8 ms·

> I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier. Yes, you still want a car for such thing

• dsign 5y ago
  > Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc That's just a problem of having crime and drugs, not of having inviting public spaces.
• crooked-v 5y ago
  If you're living somewhere urban that's built out properly (e.g. not a residential-only section of suburbia pretending to be a proper neighborhood) your schlepping shouldn't be any longer than a 15-minute walk either way, at which point instead of doing the periodic bulk shopping that cars incentivize, you just pick up a limited amount of stuff as you need it every day or every other day. A lot of U.S. cities have gotten this fundamentally wrong by just not being dense enough to support businesses like this and/or zoning strict residential instead of allowing natural development of small stores, so you end up with neighborhoods that are nominally walkable but that are still pointless without a car because there aren't any businesses at all within a mile radius of your home.
  • jseban 5y ago
    I grew up in such a properly built out environment, and I just think it's a complete waste of time and effort to insist on such inefficient and inconvenient modes of transportation, and I hate wasting time and effort on recurring daily chores, I just want it to be as efficient as possible. You rely on cars/trucks indirectly anyway, that bring the groceries to your closest store, and deliver your packages so what's the different if you drive all the way to your doorstep, or make a pointless boring schlep for the last 15mins every day. You can also just put every public transportation stop 15mins away from everyones house so you're forced to walk the last bit, look walkable paradise!
    • crooked-v 5y ago
      > inefficient and inconvenient Just the other day I was about to start cooking but realized I was out of butter, so I walked about 5 minutes to a nearby store, got some, and walked back. It would have literally taken me more time and effort to drive to a store nearby with parking than just walking. The same holds for most household basics (paper towels, garbage bags, etc), for which I have about a dozen options within 15 minutes of my home, ranging from cramped bodega-type stores to large grocery stores. > You rely on cars/trucks indirectly anyway, that bring the groceries to your closest store, and deliver your packages so what's the different First, basic efficiency of scale when it comes to general impact on the environment; second, as I mention above, it would literally take me longer to do it all with a car than just walk.
      • jseban 5y ago
        Yeah but now you are optimising for the minority case at the expense of making the most common case worse.
        • detaro 5y ago
          the most common case surely is groceries?
        • crooked-v 5y ago
          The most common case is that I'm picking up about three days' worth of ingredients at a time, in which case I walk either five or eight minutes (depending on which shop has the better stuff for my list) and carry home one large grocery bag. Since I don't need to worry about parking or traffic, I can fit this into my schedule whenever and usually do so when I'm already on my way home from somewhere else. The actual minority case is that I'm picking up something in bulk (replacing pantry stock, getting supplies for a party, etc), in which case I might switch to using my car, depending on how heavy or unwieldy it is for a half-mile walk.
          • jseban 5y ago
            Three days of ingredients is a lot, with your toilet paper and laundry detergent and everything, this breaks down immediately if you're only two people. So if you are a couple then both of you have to go shopping, that's twice the time you spend. Not to mention if you are a family
  • stavros 5y ago
    That's a good point, we walk to the supermarket (or the farmer's market) multiple times a week, get one or two bags and go home. That way we don't have to have a huge space/fridge/kitchen to store everything in, either.
  • MagnumOpus 5y ago
    If you're living somewhere urban that's built out properly you have (or ought to have) doorstep grocery delivery costing $1-$5. In the UK at least, there are at least 5 competitive services offering that in every city, including most major supermarket chains, so there is no need to shlep, ever. I only go to the supermarket for fresh bread/milk occasionally in between deliveries.
• rekado 5y ago
  I've never owned a car in my life, never got a drivers license. I live in a walkable city (Berlin, close to the border). When I need to haul things around the city I take the cargo bike. For decades I simply carried groceries in a big backpack and walked to the markets on foot (they are all within a 10 minute radius from where I live). I'd call the layout of my neighborhood functional and efficient. Adverse weather has never been an issue for me. It's not like I regularly have things to haul that cannot possibly be rescheduled to a time after a thunderstorm. Some drizzle is barely even an inconvenience. Having to share the road with cars is the most annoying part of being mobile in the city. > Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc I'd like to have more convenient access to drugs, but our parks don't seem to attract enough dealers. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Seriously, though: when drugs and crime become a problem, making public spaces hostile to all people seems like a solution that should not be among the top ten.
  • jseban 5y ago
    Yeah and if you stopped doing that and instead used a car to buy your groceries or ordered them delivered to your doorstep, you would have more free time and more energy. People want free time and energy. Just because it "works" for you to walk in the cold rain carrying groceries in a backback, doesn't make it the best solution. If there are better solutions, why insist on doing it the worst possible way?
    • matkoniecz 5y ago
      Walking for 10 minutes with an umbrella to the shop takes about the same effort as packing all this things into car and later unloading it and driving. Or even less if shop is 300m away.
