The reason you can drive a car everywhere is because people put roads everywhere. People are capable of putting safe bike and walking paths and public transit infrastructure everywhere too. Asphalt and gravel roads are not naturally occurring. You being tied to your car if you want to “go anywhere” isn’t a feature of cars it’s a construction as artificial as the car itself
The “freedom” that comes with cars is also possible with other things. Car manufacturers have brainwashed you into thinking it has to be this way. There are places in the world you can leave whenever you want on a whim and go wherever you like on transit or on a bike. This function is not unique to cars. Cars are just the only thing in many parts of the world that get any attention from those funding the infrastructure.
Expanded public transit and bike paths and train service and walkable cities and towns mean freedom. Cars do not need to have a monopoly on freedom.
Get yourself a granny cart for your big shopping trips. Also some cities have companies that have hourly rentals for cars or vans. And you can get more stuff shipped to you than you think. Also in places where bike infrastructure is good, cargo bikes are a thing.
Yeah I go grocery shopping a couple times a week and occasionally get an Instacart order on top of that because there’s a target and a little grocery store near some other places I go and I can pick up pantry staples there on the way home and either go out of my way to get specialty stuff on one of my days off or get it delivered. I’m almost never carrying more than what two grocery bags and my backpack can handle. Like I often just buy veggies and eggs and milk on my way home from church or a friends house. In a car-free existence you can just casually incorporate errands into your daily routine. You don’t need to go out of your way to go to the grocery store because there’s one right there
Genuinely the biggest barrier to being able to walk or bike or tale transit everywhere is the design of our cities, almost every issue people come up with that has do with using one of these to get around can be fixed or dealt with, we use cars not because they are the best way to move around but rather becaus they are what our cities are built for
Literally the only situation where a car is necessary that I can think of is moving houses or buying furniture and you can have someone else deliver furniture or move for you, so even in that situation you don’t need a car because furniture stores often have delivery trucks and moving companies exist
This is - disingenuous at best. It ignores physical disabilities.
My car is the most important accessibility aid I have, bar none.
If I had to walk to and from the grocery store, I would never go shopping. Especially if I had to carry/drag things back to my house. A walking path or bike path cannot fix chronic pain and fatigue.
It can’t make my knees hurt less. It can’t do ANYTHING about what the Texas sun does to my lupus.
It doesn’t change the fact I wouldn’t have the spoons to go to the store every few days. I go every couple of weeks because that’s what I can plan for. I can choose the day. I can plan for what I’ll need. I can set my life up for the day I’ll be laid out.
Without my car, I could not go to and from work - because I don’t work at a singular location. I go from client to client.
My clients are disabled. Many housebound. Reliant on me to help them get out of their houses to shop. To participate in the world. They can’t use public transit, because that many people? Bad news. Waiting for a bus during a panic attack? Not great.
Being able to get into a car with a person they trust to help them leave RIGHT when they need to?
That works.
My car lets me deliver services to other disabled people. Services I could not provide using even GOOD public transit.
Wanting walking paths, bike paths, more stores closer to people is GOOD.
But please don’t ignore folk with food intolerances and food allergies. Smaller stores can’t carry the variety needed to cater to us. The big stores can.
Genuinely, the biggest barrier to physically disabled folk being able to bike or walk or take transit everywhere isn’t JUST the design of our cities.
It is the cost of doing the physical activities. Something which cars reduce.
Setting up your own car to accommodate your needs is much easier than relying on public transit to have the accommodations you need, because there are so many permutations of that.
And that’s just physical disability. That doesn’t get into folks with neurodivergence. Or folks with mental illness.
Car free isn’t an idyllic lifestyle for everyone. There are a lot of us who wouldn’t be functional people in that world.
People like me.
I’ve talked about this at length before but I’m tired of coming up against this over and over again. Cars will still exist. The fact remains though that if society was designed correctly then a) it would be easier to get around as a disabled person without a car because accessibility is a part of people-centric infrastructure b) the vast majority of people wouldn’t need or even want cars so people who do drive would have much less traffic and safer roads to deal with and c) a lot of people currently isolated because they can’t drive because of their disability could gain a lot more independence than they currently do.
