It’s awesome you’re remodeling your house, but I would equally want a citation that says this is a “most people” problem.

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.

That’s why I added a bunch of other examples, not just remodeling. I think I painted a pretty standard picture of what a 30s some adult family routine looks like.

Have you tried renting a truck from Home Depot before? There's no way to reserve one in advance. Most Home Depots have one or maybe two trucks, you just have to show up and hope that it's available.

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.

If you order from a slightly more upscale hardware place they'll do delivery for a reasonable price usually next day. Seattle has a place called Dunn's. Their lumber is somewhat more expensive but it's all premium grade or better and you don't have to sort through 50 2x4s to find 5 good ones. In fact everything I've had delivered was high quality except one piece. I called them back and they swapped it out at no charge to me. Better if you're ordering with a truck you can fit much larger pieces like beams or 20' trex pieces that you can't get in a pickup. Delivery is $75-150 depending on how much of the truck you use last I checked. I stopped getting anything but instant fixed from Lowes or home Depot. For any big project thses places also discount in bulk better. We put in a 1k sqft paver patio. Was half as much buying from a local supplier who delivered for $50 on 5 pallets. No way I could have gotten that in a pickup with or without a forklift. Had a dingo delivered. Sure I could have trailered that but I'd have to rent and return a trailer. It was dropped off by a rental place and picked up a month later included in the rental. 8 minutes of my time. 15 total if you include the phone call to rent. I've spent an hour renting a chipper from home Depot.

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?

Most people don’t take 2 years to remodel their own home. Most people don’t remodel their home at all.

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.

Even if someone isn't remodeling their home, they probably still do things like go camping or surfing, take the kids to school, pick their parents up from the airport, go to the local home depot to get supplies for home maintenance or gardening, etc.

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

Cars should be optional, not mandatory.

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.

Cars are already optional. I didn't own a car until my thirties. But the things you can do with a car are so much more expansive than the things you can do without a car.

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.

You can rent a small van for 2 days, that's it for moving. By small van I mean Fiat Doblo or similar, bigger if you have larger furniture. Super big furniture: can't move that with a car, you need a box truck anyway, you'd rent that.

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.

I cant find a single image that gets close to the amount of stuff I use to hurl around on cargo bikes. The older ones take 300-400 kg worth of stuff.

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.

Okay, now try doing that in monsoonal rains like the ones I grew up with as a kid. Between India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Brazil, several billion people live in heavy rainfall regions close to the equator. Most people in those regions would already know the reality of having to haul goods by bicycle in the rain, and I'd put money on them choosing a car if given the choice.

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.

The curse of being human is that we need to do uncomfortable things to grow and maintain ourselves all while avoiding things we enjoy but are bad for us. It's a catch 22 if you like.

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.

Errr... Maybe try telling this to the people in developing countries who already do this and more because they have no choice. Think of the lesson you'll have learned if you make it out with your life!

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.

Your personal freedom is actually economic slavery that you can afford but those who can’t… they’re in a really bad spot in most of USA.

I didn't own a car until I was in my thirties. If that's economic slavery, it's not a very effective system. The reality is that a car opens up doors and opportunities that aren't available without one. As long as that remains true, there will be a need for them, or something that fits the same societal niche (e.g. horses).

An argument was given as to why cars were a poor solution to the problem of personal transportation, and you've made it into an argument about personal freedom. The point is we can't design a system that optimises for both efficient personal transportation and widespread car usage (I'd argue we can't design a system for widespread car use at all, but that's by the way). So, as a society we make choices. Each choice we make impacts someone's personal freedom in some way, be that through making it harder to drive somewhere, or indeed making it harder to cycle or walk somewhere. Based on your perspective, any given change you might think is appalling or a very good thing; a curtailment of your personal freedom or a liberation.

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.

Cars are, by far, the best and most universal solution to most people's transport needs. That's why they're so prolific. Because every other option has an asterisk next to it for certain use cases. If they weren't the best solution, we would be talking about something else.

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.

>Because every other option has an asterisk next to it for certain use cases. If they weren't the best solution, we would be talking about something else.

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.

And yet I'd be willing to bet that cars are still commonplace where you live. I also live somewhere that has trams, and even used them myself for many years. They're still not a replacement for a car. And again, this isn't really a point that needs to be defended, because odds are you saw plenty of cars driving around today. Even if you yourself don't use one, you're relying on other people to do so for you. If you're not picking someone up from the airport yourself, you're paying someone else to do so. In a car. Or you're having your goods delivered to you, by car. I think you get my drift.

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.).

The point isn't that cars aren't useful. The point is we shouldn't optimise for cars. People's individual choices are a poor guide for transport policy decisions. See Braess's paradox, and Downs-Thomson paradox (neither of which are actual paradoxes, just a noting of how individual rational decisions result in a net reduction in utility for all, including the individual).