    • rekado 5y ago
      Oh, you misunderstand. Involving a car would most definitely not make it a better solution. I have no interest whatsoever to involve cars in my life. Having to share the roads with them is bad enough. (The arrogance of space is ridiculous.) Deliveries: these cost little because people aren't paid properly. If I wanted to pay them properly, I wouldn't be able to use their services much. So instead of normalizing exploitation in the name of convenience, I prefer not to use delivery services when it can be avoided. And with different supermarkets in almost every direction, within 10mins on foot they most definitely can be avoided. I don't mean to moralize, and I'll step right off this soap box, but keeping bad jobs alive is a disservice to my community. More energy / more free time: neither the time nor the energy are wasted. If you want, you can see the time spent as an investment into health and focus, a tool for stress-reduction, an active period of mental rest, but really: this is not a zero sum game. I don't think any of this will convince you, and I'm not trying to. But perhaps you can see that your view on the "best solution" is hardly universal and well-established alternatives exist that work for a surprisingly large number of people.
• CalRobert 5y ago
  Having a grocery store five minutes away is wonderful, and a pram helps with the schlepping. As far as crime - that doesn't seem to be a big problem in places popular and busy with residents. Personally I'm more worried about a driver (the leading killer of children) hurting my child than someone selling weed.
• toto444 5y ago
  You can get delivered in most cities now.
  • jseban 5y ago
    Yeah this is what I do, and I think it's great! But it relies on there being a driveable street outside of the house, and not a stupid walk path.
    • matkoniecz 5y ago
      Road/driveway next to a residential buildings is standard and not contradictory to having a walkable access.
    • crooked-v 5y ago
      Delivery people can and do walk the last stretch, the same as they do when delivering to apartments and townhouses that don't have streets or parking directly adjacent to individual units.
• somnic 5y ago
  >Yes, you still want a car for such things, sure it's quaint and nice to have a "walkable" neighborhood, if you're a tourist, but if you live there and have to schlep around by foot with your groceries every day, in all weathers, it's just annoying. Depends on your lifestyle but I'm quite comfortably car-free. Shelf-stable stuff like tins, rice, beans I get delivered once every few weeks. Meat, veg, eggs and milk I want fresh so I rarely buy more than a couple of days in advance. If it's less than ten minutes walk to the supermarket, or on the walk home from the train station. >Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc Crime and drugs happen where there aren't lots of people to witness them. If you're walking at night and can choose between a busy street and a quiet one, which do you choose?
• matkoniecz 5y ago
  > but if you live there and have to schlep around by foot with your groceries every day, in all weathers, it's just annoying Even with quite large family walking for 10 minutes with groceries seems to be not problematic. Unless you live on South Pole or something.
• sammorrowdrums 5y ago
  I live in the Netherlands. We bike rather than just walk everywhere, and generally people do more frequent small shops rather than big weekly shop. It takes some imagination and a lot of urban planning work, but quality of life improves dramatically, it’s life-changing. Much Urban planning was involved in making it better for cycling though, and it wasn’t always great for it. Off-road cycle paths being a mainstay for the country with separate lights is the biggest differentiator, and took a lot work to get there, but now you can safely cycle the entire country! Even Cambridge in England where I used to live (and is famous for thousands of cycling students and locals) Is laughably bad compared. Northern Ireland where my family live has also transformed large parts with Greenways projects and it has been transformational, I ran along them, walked along them to shops and cycled a long way and it was amazing I thought. https://nigreenways.com/ https://nigreenways.com/
  • jseban 5y ago
    > We bike rather than just walk everywhere, and generally people do more frequent small shops rather than big weekly shop. It takes some imagination and a lot of urban planning work, but quality of life improves dramatically, it’s life-changing. Yeah which means that you spend a lot more time and energy on grocery shopping. That is for me directly inverse to quality of life. The more time I spend in traffic (cycling is also sitting in traffic) and queueing in crowded grocery stores, the lower my quality of life is. Who are you to decide that cycling and grocery shopping is automatically the best quality of life for everyone? Some people prefer to play tennis, or paint, or read books or whatever. No freedom, only inefficient transportation.
    • crooked-v 5y ago
      > The more time I spend in traffic Where I live, walking to a small grocery store is literally faster than driving plus the ancillary annoyances of driving (finding parking, loading and unloading, etc). To come out ahead in the time side of the equation while driving I would need to make significantly larger shopping trips spaced further apart... which would each then eat up significantly more time in loading, unloading, carrying, and putting food away. > and queueing in crowded grocery stores Walkable neighborhood grocery stores have smaller queues than big-box stores, as a mostly-even distribution of customers across multiple stores and floors on staffing (e.g. you can't have less than one register) mean an average of more staff per customer.
• slifin 5y ago
  I live in a walkable urban location and have never drove, in order to shop without having to worry about carrying heavy milk etc I just use a trolley capable of going up steps it cost me £35 and allows me to carry a lot more comfortably Before that I used deliveries a lot, I notice people with cars don't think very hard about alternatives like they can't even imagine a world without their car Which means there's parts of the city that are just inaccessible to the rest of us and permanently degrades the experience of walking in most other places
• matkoniecz 5y ago
  > Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc Maybe in some third-world crime infested countries? At least in Poland it is not a real problem at all. Some parks are locked for night and that is all. If making nice park is instantly resulting in crime/drugs/etc then something went really wrong.
