If you believe car shares are part of an efficient transportation future then self-driving cars are part of it!

And while I'll grant you I'm no expert, some things I've read strongly suggest that improvements to city planning that making it more friendly for bikes, pedestrians, and transit commuters also tend to benefit the vast majority of drivers in various ways.

I slip on light windbreaker pants on top of the regular, regular winter jacket and gloves, a thin hat and a scarf.

What issues did you run into while trying?

It's also hilarious how - 25 C is being brought up as not suitable for people to bike around. Like how many people in Europe/Northern America actually encounter these temperature even once (let alone regularly that it should determine our traffic policies). These are the same arguments that ICE car proponents make against electric cars, "I might want to make a cross country road trip once every 5 years and so every car with a range of less than 800km on a single charge is not suitable".

You need to load your body. A car takes load off of you.

This is not the topic.

Cycling is the whole point of this little sub thread. Specifically with respect to the increased risks or lack of accessibility it offers for some sub populations. Besides, public transport is not an option for many people. I have a grocery store 3 miles away from me, and no public transport to get there, but again that wasn’t the topic.

  Specifically with respect to the increased risks

Car travel is risky. For 2020 NHTSA put the number of medically attended injuries at roughly 400x the number of traffic deaths. For 2021 NSC puts that number at closer to 115x or 5.4 million injuries per 47,000 traffic related fatalities.

Harvard puts the number of deaths due to "a result of exposure to ozone and fine particulate matter from vehicle emissions in 2016" at around 7,000 on the East Coast alone.

Meanwhile with bicycles the NSC puts the annual deaths at around 1,300 with about 800 of those (or nearly two thirds) as a result of "motor-vehicle traffic crashes".

Bicycles aren't riskier, society has just normalized automobile hazards. The answer to "bikes are dangerous because you could get hit by a car" isn't "just use a car".

You can't just pull part of my comment out from that part of the sentence. A few words back you will see I was writing about sub populations for whom riding is riskier. Of course you would think what I'm saying makes no sense if you are getting caught up on one phrase and interpret it to mean I'm making a broad, general statement that riding a bike is dangerous compared to cars.

But that is not what I wrote.

Still have to deal with cars at some intersections, and on streets that are so narrow that their full width from curb to curb is only one lane, but things move slowly on those streets and good intersection design takes a lot of the risk away.

I wish people here would just accept that on average people don't exercise.

I on the other hand am making a narrow, targeted argument in the context of a thread that has diverged into claims about the viability of bicycles as a primary means of transport for certain populations. Particularly those where risks of accidents pose much more serious consequences than others. I don’t think people should be expected to bike everywhere or be looked down upon by others who make the choice to do so.

Exercise only account for a small portion of our time. The rest is spent on doing daily living. Time spent outside exercise are going to matter more.

Having an environment that encourages walking and biking keeps the population healthier than an environment that encourages sedentary behaviors.

The elderly especially need physical load bearing activities of some kind, or otherwise their bones are going to deteriorate to the point of hip fractures.

Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (but Finnish people can) https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU via @YouTube

That said, I live in a very bike friendly city now, close to their school, can afford a cargo bike, etc.

The cargo + electric combo is really amazing.

The bike, a Tern GSD with a big two passenger seat for the kids, wasn't cheap ($6k) but it lets us get away with owning only one car using far less uber'ing, and is way less expensive and hassle than a second car.

(This is in Pittsburgh - it's hilly and we have weather, but we don't have too many bike-hostile drivers in the city)

The perfect is the enemy of the good. E-bikes are good. They're not perfect on their own and that's ok.

Edited to add: and I left off: they're WAY more fun! It's delightful riding around on it compared to being stuck in a car in rush hour traffic. :-) the bike is almost never stopped. and we get to say hi to more people we know as we pass by. Much better experience, even if a big rainstorm sends us back into the car.

I said reducing your car usage by half doesn't eliminate your need for a car. You still have to buy the car. You still have the need for the car. We’re in a thread under “most people don’t need a car”.

No. At best most people use a car more than necessary, unless you live in a dense city, maybe then you don't need a car. But then you aren't most people.

