Article about an experiment from Brisbane, Australia.
As someone who has been without a car for a decade now I’m not sure I could go back. I love walking and biking too much.
My understanding of the study is it is highlighting that without good public infrastructure it is difficult for most people to go car free.
For example, for me, my daily commute is ~20 minutes each way by car. Or ~3+ hours one way by bus, ~5 hours walking, ~90 minutes biking. The closest store to my house is a 20-30 minute bike ride, or hour walk, without sidewalks or bike lanes for most of it, making it rough and dangerous to traverse (Dont get me started on how its an over 1 hour bus ride [yes for a route that takes 40 minutes to walk]) It is its own chiken and the egg, poor infrastructure is justified as not even enough usage but people dont use it because there is not enough non-car infrastructure.
The average claim per person for all their travel expenses during the experiment in Brisbane was $125 – but they saved $300 in car costs. “I hadn’t realised how much money my car eats up,” a 43-year-old man from Brisbane said.
Those $300 for 20 days look like just fuel costs. Add the yearly depreciation value of the car (especially bad for new cars), insurance and maintenance costs and it gets even worse.
Even limiting oneself to only a financial viewpoint (which is quite reductive since the are also big Environmental, Health and Social costs), for most people (especially those who live in cities) cars are stupidly expensive for the utility value that they deliver.
I went without a car until my very late thirties. Then I got married, had a kid, moved to a suburb and the city I’m in can’t unfuck its public transportation to save its life and thus I was forced into buying a car.
I live in Ottawa, Canada and the polite term of our public transit (OC Transpo) is NO C Transpo or OCCasional Transpo. Seriously, they bought a train that doesn’t work in ice/snow and also doesn’t work in summer heat. They don’t have enough resources to perform proper maintenance on the buses. And final cherry on top is that they went with the decision to buy zero-emission buses (a good idea I’m supportive of) but had no plan to transition between the gasoline powered ones which are now at end of life while their replacements are still years away from becoming operational.
The only other organization I’ve seen fuck up major projects this bad is our Department of National Defense.
Last time I looked at using public transport to get to work it would take about 3.5 hours. Takes 30 minutes to drive. Housing is too expensive near there for me to move.
I live in an area where you don’t have to have a car, you can do most things without. But you’ll have to pry my car keys from my cold dead hands because it is so incredibly more convenient and faster to have one.
Edit: noticed the community. To be clear, I’m all for good infrastructure for people who don’t own one, I just wouldn’t go back to the days where I didn’t have one.
Myself, and probably a good percentage of this community dont just have a blanket hatred of cars. It’s mainly about how car-centric design sucks, even for people who drive cars.
Many cities that are designed with good public transit are also way easier to drive in. If 99% of people have to drive into a city center for work, or school, or groceries, or whatever, everything has to be really spread out for enough parking, roads need a lot of lanes and a lot of entrances/exits, so driving is stressful, and you still end up spending a lot of time in traffic.
With competent infrastructure for walking/biking/public transit, the mode share for cars drops, and driving actually gets easier since you aren’t competing with everyone else.
This is what people don’t get. Having a car changes everything. It’s much more convenient.
Yeah I’m also all for good public transport and as many options as there can be. However that doesn’t change the fact that having your own var is much more convenient. Especially in an emergency.
Yes because your own life is the measurement of what’s right and wrong. Everything revolves around you and your ability to vroomvroom your fatass around
People like you ruined my life. I have a long term disease because of all the fine particle from idiot vroomists. I hope you get lung cancer
Yeah, I have a kid. From groceries to doctors appointments and camp and activities, doing all this without a car would be a nightmare. That said, I buy used, pay cash, and own a little Honda hatchback that sips gas.
I was a kid when i was poisonned by idiots drivers
The real question is would you ditch your car if it were more convenient and faster to go by bike or transit, or with a shared car service for extra and week-end trips?
Hopefully they got action items out of it - what do they need to work on.
Personally I loved the freedom of not having to deal with a car on a daily basis, but there was too much I couldn’t do.
