This is apparently in Columbus, Ohio – a pretty major city by any stretch of the imagination.
And yet there are people who rail (geddit?) against 15-minute cities and efficient public transit that ensures no one ever gets stuck like this.
We should feel compassion towards addicts. Yes, even car addicts.
Sure, provided they show they want to make changes to the way they do things – at the very least by not actively fighting tooth and nail against systemic measures that could free them of that addiction.
@destructdisc @BilboBargains Yes. We can show compassion without indulging the habit and certainly without caving to their demands that everyone else live in a world designed to cater to their addiction. If your sibling is an alcoholic, you might only invite them to your home for an alcohol-free party. If they’re a car addict, you can invite them but make clear there isn’t space to park their SUV and give them transit and/or bike directions.
@destructdisc @BilboBargains Our culture normalizes constant car use in so many ways, from how retailers and professional services offices give directions to their businesses to what is shown and how in pop culture. People for whom everyday car use has become normalized often just need to hear alternative voices consistently and persistently for a while to realize that they can and should at least reduce if not eliminate their car use.
@destructdisc @BilboBargains Unfortunately, public transportation is one of the many public goods that has been in decline for decades due to neglect by both major political parties in the US and is now getting absolutely demolished under the new fascist regime, and people who walk and cycle have also had targets painted on our backs by hatemongers. We need to fight more actively than ever for our freedom to travel freely by the mode of our choosing.
aT lEaST iT’S lEsS CrOwDeD tHaN PuBlIC TrAnSpORT
I’m confused whats the alternative here? Even in Japan you’d hire a taxi if you have a full load of groceries you’re not taking the train.
Living in Wroclaw, PL. Closest grocery store is 100m from where I live. Closest discount store is 350m. Closest hypermarket is 850m. Closest mall is 600m. Closest bakery is 50m. Closest restaurant is 250m, 300 for kebab, 450 for mexican, chinese, thai, korean, and italian, 600m for sushi Closest pharmacy is 300m. Closest clinic is 450m. Closest hospital is 1,3km. Closest bank is 100m.
Very not city centre btw. When your apartment is closer to things you need than the distance between free parking spot and the shop in US the car becomes pretty useless
Mumbai, India. Six grocery stores, five pharmacies, two clinics, and multiple cafes and restaurants within a 3-minute bike ride from where I live. A full-fledged mall, a hospital, a 7-Eleven convenience store, and an upcoming metro station 5 minutes away, a major discount department store, a shopping complex, and the train station 10min away (by bike).
That’s on top of the fact that there are multiple Instacart-style app-based delivery services that’ll bring groceries to you, so you don’t even have to get out of the house if you don’t want to. (I steer clear of those because they grossly underpay their low-level employees, but they’re there if you really need something in a pinch)
I live a solid 25-30 km outside the city center. Not once have I felt the need for a car in my eight years living here, even for longer distances.
Similar in Turku, Finland.
And I live on the very edges of the city. 500m to a store and pharmacy, supermarket a bit further. But there’s buses that go like every 7 min during the day.
Now they’re also opening more cross city lines, so that’ll make it so that I have a bus stop outside my building that will take me to one of the largest malls in Finland in a few minutes. And the other connection takes me to the centre of the city which has a mall even larger by sales.
I’ve not owned a car for years, and even when I buy lots of groceries, the bus connections are so good that I’ve not needed a car. I’m a single guy though, but sometimes I’ll have like 25kg of groceries on me when I weigh myself for the luls. A backpack and bags in both hands.
If I need something bigger that requires a car, I can use a taxi or loan a car from a friend.
Surely thats not applicable in most of the world.
Japan has accessible grocery stores and department stores just about everywhere. That makes it a lot easier to just get what you need and take it home because of how easy it to get to and from the store. If the load is something you can’t carry by yourself most stores offer a delivery service.
AAA
$$
It’s not free.