And frankly that -is- a point worth remembering. I know lots of couples that could be able to get by with a single vehicle instead of two at a significant financial benefit to them as well as an environmental benefit.

I know in my late 20s I was able to ride my -normal- bike to and from Meijer and get 40-80$ of groceries (2008 dollars mind you) in a trip. Back then that lasted the two of us a week, although yes I had to hoof it back for the sake of perishables. And yes I balanced triple bagged items along the handlebars.

But, frankly, if I had the money for even a small 'trailer' that wouldn't have even been an issue. It's amazing how much volume a child trailer has for groceries/etc when there isn't an actual child involved.

Edited to add: maybe the bigger questions are why we have economic and social pressures for single folks to have a car and DINKs (ESPECIALLY SINKs) to have two cars.

And this in a city that has max 500 m to a busstop frequented at least once per hour but mostly every 5-10 minutes. And bike roads covering the whole town. It's just a status symbol with social pressure. You have to have a House, Kids, Car and a dog/cats or you are a looser.

I also do most shopping with the bike, have baskets on the back of it. Works really nice. The kid bikes to school until the ice shows up, then it's bus time. Bigger things still go in the car and I have a job that involves needing the car to transport handicapped people now and then so can't get rid of it yet.

If the whole family is going somewhere we also choose the car because the bus is much more expensive and usually it also involves shopping for the grandma 60 km away.

Exactly, it's half of a counter argument.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

The requirement for “most people need a car” depends on the definition of most people. Live in a small town in Arizona? Sure you need a car. Live in TriBeCa? You don’t need a car.

The touchy part is be ause the logic often goes, because 100% can't get off cars, the necessary infrastructure to allow the 20% who could, won't be built.

It's like public transit, it sucks due to shoe string funding, ridership is low because it sucks, funding is then reduced because ridership is low.

It also sounds like you might be an outlier, the average used car cost is much higher than that[2], let alone new[3]. It's ok to not fall on the average, but it is important to notice when you do.

1: https://www.move.org/app/uploads/2021/02/Average-cost-of-own...

2: https://cdn.thezebra.com/zfront/media/production/images/chea...

3: https://i2.wp.com/financialsamurai.com/wp-content/uploads/20...

But at $0.10 vs $0.50 per mile of operating costs, the TCO is much lower than an equivalently priced car. I bought the bike planning on getting at least 10 years out of it. My road bike is 17 years old and going strong, which is better than I can say for any car I've owned

I think of and treat this bike as my second car more than as a typical "bike".

(It's kind of funny that with the huge size of cars in the US these days, our car won't fit into the garage, so the e-bike gets to share it with a rack of computers. :-)

I am nor sure what you consider “walking distance” but I am going to assume there is a greater population density where you live.

I do not think there is anything that is not a private residence within 200 m of me. It is well over a kilometre to the nearest school. It is more than 2 to the closest business. I am having trouble relating to a world that has all these services available a short stroll from my front door.

Oh, and with regards to the poster from the UK with the free daycare, I pay $800 per month for one child ( and have 4 ).

So yes, these places are very much sounding like utopia to me.

There are 25 day cares within 700m from my home, 3 supermarkets and 3 primary schools, 3 parks and the police station.

Cars are greatly disadvantaged because of the lack of parking.

I have lived in several different towns and know a few more in the area. The town that was 1300 people had plenty of daycare within walking distance (500 m). The town with 150 people had about 1 km to the daycare but we didn't use it, had no kids at the time. The other towns I know: 10k ppl, plenty of daycare within 1 km wherever you live. 500 ppl, two day care at least, all in 500 m. Starting to guess population now but around 500 ppl and I saw at least two daycare when passing through. Surface similar to the other 500 ppl.

Where we live now is planned and built around 1980 and we have five daycare within 1 km. Three of them are less than 200 m away. Many of the younger kids gets walked there by their slightly older siblings that just continue to school after leaving them at daycare. This city have 100 k ppl, we live in the most populated areas of town with mixed single house and bigger appartment buildings with around 10 k ppl.

They all had space for our kid without having to wait or book a place before birth. The state is required to have space for all kids so they keep track of how many births and plan accordingly.

