Bandera

Well though out and presented w/ a wide interesting view of your world.
Nice to get a viewpoint from outside the "West".

We ( my extended family and I ) operate a rural commercial farming/ranching enterprise that relies on an efficient cost-effective mechanized supply chain to get our products to market, our requirements and workers to us way out where "the sticks" are considered suburban. Not a bad thing at all.

-Bandera

kickstart

I drive a semi all day, so a bike or motorcycle are simply a relief from the daily grind. Why did I go to full time bike commuting? Because I wanted to.

Mobile 155

I hope this comes out ok? But your post echoes what I have heard for other nations as well.

ただけ言ったの反対を提案し、多くの人々の心を壊します
Watashi no yūjin anata no posuto wa anata dake itta no hantai o teian shi, ōku no hitobito no kokoro o kowashimasu

Mobile 155

I know the last post was off topic so to get back. I have been car free if you consider several years of not owning a car and using a motorcycle car free.

I started out in a car heavy family. From manufacturing to mechanic and sales. At one point we had six cars for 3 people. The thing that moved me to car light was not a battle with cars or people being able to have and drive their own personal transportation. It was with the ICE powered vehicles. Being a gear head at heart I once tried to build my own EV powered Corvair. Range, charge rate, and capacity were my down fall. For almost 30 years I looked for corporate America to come up with a replacement for ICE and city cars.

My hopes were raised when my state mandated in the zero emissions mandate in 1990 I got my hopes up even after every manufacturer said they could never do it but they might make a hybrid. CARB held to their guns and indeed towards 1998 GM, Ford and Toyota were about to offer full EVs for public consumption. Sure they were willing to exempt trucks and buses but we were going to get clean driving EVs like the EV-1, Toyota's EV Rav-4 and the little Ford that I saw commercials for but never saw one personally. Then Toyota and Honda came out with a hybrid around 1998 and CARB folded, GM pulled the EV-1 and they rated small gas powered cars as P-zero. A great disappointment.

I just oust about gave up think ICE was ever going to be replaced so I started looking to LSV vehicles like the GEM and moved from my resort home to where I am now. I soon re-discovered bicycles and knew the range was more than most LSVs so I gave up all but one car and a travel trailer and started cycling.

I am mo longer traveling like we did when I got the trailer so I sold the truck and trailer and got a small car that my bike fits in. I now drive fewer miles a year than I ride. So that in a nut shell is how I became car light.

gregf83 

I have a couple of cars but consider myself car light as I seldom drive them. One car has collector plates and is licensed for pleasure only (can't be used for commuting to work). My wife has a diesel Smart car which costs almost nothing to run. I ride primarily for fitness but I like not wasting gas as well.

ModeratedUser

My motivation for becoming car-free started out cause I ended up being car-less after a car vs car collision. This collision wasn't my fault and no one got hurt, but both cars were totaled. This car collision happened about 6-7 yrs ago. I've been "into" bicycling ever since high school, bout 40 yrs ago, so there wasn't any "discovery". It ended up that the place I live is prefect, imho, for being car-free. 25 yrs ago I wanted to live on a boulevard with train tracks near by. This symbolized the world working each day, which I liked and wanted to be close to. After being without a car I got the money for the collision and wanted to give this car-free life style a shot. What helps me get around is that the train tracks are part of the subway system here and with the subway and riding, I can get just about everywhere fairly easily in the LA county.

I've always been environmentally sensitive to how we treat the environment and even when I was driving I was still trying my best. I was getting 40 mpg, surface streets or freeways, on a vehicle that was not even getting classified to get that. This was a Mazda Protege with a 1.5 L engine. Also always had my foldie in the trunk ready to break it out.

Now it's good central location, good access to the subway system and climate that is pretty much summer all year long*!


*Hopefully I'll have to ride in the rain this winter. We need it!

cooker

Why don't people move into those vacant rural homes if the cities are so expensive?

Roody

What would Tokyo be like if there were no de facto restrictions on cars? I think the streets would be clogged, literally undrivable due to congestion. People moved to the cities because they wanted to live in the cities, because that's where culture, education, entertainment, and, above all, jobs are located. They didn't move there because they wanted to drive cars every day. This is a worldwide phenomenon, not limited to Japan at all. As cities get bigger and more crowded, the private automobile becomes both an unsustainable luxury and an impractical choice.

For many people in the urbanizing world, the relative lack of automobiles is not a drawback, but part of the appeal of living in the city. And city governments are beginning to understand how expensive a burden the dependence on cars really is. "Being able to get around in a car cheaply is not necessarily a bad thing," but it is a very expensive thing. Somebody has to pay for it, in Japan or anywhere else.

Machka 

Jobs ... I imagine. And if that is the case, the same situation exists in many parts of the world. We would love to live in a small town out in the middle of nowhere ... but there isn't much in the way of work in places like that.

Walter S

Seems like great retirement opportunities though.

cooker

it could get better or worse thanks to evolving technology. More jobs may become virtual work that could be done anywhere, or they could be lost to automation and artificial intelligence. Hard to predict.

cooker

It's good for a while for healthy, early retirees, but there is a window that closes as the need for medical services pushes people back towards civilization. So people might retire to exurbia in their 50s and 60s and move back into town in their 70s or 80s.

Machka 

And the communities we have in mind are exactly that.


That would be ideal ... being able to do my job from anywhere.

cooker

Which do you think is more likely - that you will be able work from anywhere (which for many people will allow them to go car-free or car-light) or that your job will be lost to machines?