I’m assuming this lasy does not have much money at all. You can get road side assistance with your car insurance and they’ll come to you and get you taken care of. If its a dead battery then just use a jumper. Gone are the days of needing a second car for this. Its just a big rechargeable battery with jumper cables attached to it. If you don’t have these then you are either ignorant to their existence, can’t afford it, or just want to live on the edge. If you don’t have the money for it then thats fine. Times can be tough, I get it. If you do have the money for it, then don’t be dumb and pay for these things. Having simple car knowledge helps a lot yet so many in the US don’t know shit about cars
If you don’t have the money for it then thats fine. Times can be tough, I get it.
Is that the entire extent of your consideration, or do you have an actual suggestion for a systemic solution for poor people who find themselves in this situation?
Sure, heres my solution: get some heelys and stop being poor. Lmk how it goes for you
Columbus is special. It’s a 15 minute city by car outside rush hour. But gods help you if you don’t have a car. The bus comes like every hour.
I spent years there trying to convince people that it needs light rail
Looks like you had a really good light rail system up until the late '70s?
https://allcolumbusdata.com/rail-transportation-history/
I’m assuming Judge Doom got involved at that point and paved over the lines
That looks more like they had a role in the national rail lines and trams, before proposing a really good light rail system and continuously changing their minds to oppose it. Which is exactly what I’d always heard. “Rail is too expensive and difficult and it doesn’t work, we’ve tried and it keeps getting proposed and shot down”
Hell, just needing a jump start becsuse your battery died can be a PITA if you have to rely on strangers.
i mean your insurance is supposed to cover the fees of tracting the car to the first garage, and pay you a taxi or whatever
isn’t that a thing in Murica
We call that roadside assistance and many people do not have it as it is not required. Manny more people don’t know they have it. Actually some phone companies include it in their plans, I’ve also seen it as a feature on some credit cards. But if you don’t think about it, you forget you have it.
American car insurance covers collision damage from other cars or external factors. It doesn’t cover mechanical failures. You can get extended warranty coverage, both from your car dealer or from third parties, but this is usually not financially worthwhile.
oh. I do get coverage for all failures & replacement car for about 110€/month
Insurance in America paying for something
Cars (like any technology under capitalism) are meant to keep people dependent, desperate, and exploitable.
meant to keep people dependent
As compared to what? Public transport is the definition of being dependent! There’s plenty of criticism to be levied, exaggeration isn’t needed.
Aren’t trams, trains and bikes technology?
They don’t want that there.
fans? books? phonographs? tractors? guns?
Definitely yes for tractors, you should see John Deere’s business practices and walled garden of maintenance and repairability! Peak capitalism right there.
This is naiive and dumb (like a lot of posts in this community).
If you drove to the grocery store, then you almost certainly have more groceries than are going to be comfortable to carry back by hand.
I mean if you can walk to the grocery store in a reasonable amount of time you’ll be able to divide those groceries over multiple visits and not have to deal with this.
here in sweden we have also have this unique invention called a “handcart” that lets you transport more things while walking
Not to mention, cargo bikes are a thing.
Not just cargo bikes. I’ve got a folding bike (small apartment) with two panniers and a backpack. Sure it’s not car level but its pretty good for grabbing groceries.
And it should be noted, Columbus has a pretty bad food desert problem.
And if your cargo bike got a flat while you were at the grocery store? It’s nice to have friendly neighbours to help out.
Ah yes, the inevitable “I have no suggestions, but what if your suggestion doesn’t work???” scenario begins
I think they were trying to make an analogous situation for the car with a flat tire on the cargo bike, not saying that cargo bikes aren’t awesome
Thanks. Yeah, I think cargo bikes are awesome, but breakdowns can happen to anybody.
If you have the sense to get a cargo bike you almost certainly have the good sense to have a patch kit and a pump on hand for exactly that scenario. Also fixing a flat on a bike is orders of magnitude easier than fixing one on a car
Sure, I’m not here to disagree, just trying to make a charitable interpretation of their comment for the purpose of discussion. Maybe a badly bent rim is more analogous, so just pretend that’s the example used if that’s more helpful.