One of the shortcomings that seems to surprise people is a lack of long term car storage. There will be an extended transition where many people can not give up their cars or think they cannot. Why not help with that? At one point I was driving my car mostly to move it for street cleaning because there was no permanent place to store it. We want the cars off the street to make room for more important road users. Garages in apartment blocks are too convenient and for-profit garages too expensive
You’ll get more people willing to try car-free if you give them a slightly inconvenient place to store their car, until they realize how little they need to use it. I wonder if making it cheap and easy to leave your car at a park and ride at the end of a transit line would work
I used to do this when I lived in New York state and would occasionally travel down to New York city. It was stupidly cheaper to drive (and faster - which WTF whhhhhy). So I would rent a cheap spot in a garage near the outskirts of the city for the day and use public transport for the rest of the day. I remember being mad that it was cheaper and faster to drive and pay to store my car then it would have been to take the train. That’s a problem. Especially when I had a train station in biking distance to my apartment at the time.
I mean, if you search around you can probably find someone willing to rent out driveway or garage space for cheap. Or else if you head to the outskirts of your city or near the industrial areas, you’ll find car/rv storage lots - usually near or part of storage units. So the solution already exists.
I think it’ll be a hard sell to get people to, say, approve government subsidies for parking garages to make it cheaper for people to store cars that they arent even using. Especially if street parking is already free
The point would be to remove/recover street parking for more important uses. Especially in older urban neighborhoods you might have really narrow streets, no room for bicycle or bus lanes. This lets you compromise: car is still possible for those who need it, but less convenient so used less, neighborhood streets have reduced traffic and can be opened for cycling or pedestrians
I mean, if the point is to remove street parking, I’m in favor of that.
I don’t think there should be any real government intervention to then create additional parking, though. Seems like a move in the wrong direction.
What I think would be good instead, though, is ending parking minimums and then declaring that businesses cannot restrict who parks in their lots to only customers. They can charge a fee for the use of their lot, but otherwise anyone can park there for any amount of time. This would vastly expand the amount of long term parking, drastically driving down the price, while also incentivizing landowners to now redevelop their parking lots into something useful
They do that in my town. Finding parking and garages and everything is not even an issue. I feel like you’re more in a much more Cityfied area than I live in. Well I do live in a major match politen area I was making the comment the other day that the majority of the city I live in is more valley and suburbs than actual city. However at all of the train stops throughout the valley there is free parking. And you could even leave your car there for a few days if you wanted to. And at any of the major bus hub areas there’s also large lots and free parking. They even provide random park and ride lots throughout the outer suburb areas so you are encouraged to carpool.
I went without a car for 8 almost 9 years. Bus, train, biking. Etc. everywhere. It’s honestly such a limited existence compared to having a car. When I can just jump in and go anywhere I want. I regularly go on long road trips I go visit multiple states. In the first year I had a car I visited probably eight different states. Where is in the previous 8 years the farthest trip I had taken was bumming a ride up into the mountains to do a camping trip and waiting in the rain for my friend to show back up to pick me back up. As much as I love my bike and as much as I love walking and I honestly don’t even mind the bus system having a car is something I’ll never go without again.
car is something I’ll never go without again
Anthropogenic climate change cascade says “Good luck”.
Yes and no.
I lived without a car for about 5 years and never missed it, since I could consistently bum rides with friends who had cars.
To your point about the convenience of having a car and being able to travel - with better infrastructure and built environments, these things would not be issues. Daily necessities within walking distance + transit frequent enough that you don’t need to plan for it + high speed intercity rail covers about the same use case. More pleasant to run daily errands, since no traffic. High speed rail is faster than driving, plus you can get up and walk around whenever you feel like it, and even get a bunk in a sleeper car to travel while you sleep. Of course, it is still less private, and you are on the train’s schedule - but you also never have to change the oil or stop for gas.
I currently can’t imagine living my life the way I want to live it without a car. For example, today I am returning home from a weekend trip climbing in the desert. To do this, I wrapped up the work I was doing (late), threw all my shit in my car, and drove for several hours into the night before sleeping in my car at a highway pull off. Then I finished the drive early in the morning, going from interstate to rural highway to rural desert road to dirt road to get to the random patch of dirt my friends were camped at. And doing this, I had a car full of water, food, camping gear, and climbing gear. Making this trip without a car would be literally impossible with our current transit infrastructure. And even with some futuristic infrastructure, the trip would take significantly longer since any transit to remote areas will always be less frequent than you want it to be.