All this in northern Sweden.

I also know a few towns in Germany with similar situations except less bicycle-friendly roads and a lot more population. Didn't have the kid in daycare there though.

We want kids to be able to have other kids to play with and professionals to look after them.

I love my kids dearly, but I'm not cut out to stay at home raising them full-time from age 0.25 through 5.

I would argue that the fact that any of us have to work at all is just poor societal planning.

I mean, societies have been a thing for thousands of years already. At this point, I should be able to argue on the Internet that we should behave as if all problems have been solved by now because—-I mean, why haven’t they been?

The fact that so many parents live so far from available daycares that they need to drive to them is not ideal. It is a problem worth solving and there is no fundamental impossibility in solving it: part of the reason daycares are far is because cars exist, but it is unhealthy for a society to let the option to have a car degenerate into a requirement to have a car.

In any case, I never said the problem was solved or that anyone should act as if it was solved. I'm just pointing it out, because we're not going to solve any issue we refuse to even acknowledge.

Now, suppose I did manage to get my kids to daycare that I could conceivably ride a bike too, and suppose I manage to fit three on a bike, including an infant that’s not even one year old. What then, how do I actually get to my afterwards job? Yep, I still need to drive.

Ultimately, I could probably design my life around the goal of not owning a car. I could move to a place that’s close enough to my job to walk (and hope that all my future jobs are similarly close), and also find a daycare that’s close enough. I would probably have to compromise on housing size, quality and/or cost, distance to my friends and family, my hobbies that require indoor and outdoor space, but why would I, when I can hit a pretty good trade off with everything else, just by getting a car?

I'm going to say one thing, though: I would appreciate it if car owners were a bit more conscious of the externalities of their way of life. When I walk or bike around my neighbourhood, every car I encounter is a nuisance to me. They are noisy, they are scary, they are everywhere. So it's not just about your comfort, it's also about mine. If I understand that your car makes your life easier, and you understand that your car makes my life worse, maybe we can arrive to a productive compromise rather than think that the other is out to get us.

Thing is, the car-centric lifestyle, when taken to its extreme, is so space-intensive that it becomes the ruination of other lifestyles. The more people drive, the less amenities need to be near them, the more space is taken up by roads and parking, the less walkable the area becomes, the more people drive, and so on, until no one can walk anywhere. We have to be cognizant of that and make sure it doesn't get to that point. Part of that is making sure that e.g. as many people as possible have daycares at a walking distance from them.

Now, if you don't have any daycares at a walking distance, do what you must, I'm not the one who is going to judge (what would that achieve?) But in the grand scheme of things, it highlights a problem. Let's keep it in mind, you know. Let's try to solve it at some point, maybe.

But why? You seem to assume it to be universally accepted that everyone wants to live in walkable places, but the evidence in front of you is simply contradicting this. People routinely move to non-walkable places by the millions, with the expectation that they will be driving everywhere, and they don't mind it at all. I think you are so deeply emotionally embedded in your anti-car lifestyle (especially given how you describe them as "scary, noisy nuisances") that it might be hard for you to conceive that people might prefer this to the alternative you describe.

> Part of that is making sure that e.g. as many people as possible have daycares at a walking distance from them.

No, because it is very much unclear that people actually want that more than other things. If you ask people whether they want to have a nice daycare in a walking distance, most will answer "yes", this much is true. However, this is not necessarily compatible with many other things people want, like, for example, big houses, low costs, low noise, low traffic (including public transit and foot traffic), or generally living in a place with fewer people and less churn, so that you can actually get to know your neighbors.

Given all these preferences and constrains, what most people are aiming for is a satisfactory trade-off. Your proposal about making sure that as many people as possible have daycares at a walking distance from them is basically trying to force on them your preferences, and ignoring the trade-off that they choose.

Going back to your description of this vicious (to you) cycle of car-centric lifestyle, I can also describe virtous cycle, where a walkable place pulls more people into it, resulting in more businesses and amenities setting shop there, which pulls even more people, and adds more transit options which are now economical due to existing density etc. Now imagine that someone helpfully tries to "make sure" that as many people as possible have a car parking spot close to where they want to be, and institute parking minimums on businesses. After all, if you ask people whether they want to have cheap and plentiful parking anywhere they need to go, most people will answer yes, just like when asked about daycares within walking distance.