Machka 

In my lifetime ... neither.

Eventually in someone's lifetime ... someone should be able to do some semblance of this job from anywhere.

rossiny

I hate working. Not owning a car has allowed me to afford to "work-a-year, take-a-year-off" for the past 30 years. Thank you college Economics course! How do u manage that one???!!!???

cooker

What do you do during the year off?

Mobile 155

Depends I guess on where you live. The effects of sprawl seem to be different in the north east of the US as an example from the south and west. At least from a study I was reading on what constitutes urban decay. In the south west it was cheaper to build new medical services on the outskirts of the ever expanding cities and suburbs. And if you retire and move to a retirement community medical services pop up like mushrooms in dark damp places. At least that is how it works where I am.

cooker

I was thinking about more remote sites, like the vacant farmhouses Sangestsu had mentioned, although I suppose in Japan those are probably clustered in villages, whereas in North America they might be individual homes miles apart. Around here I know of a few older couples who retired to their lake cottages, but then moved back into the city after perhaps 10 years, when they got too old to deal with maintaining the properties and getting in and out in winter, especially if they need to plow their own snow.

Roody

That's the main reason there is sprawl--in the Southwest or anyplace else. It's cheaper for developers to build there, because they are passing major expenses along to others:

• Employees and customers pay the bill by having to commute the extra distance to the "cheaper" office or store.
• Local governments pay more because they have to expand road, transit, and utility networks.
• Municipalities also lose tax revenues because sprawl places the "cheap" development beyond their taxation boundaries.
• And the environment pays the biggest price of all--more pollutants into the water and air, loss of habitat, land paved over for highways and parking lots.

In short, when something is cheaper for one person, it's because others are paying a bigger share. Everybody pays more for sprawl except for the developers and speculators, who just rake in the money. But I'm glad you like it.

Mobile 155

Ah yes, it is often nice to retire to a semi resort kind of area only to discover what a hassle it can be if you can't pay someone to maintain it. We had two homes when I retired. One in a mountain community overlooking the city on one side and the high desert on the other. Our other home was in a valley below a man made lake out by Palm Springs. We decided to sell the mountain home and move to the other home because it doesn't snow there.

Still the the example of expansion of our cities and services holds in most cases. The best hospitals tend to be outside of the city proper. L.A. May be an exception with MLK and Ceder Sinai, but that is closer to Beverly Hills rather than down town.

cooker

It's too bad, because in a way it is not health promoting to have everybody drive to the hospital all the time. In downtown Toronto a million people live within a mile of an academic teaching hospital and lots of staff, patients and visitors routinely walk, bike or take the public transit to the hospital. Obviously if they are too ill to travel that way they can drive or take a cab or call an ambulance, and even then it is a short trip! I consult in a few smaller cities in Northern Ontario and in most cases there was a wave of hospital reconstruction in the 1990's, fueled by incentives from the provincial government at the time, and of course they all abandoned their downtown locations, and rebuilt on the "cheap" land at the edge of town, and nobody walks to those hospitals. So the community is burdened with increased transportation costs for the next 50 or 100 years, and a lot of people have lost an easy opportunity to build some healthy activity into their daily routine, and occasionally you hear slightly jealous comments about how they wished they had the same close access to hospital care that people have in downtown Toronto!

Roody

Funny how we build important things far away, where they can only be accessed by car...then we think that the car is the only practical form of transportation. Luckily, there are many signs that this foolish pattern of wasteful sprawl is finally being changed in many places. But it will take generations of wis planning to undo the damage that's already been done.

In my city, fortunately, even though hospitals took part in the consolidation craze of the last few decades, all four campuses of the two remaining hospitals are within a couple miles of the downtown area and located on bus lines. However, it's alarming how many doctor offices have been relocated into the distant suburbs and exurbs. I've had difficulties finding doctors who have good access for carfree people.

Mobile 155

It is no different than when cities were built based on proximity to water or coal delivery. Business was built where their costs were less for shipping and receiving even if property cost more. Once electricity and more specifically alternating current was widely available the businesses could consider building away from the more expensive core. Trucks and cars may indeed have expedited the move but what else could be expected? Any expansion was to service the needs of industry and the desires of the consumer. That is how the system works.

But it I understand the difference in how people from the rust belt and the south west see things. The south west benefited from the system because our cities were expanding with the sprawl a bit like Atlanta. The north east was bleeding from the loss of jobs and population. To the later it seems like a tragidy to the former it is just how things work.

I have lived on the receiving end of the transformation. I found this to be interesting even if I found their speculation on what future non centralized employment will have on urban development.

https://eh.net/encyclopedia/urban-de...united-states/

kickstart

I think there's something you're overlooking,
That many people including myself absolutely detest high density, urban living conditions. To put it in my perspective, taking steps to force someone like me into those living conditions is no different than my suggesting anybody who supports that school of thought should commit suicide to reduce their foot print.

Some of the suggestions I've seen here such as work week pods, and secondary labor employment schemes sound like science fiction nightmares. If its the choice between humanity becoming a bunch of urban subsistence drones, or allowing humanity to burn itself out, I choose the latter. Who knows, perhaps what comes next will be better.

It may sound cynical or selfish, but I didn't make the world, and I can't fix it. I can only make the best of the few moments I have in it, and I'm not going to make my life a martyrdom to its problems. Minimize? yes, sacrifice? no.