I have two sons. At the time that we chose to go carless, we were living in an apartment complex with endless speed bumps. Driving over the speed bumps into and out of the complex daily was about 3 minutes of torture that we were completely thrilled to give up.
Humorously, we have had occasion to put me on a bus for some reason while they walked to the destination in question. I would get ahead of them, then the bus would get stuck in traffic and they would get ahead of me. We all arrived at the spot in question within a couple of minutes of each other.
Unless you are driving quite a long distance and/or on the open highway, car travel is not as much faster than foot travel as some people seem to believe. Short local trips don't see as much gain in speed as Americans seem to imagine. I think this belief persists in part because so many people just don't walk anywhere at all. They drive everywhere, even if they are only going 1/4 mile or something silly like that.
Unless you are driving quite a long distance and/or on the open highway, car travel is not as much faster than foot travel as some people seem to believe.
I'm going to have to disagree on this one.
I can drive to my local Wal-Mart in about 5 minutes. It would take me 30 minutes to walk there. I can drive there. Do my shopping, wait in line, pay, cart my stuff back out to my vehicle and drive home in less than the amount of time it would take to walk there.
I've lived in multiple cities of different size where I had multiple grocery stores within 5 minutes walking. In dense-for-US SF where I need to drive for 10 minutes to get to the closest Safeway.
> Unless you are driving quite a long distance and/or on the open highway, car travel is not as much faster than foot travel as some people seem to believe.
The average speed limit on municipal roads in Ontario is 50 km/h, which means that anywhere within 5km will take 6 minutes and, within 10km, 12 minutes.
Running 5km takes me 18 minutes, and running 10km takes me closer to 40 minutes. Humans walk at about 5km/h, which means that 5km would take about 1 hour, and 10km would be 2 hours or more, since exhaustion starts to factor in.
Car travel is unimaginably faster than walking. I don't know anybody who wants to spend 2 hours on a round-trip to a grocery store 5km away when they could do it in 10 minutes in a car.
You're not wrong, and even though I dislike cars, I can't help but feel like you're arguing against someone living in an alternate reality. Unless you live in a dense urban core there's no possible way that walking saves more time than driving. The main reasons I don't have a car is that it's very freeing not to have to worry about owning one (from a theft/maintenance/risk perspective), and also because I'm now living in Manhattan, where owning a car is a huge additional hassle above just parking it in the suburbs where I used to live. I'd either have to pony up for an expensive garage or go fight to find free public parking multiple times every week, all just so I can drive in traffic that's horrendous during the entire day. No thank you.
If I had the choice to go live in Manhattan and not have a car vs. live somewhere else and be obligated to own a car I would choose Manhattan in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, I can't do that (and even if I could, most people cannot).
I'm curious as to why you truly can't do it. Obviously not everyone can, but most individual cases likely can. It's more that you choose not to, which is still perfectly valid.
If there are fewer places to live than people who need to live there, then having a place for everyone is impossible. In a shortage, all housing is luxury housing.
You are not doing speed limit on average in most cities. You slow down for turns, you wait for red light, you wait for other cars, you are parking. Most importantly, shortcuts available to pedestrians are not available to cars that have to take longer route.
I do groceries by walk and it never took 2 hours. The store is not 5km away pretty much from anywhere. You have to be out of city or in the middle of night for it to be that far. Unless there is some kind of law to prevent it, stores with what you need daily pop up around cities everywhere.
In any case, 5km is still nothing on bicycle which I might take for that distance. Just to kill two birds with one stone and get a bit of exercise.
* Slowdowns, sure, but many drivers also exceed the limit, and the walking:driving ratio is still massively lopsided.
* Pedestrians are not immune to red lights.
* While there are certainly pedestrian shortcuts that are faster than driving, this is definitely not the case for most combinations of start and end points. Far more often, while the pedestrian might gain distance, the car is still literally 10x faster.
* In fact, unless you live in an extremely dense city, it's highly unlikely that there will be a grocery shop, book store, electronics retailer, Italian restaurant, furniture store, etc. less than 5km from your house. Plus all of the people who you might want to visit, your school, place of work, and so on.
* A bike is not walking. Most bikes are for one person, so if you're in a group they're not much use.
* Carrying purchases home is a pain. I should know, I did this for two years.
>* A bike is not walking. Most bikes are for one person, so if you're in a group they're not much use.
My favourite part of visiting Amsterdam was the excessive bike usage. Pretty much everyone has 1 or more of them, you just ride together in a group or catch a tram, even out of the city everyone would either catch a train or simply ride on the side of the highway between villages.
> Unless you are driving quite a long distance and/or on the open highway, car travel is not as much faster than foot travel as some people seem to believe.
I actually got to test this. My office was about 8km from my house. If I was to leave around my usual time, it would take me about 55-65 mins minimum to reach home.
One day I hadn't taken my car and couldn't find a cab. So I said screw it and decided to walk home.
Reached home in flat 71 minutes. Would have been faster had I taken detours that cut the distance by a kilometer or so.
Since then, I haven't driven a single day. I walk, take the metro or get an Uber.
I haven't been happier. Driving was easily the worst part of my day.