Of course, as you almost certainly realize, you can either have daycares in a walking distance, or free and plentiful parking everywhere, but not both at the same time. Thus, if you understand the mechanics of this, you'll oppose the parking minimums (which, by the way, I oppose too). However, for the same reason, many people will oppose your plans of densification and daycares at walking distance, because they simply don't like it as much as they like other stuff, and they understand that there's a trade-off involved.

> But in the grand scheme of things, it highlights a problem. Let's keep it in mind, you know. Let's try to solve it at some point, maybe.

Yes, let's keep in mind that there are trade-offs, and figure out a way to eliminate it, so that people can satisfy more of their preferences. Often technology helps; for example, cars eliminated huge part of a trade-off between being able to live in calmer, less dense places, and access to amenities. Future technology might help here in other ways.

And yet your experience of it is totally foreign to me. There are a half dozen daycares within walking distance of my house. My sibling who lives overseas has the same thing.

When my kid hits school age the local primary school is next to the tram line that will take me to my office.

Please please please understand that infrastructure is a choice, urban design is a choice. These are not immutable facts of the world.

I took my child to daycare by pushing a pram 500m. Later I'd half-carry him, and half let him walk. After he was walking consistently he later started to cycle there himself, as I walked alongside.

In a few weeks he'll be walking to his school himself, again a distance of approximately 400-500m - with only one road to cross.

I've seen children take themselves to school from age seven by bus, tram, cycles, or walking here. It is common-place.

Maybe that isn't possible in America because the houses and the schools/daycares are too distant. But that's certainly not universal.

I live in a small college town in New England. I bike our toddler to/from daycare, our first grader either rides her bike or walks (about 500m). They’ll be able to walk to school through ninth grade, at which point she can ride a bike or take the bus or hitch a ride with mom. It’s definitely possible in much of America, if you simply choose to do it.

I have 1 kid, and we always went to the daycare by bike. Last year, age almost 5, I bought a followme, and it works great. He's 6 now. When we bike more than a few km or when it rains, he gets connected to the followme, otherwise he bikes by himself. My ebike did 2500km in what's now almost a year, easily paying itself by the gas we didn't buy. The car is mostly used for big groceries every 2 weeks.

Most roads have bike paths. On the way to school, 1.5km away, there are still 2 places where we have to cross unsafe car roads. Ironically, one is the school entrance. I think 1 parent in 3 or 4 still come by car, and their driving makes it harder for the others.

In countries like the Netherlands, urban areas in Germany or anywhere else that has a public infrastructure not exclusively focused on cars (aka, the services required for daily life not being mega-sized and requiring a car to get there, but small and distributed) it is a perfectly viable option. Hell I 'member walking to kindergarten. On my own, in the outskirts of Munich. I had never been driven to school by car.

Today the alternative are cargo bikes modified for child transport which become more and more popular around here (urban Germany).

Heavy citation needed. I've been remodeling my home for the last 2 years and I'd say on regular (every other week or so) basis I've needed to pick up something from the hardware store that can't be biked home. When I buy groceries for the family for the week, I cannot bike those home. When I need to take a large package to the UPS store a bike doesn't work. When I buy a new lawn mower, that box can't be biked. When I need to go more than 3 miles quickly, a bike doesn't work. Baby (in the winter nonetheless), bike's a no-go. Etc.

It's awesome that you live somewhere where you can make do with a bike and hired labor. But you are frankly out of touch if you think that most people rarely need to transport things that are too big for a bike. And you're conveniently ignoring the fact that plenty of people have trucks, SUVs, hatchbacks, etc. for the cargo space so saying "you can't do that in a car" is neither here nor there.

There will be exceptions, to be sure! Remodeling your house (at least to western standards) is surely one.

But then most people could potentially rent a truck from Home Depot for this sort of thing.

