Thursday, February 23, 2006

Carfree? Are you nuts?



The Weekly Standard, a cauldron of American right-wing blather, hates the idea of going car free.

They seem absolutely incensed that anyone in the United States would imagine a world beyond the personal automobile. What we see is a lack of imagination that our cities could ever be organized in a way that does not include the strip-malls and parking lots of today's American landscape.

Here is a sample of their breathless rhetoric...

Families rely on cars for many of the same reasons working class people do. Families have dozens of short errands that require a "trip-chain": that is, a trip to drop off the kids at daycare might also include a trip to the drycleaners, a trip to the bank, and a trip to the grocery store. No transit schedule can accommodate these needs. Nor can carpooling.

We wear this article as a badge of honor. Upsetting the close-minded is the job of visionaries, eh?

What do you think?

2 comments:

Off the Grid said...

See, here's my situation: I don't live in a city; I'm rural, and i prefer to stay that way. I would gladly give up my car for a good transit system, but it's never going to happen. I can't even get dsl! It sucks having to run a car, a terrible waste of money and resources, but I simply don't have a choice but to own one.

So, I guess what I'm saying is, aside from some utopian fantasy in which an electric shuttle whips through the community every 60 minutes, do I get to keep my car?

Because it I didn't, it looks like I'd have to move. I'd hate living in a city for many different reasons that I won't go into here.

Unknown said...

Rural people may need cars for quite a while. But innovative solutions do exist. In Sweden, one can take the inter-city rail to hundreds of local stations, and then proceed to a bus that delivers people to neighborhoods far from cities. Each of the transit stations has shops and farmer’s markets at the station so getting groceries and then walking them home or riding a bike with baskets is easy.

In the USA, living carfree in rural areas is indeed difficult. But for the most part, this movement is about redesigning cities so urban people can retire their vehicles and life a life free of the stress and expense of private car ownership.

Thanks for your comment.