…which is much more likely in a walkable community where people actually see each other every day instead of locking themselves away in metal boxes.
It is certainly nice to have friendly neighbors as backup in any scenario, though most frequent cyclists keep a small repair kit on the bike that includes a patch kit. Bike flats happen more frequently than car flats but are almost always field serviceable in 5-10 minutes. It’s not uncommon for daily cyclists to be rolling on tubes with multiple patches.
Ah yes; the cargo bikes everyone carries in their car when they have to lug a ton of groceries home
I live next door to a grocery store, and a 2m walk from multiple green grocers. I live the walking grocery lifestyle.
But there are still situations where I have to drive to the store to pick up a large amount of supplies. Like say, when hosting a birthday party, or wanting to pick supplies up at a grocery store that doesn’t have exorbitant prices.
With the post indicating that it was a kid’s birthday, I thought the same thing. They may be buying supplies for an entire party. Walking home in summer heat carrying a cake (that should probably be refrigerated) doesn’t sound easy, but add in the kids (are they big enough to help carry things? Or are the kids so little that they need to be carried?) and the rest of the supplies the family bought, and it easily adds up. Then we have roads that aren’t designed for walking, no public transit options, and who knows how far they had to travel to get back home.
how is anyone supposed to carry more than 5 gallons of water by hand? or bulk flour? large watermelons? half cows of meat?
Why would you need to carry 5 gallons of water or half a cow of meat? Are you living in the post apocalyptic world? You typically get water from the tap in your house and buy meat from the cow pre butchered.
bulk meat is typically cheaper than non bulk meat (around here it’s about 20% cheaper) and a few percent of the population doesn’t have a connection to the water company.
Because everyone has so much time. I have 3 hours just to go back and forth.
If it takes you 3 hours to walk a return trip to the grocery store, you don’t just live in run-of-the-mill car-centric design, you live in an absolute barren food-desert hellscape. Which is precisely the sort of thing people in this Community advocate against.
Define “grocery store”. If I wanted a loaf of bread and a couple of regular vegetables, I’d walk 5min down the road to the convenience store. If I wanted my weekly shop of supplies, it would be the supermarket a 15min drive away, and it would take several trips to do that by hand.
I mean, that’s certainly not a reasonable amount of time.
That is legitimately an insane person thing to say
There’s a big difference between what’s “comfortable to carry back by hand” and “what’s feasible to carry to a bus stop 100 metres outside the store, and then 400 metres from where the bus drops you off to your home”. That’s if we’re assuming a situation where you did drive to the store, planning to drive home, but an emergency means you can’t drive the return leg.
But also, if you do have good public transport, it becomes much easier to adjust your schedule to more frequent, smaller shops, where it’s not just feasible but easy to carry the groceries. Or in a good city for cycling, to drop the groceries in your paniers, basket, or even full-on cargo bike.
Nobody in NYC can buy groceries because they don’t have cars. Cars are the only way to get groceries home.
We use rolly carts in NYC and make more frequent trips. It’s also not uncommon to stop by Trader Joe’s or the supermarket on your way home. The best carts are those with the weird tri-wheels that go up and down stairs.
Love the rolly carts. Lil old ladies pushing them home all over the outer boroughs. They’re actually what I was thinking about when I made the above sarcastic reply. I think most supermarkets sell them for like $10 or something.
They’re a little more expensive. Cheap ones are $20 or so at dollar stores, but the nice ones are $80+. It’s worth the small investment though
Pffft. Amateur. Everyone knows if you can’t carry every bag you bought in one trip you are a failure.
Sure. It’s definitely that, and not that most North American cities are designed expressly to force you to drive even if you want a single cup of coffee or a sandwich or something.
Oh this case for sure 100% without a doubt has to prove out the point you’ve been obsessing over.