  • will4274 5y ago
    > Maybe in some third-world crime infested countries? Like Seattle and San Francisco? This isn't a third world problem, unless you consider these cities to be third world.
    • matkoniecz 5y ago
      OK, I was unaware that USA really had such runaway crime problems. I thought that it is an exaggeration. (and still suspect this)
      • will4274 5y ago
        Almost every single park in downtown Seattle and San Francisco is covered in drug users. It's been this way for about ten years now.
• FriedrichN 5y ago
  Walking with groceries in the rain won't kill you, I promise. It's a small inconvenience but in my opinion you get a lot back for it, everything just becomes more village like and friendly. Being in a car does not tend to make people more friendly. And just because there are nice places to hang out does not automatically mean there will be drugs and crime. That is not my experience at least.
  • jseban 5y ago
    Yeah but why do you want to turn back time to a village and make things less efficient, what's the point of pretending to be poor. Americans are the friendliest people in the world and they drive the most, the more people cycle and walk in the cold rain, the more depressed and unfriendly they become
    • FriedrichN 5y ago
      This may be a controversial opinion, but not everything is about efficiency, especially when it comes to social interactions. But even if your life's aim is to impose rigorous efficiency on every aspect of your life, I doubt you'll be more time efficient if you do your groceries by car compared to living in walking distance of a supermarket.
      • jseban 5y ago
        Society is about efficiency. Social interactions are voluntarily and can be organised around any random activity such as games, sports, hobbies etc. It's really inflexible and incredibly limiting to force inefficiency of transport, because that increases social interactions. People had the same argument when banks went online, all the retired people want to still go and pay their bills at the bank, because they get to go outside, meet people etc.
        • FriedrichN 5y ago
          I can tell that we're very different people. Society to me is not about efficiency at all. I like a bit of randomness to my life and not live an absolutely regimented and organised existence. But I guess that's not for everyone.
• Jedd 5y ago
  > ... schlep around by foot with your groceries every day, in all weathers, it's just annoying. You seem to be either contradicting your position, or not accepting other people's comments in good faith. Here you are arguing against carrying groceries every day, whereas I expect most people would - even in the proximity of markets and grocery stores - do perhaps 2 or 3 trips a week. In a comment below you fixed upon someone's en passant claim that they're happy to carry 20kg groceries a short distance (a few hundred metres). Of course, no one is doing 20kg of grocery shopping every day, and there's clearly a happy medium in there between mass/volume and frequency. Obviously the grocery shopping by foot continues to work well for an awful lot of people through Europe and elsewhere, and seems to be well correlated with a higher (perceived) QoL - so I don't understand how you can argue against these realities?
  • jseban 5y ago
    How can you argue against the reality that it's better to use a car or delivery for 20 kg, than to carry it when walking. And since it's already delivered by a truck, why walk the last bit it's pointless. It's just a middle class virtue signalling competition oh look who can be the most neo-amish and eschew modern conveniences. I churn my own butter, because that's better for the environment! Everyone should make their own butter, it only takes 4 hours, that's "nothing" Ban butter factories!
    • crooked-v 5y ago
      > How can you argue against the reality that it's better to use a car or delivery for 20 kg, than to carry it when walking. If you're really going to have trouble carrying 20 kg on your back for a couple of city blocks, you can use a folding rolling cart instead to do the same at the same speed and with negligible effort. > And since it's already delivered by a truck, why walk the last bit it's pointless. One truck carrying twenty tons of groceries is not the same as one car carrying a few cases of bottled water.
      • erik_seaberg 5y ago
        Half a bag of concrete? A cart is definitely the way to go. 51 lbs (23 kg) under ideal conditions is where National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health says manual laborers should take precautions against back injuries. Being able to deadlift it doesn’t make schlepping it all the way home a good plan.
• peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  I am in no way an activist of any kind, but especially when the weather is bad (think about rain) going around with the car is a nightmare where I live, that's why I prefer to buy my groceries everyday walking to a local supermarket. It takes a few minutes, it's a break from work, walking in the fresh air clears my mind and I avoid the traffic jams or having to park where there is no parking space available.
• timeon 5y ago
  > Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc This not problem for inviting spaces per se. But spaces where you can hide. If you have this in ordinary "inviting" public spaces the that is sign of dysfunctional society. Most parks and town squares in cities I have lived are safe (at least if you are man).
• stephen_g 5y ago
  Making places inviting does the opposite for crime if you do it right. You get what’s called ‘natural surveillance’ that is, where there tends to be enough people around, seeing what’s going on that it discourages crime. This is talking serious crime - obviously things like pickpocketing can still happen.
• cjfd 5y ago
  I live in such a walkable neighborhood and for groceries I use a rather big backpack and I can get groceries for multiple days that way. For the my two-person household it is possible to get enough groceries by going to the supermarket twice a week, so either of us only needs to go once a week. Actually, I do not walk the 1 km to the supermarket but go by bike stead.