Uhaul is much more reliable, but in my experience renting from them is expensive and very time consuming. Each checkout usually takes me 20-30 minutes, even when I use the app ahead of time (their app is horrible).

Where I live, I'd say trucks make up 30% of the vehicles on the road. It's a big part of the culture here and extremely practical. There are no practical rental options. Lots of places in the US are like that. That's what led me to eventually buy a pickup for myself.

Someone needs to create Zipcar for trucks for those of us not living in dense urban cores.

Same for metal working. Moving sheet steel by yourself is stupid unless you want to slice up yourself and your vehicle. Deliver trucks have cranes. They put the pavers 30 feet from the street sneaking under power line easily.

If your doing a house how many trips are you making with a pickup full of drywall. How much are you racking up in gas in that sucker going to hd?

A cargo bike is more than adequate to pick up groceries or drop off a package. It might even haul the lawn mower, though I’ll concede a car might work better. But if you buy a lawn mower more than once every 20 years, you need to find a better mower.

Arguing that people should give up cars is arguing for a huge loss of personal freedom.

I've been to the US and people there just don't understand they've lost a basic personal freedom.

<<Freedom to walk.>>

Freedom from car corporations. Freedom from energy corporations.

I mean, have you ever tried to move house without one? You're either relying on friends, or you're forking out for a removalist. And that's just one small example. As long as that difference in capability exists (and it always will) we'll have a need for cars or something like them. Remember, cars only really filled the social niche that was occupied by horses, so that need was already there.

Definitely cheaper than owning a car 24/7.

And horses were owned by a minority of (generally rich) people.

50% of people didn't have, nor need, horses, unlike cars now.

Cars are great, but again, they should be optional. When did the 3 teens in the suburbs "option" to have to drive everywhere? Never, they didn't, their parents chose for them.

This old image of a data transfer is probably appropriate.

http://www.brabantbekijken.nl/2010/01/middeleeuwse-stukken-o...

I estimate 150 to 200 folders there.

And that's kind of the point. Can you do this stuff by bicycle or other modes of transport? Sure, many do. Would most people make that choice? Probably not, so you have to take it away from them once they have the means to choose a car instead. That's a tough sell.

Imagine how nice it is to get home after the monsoonal cargo cycling, how happy you are to see the family, how nice they are to you drenched and exhausted, how good the food tastes, the cardiovascular perks.

With a car you carry your mood wherever you go, there is no hard reset. You correct your sensitivity to register signals the monsoon would "normally" drown out until everything becomes a stress signal and you need Prozac or Valium to deal with it.

Car owners can workout too of course but it's an entirely different game if you have to fuel it with discipline in stead of necessity.

Any plan that relies on humanity to collectively go through some kind of personal growth prescribed by you, the individual, is bound for failure. You can't force people to give a shit, and you'll have a hard time convincing the guy pulling tuktuks through the rain that he actually has a better deal than the local taxi drivers. And he's not even the guy you really need to convince. We can't even convince billionaires who supposedly believe in climate change that maybe there are alternatives to private jets.

If you really want people to drive less, the only thing you can really do is provide alternatives and hope people hop on board, which is how the car originally spread in the first place. Spoiler though, they probably won't in any scalable long term capacity, because despite their flaws, cars are inherently a force multiplier. They just let you do a lot more, and as long as that remains true, people will be willing to pay the price of ownership.

So what should we do? My response is we should think holistically about the problem. How should most people get about most of the time? Optimise for that case, whilst allowing for the edge cases. Should is doing a lot in that previous statement, but thinking about efficiency and resource allocation is probably a good route towards establishing a reasonable "should".

Let's not get hung up on "freedom" rhetoric. It's not helpful.

So society has already made that choice, which is why it's the status quo. It's not perfect, but it's what we have. This discussion amounts to a relatively privileged minority decreeing that what the rest of society has settled on is, in fact, not the best solution, based on a fairly narrow set of criteria that doesn't take other people's circumstances into account.

If you don't want people driving cars as often, alternative transport solutions can take some of the load off. But take it from a guy who's lived in Asian megacities and didn't own a car until his thirties, people still own cars in those places because they either have responsibilities that mandate it, or because they don't want their movement dictated to them by where the train line ends.