No possible way it could be a situation that contradicts your pre-conceived notion, adds nuance, or just isn’t really relevant to it. I mean what are the odds of that ever happening? /S
As I’ve said, I live in a walkable city near grocery stores, that still doesn’t eliminate the need to occasionally drive to one.
As someone who also does, quite frankly it does eliminate the * need * to
No, it doesn’t. It eliminates the need to for you, in your specific cases.
Weird how people on this sub seem incapable of imagining lives other than their own.
Fair enough. Of course with public transit you could send some of you home with some of the goods while one person waits for the tow truck.
Out of interest did you see the rest of the story? Looks like OOP deleted the tweet.
I did, it was a lovely little story about how the kid thought OP was a lot younger than she actually is, I think
You can call literally call anyone you know we all have cars here. If you don’t know anyone at all you can taxi or Uber. In smaller towns you may even be able to call the police non emergency number and get help from a community officer type employee who has a car and does minor non police related stuff. Many many many things would have to fail before you need to ask a stranger and even in that case you would be hard pressed to not find help within the first couple people you ask.
My point is that this entire situation is a massive systemic failure. You shouldn’t have to find yourself in a situation where your car breaking down means you’re stuck at the grocery store with no way to get home unless someone deigns to come and get you – hell, you shouldn’t even need to drive to get groceries, any well-designed city would have multiple grocery stores within a few blocks regardless of where you live, and a dense public transit network and/or cycling infrastructure so you can get to the ones that are farther away.
Believe it or not, some people don’t care to live in cities, and prefer the outskirts. Explain, how should a train station or a bike lane get me to the grocery store when I live on a farm?
I’ve been in the situation where my car broke down and I had no way to get home without someone deigning to get me. That’s literally how life is when you’re living out of town. One of my least favorite part about this comm and the sub before it is the sheer ignorance and unwillingness to acknowledge that a non-urban perspective exists, it comes across as arrogant, ignorant, and condescending.
This situation happened at a high-density gathering point (a grocery store) in a major city (Columbus, Ohio.) The people in the story didn’t break down by the side of some lonely highway passing through the desert with no signs of civilization for a hundred kilometers either way. I am therefore speaking of systemic failures in major cities that render people in major cities stuck like this.
That said, I’ve been to (and briefly lived in) multiple tiny rural farming villages in the middle of nowhere in India that still had a bus stop and/or a train station within walking distance. When that isn’t the case there are minivans or even livestock carts that get people to where they need to be going (those count as public transport too.) Public transit is literally how people (and their groceries) get around in the heartland. Y’all bring up this point of how not everyone lives in cities every single time – we know. Americans aren’t the only ones who live on farms or out of the way. We do, too, and we get by just fine without cars.
Living in London all my life, we grew up in a car-less household and my dad would do nearly all of the food shopping for our family of 6 himself (7 for a while when my uncle lived with us while he was studying), carrying it all home on the bus. I am still car-free and can get my shopping home using the bus or my bike on the way home from work. If you can’t do that in your city, then that’s the fault of your city’s planners. It’s a failure of providing good public transport.
I think it is underappreciated how large the North American continent is with highly concentrated big cities, with vast portions of the land outside of larger cities without public transportation. This includes CA/US/MX as a general comment and not specifically this screenshot in question.
One may have “good” transit in Calgary, Edmonton and Red Deer but what about all those large spaces in between? It’s 1.5hrs driving from Calgary To Red Deer with many 10k person cities in the middle, etc. These villages do not have transit systems - cars are how North Americans travel when outside of larger cities. It’s why EV (lack of) range is a huge (non)selling point for some people depending where they live.
No, it isn’t underappreciated. It is severely overappreciated – i.e., it’s a bullshit excuse that’s been debunked over and over again.
