes building roads out to wherever you want to live.

After I moved to Kansas, I ran into a soldier I did not remember, but he clearly remembered me. The soldiers who knew what it was like to carry a 60 pound ruck sack had all kinds of respect for me.

It can be done. Not by everyone and I am not saying you are required to live that way. But giving other people options doesn't preclude you from driving everywhere. And that's the entire fucking point here.

Feel free to drive. But I like walking. I liked walking even when I was carrying groceries home in a backpack with an infant strapped to my chest and a toddler sitting on my shoulders.

It can be done, but most of us want to progress.

Preferring to walk in no way makes me some undeveloped savage. Maybe you haven't noticed, but I am online. I spend a lot of time online. I make my earned income online.

For the last time: My desire to see more walkable environments and better public transit in the U.S. in no way bars people from driving. Busses use the same roads that cars use. This is in no way whatsoever a situation where we must choose one or the other.