At the same time - maybe I could catch a night train to the desert. Wake in the morning in a small desert town, and strap my haul bag onto my back and mosey over to a sunblasted diner, drinking a cup or two of cheap, weak coffee (the kind that makes Mormon Jesus cry as little as possible), before catching the twice daily NP shuttle to a remote desert outpost. Watching the barren scrub plains roll by until I’m just about there, then tapping the driver on the shoulder and asking to be let off at the unmarked dirt road so I can hump my 100lb load a 1/4 mile to camp. Certainly, the trip would be less convenient and a bit longer. But at the same time, being without a car could enhance the quality of the adventure - which is kind of the point in the first place
It really depends on how easy and expensive it is to rent a car last minute.
Also depends on where you live.
When I lived near Central London I ended up selling my very nice car and started cycling because almost all the nice places to go out to were more easilly reached by public transport (plus you could get piss drunk if you felt like without risking anybody’s life driving back like that).
Sure, you could use a car to go out to the countryside, but given that it took almost an hour just to drive out from London, it wasn’t worth it to do on impulse and to do it for vacations I could just rent a car (or, even better, fly away to a country with better weather and rent a car there).
In practice what was happenning was that I was paying around half the value of the car every year for renting a garage and car insurance whilst I only used the car maybe once every 2 months, which financially was incredibly dumb, so I just sold it.
Living in England would be so weird to me. You talk about going an hour like it’s the trip of a lifetime. Just Saturday alone I drove something like 175 miles just to shop, pick up a load of bricks and a fountain for my garden. I watch shows like Clarkson’s farm where his helper said he’s never left their village and that blows my mind.
It’s not a “trip of a lifetime” (closest I did to a driving “trip of a lifetime” in Europe was driving from Lisbon to Amsterdam, about 2000km which I did in 2 days), it’s just part of my mental calculation of whether something is fun or not.
City driving is not fun for me, so having to spend 1h each way just to go somewhere to have fun reduces the overall appeal of it vs spending 15m in the tube each way to go somewhere to have fun.
Back when I lived in Lisbon I used to have a 1h commute by car to work because I lived in the outskirts and had to endure traffic jams on the way in, but over the years I lost patience with spending a significant fraction of my life in city traffic and, frankly, don’t have to endure it anymore.
More broadly I would say that your use of miles vs my use of time isn’t a like to like comparison: the problem isn’t distance if you can get there fast or at least in a relaxed way, the problem is when it takes quite a bit to get there and the driving is stressful. Driving out of the city starting from Central London would be like driving out New York from Manhattan: a lot of pain in the arse city driving in the transit just to get to the nearest freeway and then some extra pain from driving in a freeway with lots of traffic until you’re far out enough that there’s a lot less traffic and you can relax, and all this is if you’re lucky and don’t get a traffic jam.
Driving a long distance starting from suburbia can actually be fun, but driving anywhere starting from the center of a big city is not fun.
A researcher asked people who live in car dependent areas to go without theirs for 20 days, none of them were able to overcome the poor infrastructure.
Fixed Headline for them.
I couldn’t do it where I live without just taking 20 days off work. I’ve got a grocery store a couple of blocks away so food wouldn’t really be an issue. The problem is that I work about 5 miles from my house down a road that doesn’t have sidewalks most of the way and you’d have to be crazy to ride a bike in a lane. There is no public transportation anywhere between my house and work.
With public transit, I’d have to walk / drive 5 miles to a bus stop, then hop across 2 seperate bus routes, then make it another 5 miles on foot or an uber or smth to get to work, for a combined 2 hours 40 minutes, assuming I uber the 10 miles where public transit is either non-existent, or goes too far out of the way that walking would be faster
Its only a 30 minute drive…
NYers’ “I’ve been doing this my whole life”
Pro tip: live in one of the few cities that has a working mass transit system to most places.
I have found that you can often go car free if you live and work near a University.
Brisbane is a shit city for cycling. Who is surprised?
“It demonstrates that in low-density, sprawling cities like Brisbane, people cannot be expected to permanently give up driving unless there is significant investment in public transport.”
However, researchers found given participants were likely to slightly reduce their reliance on cars, it showed experiencing car-free living, even briefly, could help people break away from automobility.
In Brisbane, 89 per cent of households own at least one car and 48 per cent of commuters drive to work.