FYI, misinformation and bad-faith rhetoric, including whataboutism, is uncivil and violates rule 1 of this community.
with vast portions of the land outside of larger cities without public transportation
I mean, yeah? That’s the OP’s point? That too much for North America consists of poorly-designed car-centric urban planning.
not everyone wants to live in cities
Ok? And?
and they will use cars to get to the city to get things from store that are not available locally, like home depots and wall arts.
Ok? And the relevance of that small minority to either the principles of good urban design, or to the story in the OP is?
I mean, yeah? That’s the OP’s point? That too much for North America consists of poorly-designed car-centric urban planning.
Talk to me about the public transit options - besides the one bus that runs from Kalgoorlie to Esperance - in Norseman, WA.
I’m not sure what you mean. I didn’t hold out Australia as some bastion of urbanism. I simply reinforced OP’s point that North America is bad.
Australia is also terrible at this. It just wasn’t relevant to mention.
Your car will not break down, if you just walk to the grocery store.
That’s not an option for people who live in
goodfood deserts.Just fyi you got autocorrected (I swear, autocorrect feels like it’s more and more often these days changing from one correct word to a different word that’s grammatically correct but not what I wanted to say) from “food” to “good”.
Anyway, django’s point was the same as OP’s: that car-dependent urban design is bad for people. Food deserts are a feature of car dependency. They’re not a necessary feature (as in, it is possible to have car-dependent cities that don’t also have food desert), but by definition a 15-minute city, the thing this Community exists to advocate for, cannot be a food desert. A well-planned city makes it possible to get to a grocery store within a 15 minute walk or ride.
And it is pretty sad, that people have to live like this. It takes me 10 minutes to walk to the store, 2 minutes by bike, or one bus stop.
There can’t be food deserts in 15 minute cities.
Most people don’t live in those
yeah, that’s the problem
And pretty sad, to repeat the wording of the original post.
Columbus, isn’t that where that school shooting happened?
Are you thinking of Columbine?
No, but I was bowling for it
Do you have any idea how little it narrows it down?
I hate the impacts of cars too, and desperately want better transit options.
But we should maybe put up a sign for stories out of North America:
“North America is really really big. It sucks that it doesn’t have better mass transit coverage, but that’s still a genuinely hard problem to solve in rural North America.”
Most folks in rural North America have stories both of being the rescued and being the rescuer when cars have broken down.
Columbus, OH. 900k pop. 2.23m metro. Doesn’t have a functional transit system.
Yes. It is bullshit that a city that size lacks functional transit.
But it is in the middle of nowhere, compared to much of the world, so each person has a compelling reason to own a car, if only to occasionally escape from Columbus, OH.
It can become better, but the challenges are real.
In my country, most people who own a car are also members of a drivers’ club where you pay a membership fee in exchange for being able to call them for assistance in situations like this (they might repair or tow your car). Is that not a thing in the US?
It is, but they’re expensive, and since owning a car is already a pretty expensive necessity not everyone has it.
OK, in my country it’s about 100 euros for an entire year, ie much less expensive than many other expenses that come with owning a car.
It’s not terribly expensive. It costs like 2 tanks of gas a year. And you can usually sign up for AAA over the phone after you’ve already broken down on the side of the road. If you’re still financing your car, you probably already have roadside assistance. Expecting car owners/drivers to be financially prepared for a breakdown isn’t car-brained it’s just part of the social contract.
That sounds similar to AAA, pronounced “Triple A.” In the US, it’s an optional “club” that provides emergency road service to members. I’ve had to rely on it before, and recommend it for those who drive a used car (which can have unforeseen issues in the works.)
Yes, someone below already mentioned that and it seems to be the equivalent.
My bad. I usually skim other comments to make sure I’m not making a repeat post, but apparently I dropped the ball here.
American drivers are required by law to purchase car insurance, and “roadside assistance” as it’s called is usually a mid or premium feature of said insurance
roadside assistance costs significantly more than the legal minimum amount of automotive insurance
That’s right, it’s a mid or premium feature…
I see, car (liability) insurance is also mandatory here, but it’s a separate thing from automobile club membership.
