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One major issue is that if you as an individual attempt to go car-free, the resulting lifestyle makes cars into such an incredible intrusion into your daily lif

One major issue is that if you as an individual attempt to go car-free, the resulting lifestyle makes cars into such an incredible intrusion into your daily life that it is hard not to become more radicalized. That has been my story at least. My bus is late and slow, because it's stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic from all these people driving motor vehicles with a single occupant. I need ear protection on my commute because the 14th Street Bridge into DC pairs pedestrians and cyclists side-by-side with 60mph motor traffic with no noise protections. I lost a day at work because I got hit on my bike by a truck driver who was on his phone, and had to go to the ER. I am shaken and my heart rate is pounding and I am pondering my own mortality because someone gunned their engine through a left turn while I was walking across the street with a pedestrian signal - they accelerated instead of stopping to yield and I had to jump out of the way to save my own life while they sped off. If you recognize how awful cars are for the environment and how they make city life inconvenient, unpleasant and expensive, and so you make the personal decision to forgo them to be part of the solution rather than the problem, you are taking a step into a life that will nudge you more and more to truly despise motor vehicles because your daily life will be filled with only negative interactions with them.

wilg 4y ago
Do you feel you're gaining a lot by subjecting yourself to this situation?
- actionablefiber 4y ago
  Quite a lot. I save a lot of money - my monthly transportation cost is some two-digit number even after including the occasional weekend trip to other cities - most of which I squirrel away and some of which I spend on other things; I am always in excellent physical shape; I have a deep knowledge of the metro, bus, bikeshare, trail and bike lane systems around the DC metro area and spend a lot of time using low-stress separated infrastructure; I go anywhere in the city anytime I want without ever having to think about parking, tolls, gas or congestion. The drawback, if you can call it that, is that I am radically anti-car, as a direct result of the lived experiences that that life gives me.
  - wilg 4y ago
    Cool, that's a good pitch for not owning a car, and sounds great! My issue is not with people who are anti-car, but with people who cannot understand why other people have different priorities and who make different trade-offs. That's key to building a better world.
    - actionablefiber 4y ago
      > My issue is not with people who are anti-car, but with people who cannot understand why other people have different priorities and who make different trade-offs. A lot to say here for why I think the number of people who can legitimately claim it is a morally neutral matter of priorities and trade-offs for them is small. For one, there are stigmas around transit and biking. Funnily enough they are contradictory: that only the poor get around with transit and biking, and that only upper class elitists get around with transit and biking. It is extremely common for people to oppose new infrastructure or denser housing on the grounds that it will either A) cause "undesirables" to come to the neighborhood and destroy property values, or B) induce gentrification. For two, for a lot of people, living car-centrically is an automatic habit because it was a deeply ingrained assumption all throughout their upbringing that you just need a car and that owning a car is an important rite of passage and social signifier in adulthood. For three, lots of people who were steeped in driving growing up are intimidated by the thought of learning to navigate a transit system or learning to ride a bike. The last and to me most important thing is that the politics of car dependency are destructive to everyone. It is a negative-sum game to widen all the highways, and increase all the parking minimums, and zone for low density, and block bike lanes. It is extremely wasteful in terms of public resources and environmental destruction and it harms everyone's quality of life. A lot of people don't really grasp the danger and unpleasantness that their car imposes on others. Seeing, smelling, hearing, tiptoeing around motor vehicle traffic are all deeply unpleasant and you have to place an enormous amount of trust in motor vehicle operators not to kill you where you stand. This is one thing that makes me not sympathetic to the "different priorities and trade-offs" argument. The internal logic is about pros and cons to one's own self, not about the pros and cons to everyone else, and motor vehicles have many properties that put this in stark relief: they are getting bigger and heavier making them safer to the driver and more deadly to whoever they hit; their horns are loud enough to cause ear damage and cause a giant fright to bystanders but are muffled inside the cabin; and of course huge, huge tracts of even walkable cities like NY are dedicated to motor vehicle traffic with many lanes while people walking, biking, scootering, dining outdoors and so on are forced to fight for scraps of space at the margin. For me living without a car is not just about the benefits it offers to me personally but also the full understanding of the harms to others I am refusing to inflict, or even run the risk of inflicting, by opting out.

wilg 4y ago

Do you feel you're gaining a lot by subjecting yourself to this situation?

actionablefiber 4y ago
Quite a lot. I save a lot of money - my monthly transportation cost is some two-digit number even after including the occasional weekend trip to other cities - most of which I squirrel away and some of which I spend on other things; I am always in excellent physical shape; I have a deep knowledge of the metro, bus, bikeshare, trail and bike lane systems around the DC metro area and spend a lot of time using low-stress separated infrastructure; I go anywhere in the city anytime I want without ever having to think about parking, tolls, gas or congestion. The drawback, if you can call it that, is that I am radically anti-car, as a direct result of the lived experiences that that life gives me.
- wilg 4y ago
  Cool, that's a good pitch for not owning a car, and sounds great! My issue is not with people who are anti-car, but with people who cannot understand why other people have different priorities and who make different trade-offs. That's key to building a better world.
  - actionablefiber 4y ago
    > My issue is not with people who are anti-car, but with people who cannot understand why other people have different priorities and who make different trade-offs. A lot to say here for why I think the number of people who can legitimately claim it is a morally neutral matter of priorities and trade-offs for them is small. For one, there are stigmas around transit and biking. Funnily enough they are contradictory: that only the poor get around with transit and biking, and that only upper class elitists get around with transit and biking. It is extremely common for people to oppose new infrastructure or denser housing on the grounds that it will either A) cause "undesirables" to come to the neighborhood and destroy property values, or B) induce gentrification. For two, for a lot of people, living car-centrically is an automatic habit because it was a deeply ingrained assumption all throughout their upbringing that you just need a car and that owning a car is an important rite of passage and social signifier in adulthood. For three, lots of people who were steeped in driving growing up are intimidated by the thought of learning to navigate a transit system or learning to ride a bike. The last and to me most important thing is that the politics of car dependency are destructive to everyone. It is a negative-sum game to widen all the highways, and increase all the parking minimums, and zone for low density, and block bike lanes. It is extremely wasteful in terms of public resources and environmental destruction and it harms everyone's quality of life. A lot of people don't really grasp the danger and unpleasantness that their car imposes on others. Seeing, smelling, hearing, tiptoeing around motor vehicle traffic are all deeply unpleasant and you have to place an enormous amount of trust in motor vehicle operators not to kill you where you stand. This is one thing that makes me not sympathetic to the "different priorities and trade-offs" argument. The internal logic is about pros and cons to one's own self, not about the pros and cons to everyone else, and motor vehicles have many properties that put this in stark relief: they are getting bigger and heavier making them safer to the driver and more deadly to whoever they hit; their horns are loud enough to cause ear damage and cause a giant fright to bystanders but are muffled inside the cabin; and of course huge, huge tracts of even walkable cities like NY are dedicated to motor vehicle traffic with many lanes while people walking, biking, scootering, dining outdoors and so on are forced to fight for scraps of space at the margin. For me living without a car is not just about the benefits it offers to me personally but also the full understanding of the harms to others I am refusing to inflict, or even run the risk of inflicting, by opting out.