This is the most North-american thing I've read today.

Where I live cars are probably the least useful thing for most people's transport need, we take the tram here.

>So society has already made that choice, which is why it's the status quo.

Same as above.

Cars allow us to do things that wouldn't be possible in their absence. The only real argument here is to what degree we can minimize the need for cars so that more people can opt to go without, but I think that's a losing battle. People vote with their wallets. Not only have they overwhelmingly voted for cars, but global urban density is actually decreasing, and is likely to do so for the next three decades. Trying to take away the freedom that a car provides is going to be a losing battle outside of notable exceptions (Singapore, HK, etc.).

Airport pick-ups can be done with car share, taxi, or rentals.

What you’ve argued is freedom to spend a fortune on a car and drive everywhere outweighs freedom to not do so and freedom to walk or cycle. There’s a balance but right now we’re very much on the car side.

It is probably awesome to drive around in a well paved place build specifically for mass car use but if you get out of the car its just asphalt everywhere. It's not very exciting when not driving?

If I can't cycle it from the hardware store I have it delivered. The hardware store doesn't have 99.99% of things and its expensive.

People without cars [usually] don't get groceries for a whole week. I did hear people do it but it doesn't sound very appealing/appetizing/healthy/fresh. Someone calculated that if one does 20 min worth of exercise per day the life expectancy goes up by about the same. I live near a store, perhaps I chose to, perhaps we have enough cyclists to make it worth it - I don't know.

Be it Groceries or lawn mowers, just have it delivered.

I've never had to send a package so large but you can just schedule a parcel collection with UPS.

> When I need to go more than 3 miles quickly, a bike doesn't work.

I always point to the (mind blowing) 24 hour cycling distance record: 1026.21 km or 637.66 miles. He didn't just get off the sofa and did that of course. It took quite a bit of conditioning. Could he really be 1000 times more fit? I can't imagine.

I see bike trailers full of babies the year round. I just see a bike with one on the front, one on the back and 2 tiny humans on their own bike in front of it.

People go camping on their bike, there are trailers for your surf board.

kids cycle themselves to school.

There is no need to pick parents up from the airport, if you just let them stand there then they will figure out how to get home themselves in no time. Rent a car, take a taxi/uber?

I suppose it would be cool to own your own airstrip and aircraft and fly the parents wherever they want to go. Of course it would be noisy and take up a huge amount of space. Other peoples personal freedom would have to step aside.

I wonder at what age kids can safely be allowed outside in the destruction derby meat grinder that is car traffic. You cant drive a mile without guts spilled all over the road. Globally we are killing something like one person every 25 seconds and god knows how many animals. In the Netherlands roughly the same amount of drivers, cyclists and pedestrians die in traffic accidents but they are all killed by cars. The odd part to me is that 2/3 of those must be in the city where cars are the least useful.

It probably needs 2 documentary films to show cycling countries how things work in car countries and the other way around. I hear people drive down their driveway to get the mail. Sounds surreal to me.

I was a little proud of myself that I waited until January to do so, because that meant I could collect the box from the post-office, and rather than have to deal with renting a taxi, or dealing with the huge weight on my bicycle, I could put it on a (childs) sledge and drag it home over the ice/snow.

Perhaps that wouldn't work for a lawn-mower, which I guess you need to buy "immediately" if the previous one was unrepairable, and it would presumably only be used in summer. But still for a random life hack "Buy bulky stuff in winter, and use a sledge" is hard to beat!

I would agree if ever I had the chance to see it. I would love to live in a friendlier world.

Around here though we don't live in the same world as you.

There's nothing magical about it. Political and technical decisions make the difference between people having to waste time and risk everyone's lives moving around in cars, vs being able to accomplish their daily needs quickly and easily on foot or bike.

The fact that such places exist proves it is possible. They weren't always this way, but they wanted it to be this way, and they made it so. The same can happen almost anywhere, given faith and commitment.

No one claimed that it is impossible to exploit the masses for the gain of the few. What I am saying is that you wouldn't have those things without a much dirtier world providing them.