This was essentially the goal of the study, to demonstrate that more investment is needed in public transport to increase public buy-in, and that even just being forced to try it for a few weeks increases usage and lowers car use longer term - so if there can be incentives to try public transport that could also increase its use long term and reduce cars on the road.
The headline is not what people here (myself included) wanna read, but the study succeeded in its demonstration and will hopefully drive positive govt policy outcomes.
will hopefully drive positive govt policy outcomes.
From the current city and state governments? Highly unlikely.
If services aren’t within 5-10 minutes maximum, people will not walk or bike there. That’s often greater than the distance just to get out of some neighborhoods.
If public transportation is not within 5 minutes or so, people will not use it.
The cost of a car can be under 10/day. If public transport is even half that for full day multistop use, people won’t use it.
“However, researchers found given participants were likely to slightly reduce their reliance on cars, it showed experiencing car-free living, even briefly, could help people break away from automobility.”
I think this is an important secondary take away here. Reducing car use is still much better than continuing at current rate. (Similar to eating less meat vs going vegan cold turkey).
Owning a car does come with large sunk-costs tho - so you won’t feel the full financial benefit from just reducing car use (still have to pay rego, insurance, maintenance etc.)Run this scenario in NYC. The amount of carbrain people when we have so many ways to get around is absurd.
20 days isn’t really enough to judge. If you didn’t own a bike at the start of those 20 days, could you really get a bike and all the clothes, safety gear, etc. you need and get used to biking before the end of the experiment? If you’re using public transit, can you really learn the routes and schedules for the places you need to go in just 20 days?
Also, assuming these people all owned cars, they were still essentially paying for their cars the whole time. They might not have paid for gas, and the wear and tear would have been very slightly less, but any car loan they had still had to be repaid on schedule. If they rented a monthly parking pass or something, that would have to be paid. Not only that, but when you don’t own a car, you tend to make different decisions on where to live, and sometimes where to work too. So, they’re living in a place that’s car friendly (and maybe not public transit friendly).
I would bet that if you took someone who didn’t own a car and intentionally lived next to a major transit hub and asked them to get around by car for 20 days, they wouldn’t like it either. They wouldn’t have a place to park at home, rush hour traffic would probably be extremely stressful for someone who didn’t do it every day, and so-on.
What this really needs is something like what you get in one of those “wife swap” TV shows. Someone goes to live in a completely different place with people who live very different lives. Instead of living in the sprawling suburbs and getting around everywhere by car, you now live downtown in a high-rise right near a great public transit location. In addition, calculate how much someone would save without a car, and give that to them as a cash payment every day/week so they understand that positive side of owning a car as well.
could you really get a bike and all the clothes, safety gear, etc. you need and get used to biking before the end of the experiment
Most people don’t wear special clothes to ride their bikes.
Those aren’t pictures from Brisbane.
In places where biking is well established as a way to get around, people think they don’t need safety gear. But, when a city doesn’t have a lot of bike infrastructure, cars are going to be constantly driving way too close to bikers.
This is an image that’s actually from Brisbane:
Or you could have gone with this one:
From this story: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-11-11/many-busy-brisbane-cycling-routes-make-no-allowance-for-riders/12862402
You only need special clothes if you are a wanker, everyone else just wears their normal clothes
Wankers is quite harsh
Let them feel sexy on their bike, if they want toYou need special clothes (full face helmet, kneepads, ripstop breathable clothing) if you ride downhill or enduro. But normal everyday riding you really just need a helmet unless you’re a new rider.
wankers
Yeah, I already covered that
You think someone riding downhill is a wanker? I’m guessing you’ve never tried it if you think that.
This is the gear i’m talking about:
I guess, that was in jest, also anyone can be a wanker if they want to
Yeah twas in jest, I should have put /jk
What? I spent years riding a bike. You could literally go buy a bike and 2 minutes out of store. As far as special clothing or anything you don’t need any special clothing. Winter time you wear your winter stuff summertime you wear your summer stuff. That’s about it. You put on a helmet that you buy at the same place you buy your bike at. And that’s all you need to do. You can literally jump online and have it delivered same day as well. And you don’t even have to go anywhere. That’s not the issue in getting a bike and using it for those 20 days.