It's not self-evident to me that we shouldn't optimize for cars. Again, global urban density has been falling for decades, and is likely to keep falling for decades further. There are many, many reasons for this, but at least one of them is that when push comes to shove, many people decide that owning a car is a worthwhile investment, and that additional mobility allows them to live further out. In order to nudge more people into forgoing car ownership, you would need to make cars less useful and less worthwhile, because as long as that advantage is present, people will want them, utilize them, and demand infrastructure for them.

I live a mile from the local school complex. There are zero road crossings to get there (ped tunnel and nice paths) and people still drive. It’s stupid.

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.

These comments are quite revealing. The things I see every day are not as obvious as I thought they were.

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.

Last year I wanted to buy some new weights for my home gym.

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!

Agreed. They appear to live in a bubble world where everything "just works". They don't seem to realize that outside of their bubble the world does still need to turn, and that isn't currently going to happen in the nice way they'd like it to (on uhh... bicycles).

The world looks very different depending on where you live. Where I live I could do without a car if I really tried. I know lots of people don't even have a drivers license (at the age of 65). The E-Bike is a good solution for most older people, the younger ones can still use the normal bikes. We have winters with lots of snow and temperatures below -20 C. The road network is built for bicycles, I can get from one side of town to the other without ever following the same road as cars. I might have to cross a road a few times but often that is done on a different level than the cars, I just have to do a little planning. The roads are cleared of snow within a few hours of snowfall unless it's apocalyptic ammounts which happens about once or twice per winter. Then it can take 1-2 days before all roads are useable. But it's still possible to take the main bike roads into the city center and hospital where most of the jobs are.

That was a cool story, but not cool enough to give up my car.

> The world looks very different depending on where you live.

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.

I guess it's just confusing everyone why you seem to keep denigrating bike advocates instead of the planners, consultants, and bureaucratic systems that made biking so bad for you in your part of the world.

There is a difference between denigrating a thing, and critiquing it realistically. I think that humans riding bicycles is a good thing. I also recognize that we cannot transport goods in such a fashion to keep the world running as we know it.

This goes both ways. Suburban and rural living is the minority globally. Car owners are the minority globally. Single family homes are the minority of housing globally. Are you sure it's not you living in a bubble?

The "bubble" is a place where planners worked hard to make things work well.

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.

> The fact that such places exist proves it is possible.

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.

For startup on home remodeling, if you don't have access to a shop then yeah you are going to want to have a flat bed truck and/or trailer. Car just doesn't cut it, if it does you are mostly buying small tools or the like.

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.

> > When I buy groceries for the family for the week, I cannot bike those home.

> a daily trip to the store more than suffices.

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

How stale is the food you usually eat? As a rule, I couldn't say I'm often thrilled to eat fresh produce I bought seven days earlier.

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.

An apple or onion will last weeks, not days. The only stuff that spoils after 3 days is fresh greens.

Meat tastes considerably better within 48 hours. Milk considerably better within 3-4 days. Eggwhites become runny consistency about 10 days after lay, but the ones you get from the shop are already several days old at best.

People living in cities absolutely should.

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

It would be pretty expensive in terms of time if I had to go grocery shopping every couple of days rather than every couple of weeks.

Because you see no other way to grocery shop than what you're doing right now.

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's not that people can't imagine better ways. I'd love it if there was a grocery store a 5 min walk from where I live. But there isn't. It'd be a 35-minute walk. Some people live further, many miles, from a grocery store.

But that is not an immutable fact of life. It's not "cultural" either. I see the main reason there aren't grocery stores on every other corner to be single family zoning. Not wanting to have "noise" around your house, pushing any kind of business away from your neighborhood, and not wanting "shadows" pushing away denser kind of buildings that can easily support local business. Change the zoning, and the built environment will change, I would argue for the better.

Takes me 5-10 minutes max to get from my kitchen to the supermarket and back home, on foot. The streets are safe due to low car usage so if I needed something else while cooking, I could send my kids on their own from when they were about seven (prior to that I wouldn't worry about their safety but I would worry about them bringing the right thing back and not deciding to stop off in a playground).

Here it would take 35+ minutes.

In dense cities, there are multiple grocery stores withing walking distance. What people do is come back from the office (or anywhere else), get off the subway or bus, and on the 2 block walk home pop into the shop for fresh produce. Yes people absolutely get things like fresh bread on the daily.

I buy fresh food daily. Fruits and veggies from whichever stall in the local street market has the best options, bread from the baker, meat from the butcher. Packaged goods from one of the many supermarkets within easy walking distance.

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.

I am not saying you should do grocery shopping like this guy https://youtu.be/H27InrF_eIs

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