Everything else can be shipped, albeit for higher fees.

For groceries, you do need to have one within a reasonable distance, but a daily trip to the store more than suffices. You waste less, too. Since such a thing became locally available to us I have made almost no trips to the grocery store by car - those I have have been for specialty shops at longer distance, or the rare case of being tired/lazy/already out.

Transportation of large heavy packages and inclement weather are two areas there are no standard solutions, however there are enclosed designs, tricycles, and e-bikes - a small heating apparatus is all that's necessary to hold back e.g. the cold.

I think the point does stand, in that no its not "needed". It's mainly just a giant PITA when a bunch of unsafe half ton steel death traps are the "norm". The long distances between shops are also a function of the car.

On the flip side, no I don't think ride-share should be the only option, but a lot of people would fare much better without a car payment they don't really want or need.

> a daily trip to the store more than suffices.

You want people to go to the grocery store every day instead of every week?

Every single day might be a bit much, but if I'm bringing home food for 3 people * 3 days, a bike is absolutely fine.

People living in US cities? They can't because American cities are designed explicitly to be hostile to humans.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KPUlgSRn6e0

In my case I didn't go by bike, I walked to the local grocery store 500m or so from home.

You'd just pop in on your way home from work or from whatever you'd be doing in town.

5 minutes in a small grocery store, back home with a bag weighting max 10kg, usually 2-5.

This is close to impossible in many places.

Big business killed small living.

It takes me a few minutes on the way home from whatever I'm doing. Less work than getting into a car and driving 15 minutes somewhere once a week. Plus everything is fresh, we only buy what we need and basically throw away zero food.

Cities can be organised differently, including in ways that facilitate more responsible life choices.

What I do think however is that our perspective why and when a car is needed has been heavily influenced by media.

I just had a conversation with someone who lives in the center of Vienna and he was perplexed that I had to find a parking spot because he did not realize that was even driving a car.

So we should not make assumptions on the need of a car in either direction

Clearly, you have never been a performing musician.

I'm not either anymore, btw. I gave up that dream long ago. It wasn't because I was broke (I was broke, but that wasn't the reason), it was because I found out that I'm not a good musician compared to the folks who pass through Austin, TX. I wasn't even close.

However, in any case, I do have a good friend who is a performing musician (classical). I often go to gigs where he and his collaborators are performing. None of them has a car. They bring their tubas, oboes, bass cellos and the like on bikes. Then they bring them to a bar or someone's house on a bike to have a drink after, and then they bring them back home on bikes.

great definition. this means nowhere then.

Let me guess. You are single or in couple without kids ?

At least one leg of every trip I make requires a larger vehicle.

Oh, and I commute about 50 km each way ( 100 km total ) on a road heavily used by large trucks. I am not sure how small a vehicle I want to be in for that trip, especially after dark.

I use electric scooters extensively. I love them. I own an electric MTB. I really really wish all city centers would be for pedestrians and bikes only. But for the love of god, I cannot understand people who pretend that ebikes are a full solution to any transportation issues.

But many places have been designed explicitly against humans (frequently against the "wrong kind" of humans).

I'm not saying that I love it; as a family of four, we average about 6K miles on one of our cars and 3K on the other per year. I'd be hard pressed to cut that usage in half without significant sacrifice and it would be practically impossible to cut it to 25% or less. Winter skiing alone is probably 2.5K of those miles (10 trips @ 250 miles R/T) and there's not a practical substitute to get from here to there for a weekend of the kids' skiing.

but as an example recently my Air Conditioning went out, the part to replace it was on back order so I was going to be with out AC in VERY hot weather for about a week..

Well I got in my truck, drove down to the local hardware store, bought a couple of portable AC Units and huled them back. I did this on a weekend where no truck rentals were an option, and I did not have to wait for deliver etc.

Over the years there have been TONS to situations where having a truck at my ready disposal to use has really saved me lots of anguish, and inconvenience.

So in short, could I survive with just an ebike, or something sure. However I have no desire to live that style of life, and would find that to be MUCH MUCH less enjoyable, and to be of lower quality of life then if I just continue to drive my Truck instead.