Living without a Car
The bus I took for years in Chile.
Paul Krugman wrote today about Life Without Cars. This subject strikes home for me. I have lived without a car since 2005. I lived 5 of the past 9 years in Chile and used the bus system there. I came back to the United States and have used a combination of walking, a bike and the bus system for the last 4 years.
I carried groceries 3 blocks in Chile. In the United States, I have carried groceries in a cart behind my bike. I currently walk one block to get my groceries.
In my opinion, the world is using cars too much thanks to cheap oil. But oil is getting more expensive and will be getting more expensive as the decades pass. People will learn to live as I do now. And it is not a problem to live without a car.
The people who ride the bus are people of the community. They are good people.
I always thank the bus driver as I get off the bus.
Edward:
Nice area you live near also. I should be down over Thanksgiving for a week. Maybe grab a cup of coffee again?
On topic, Michigan is the state of little or no mass transit. it keeps the Detroiters confined to their city and unable to reach the suburbs.
Run
THAT may be the fault of General Motors. I grew up with busses and street cars and got along very well.
Until GM, I am told, made the (paid the?) cites to tear up the car tracks, and then the busses gradually disappeared.
And today it takes longer to get home from work in a car than it used to take me to walk. The cities are bigger and the grocery stores further away.
The car is what makes the giant corporate grocery chain profitable. And the “giant corporate…” whatever is beginning to be what makes life in the US miserable.
But prices are lower.
Coberly:
The state of Michigan also made a cognizant decision not to invest in mass transit as it was the auto capital of the world. The only transit systems existing are a shuttle system near Coho. a bus system within the cities, and Amtrak. While the transit system within Detroit was definitely impacted by GM, there are “still” no light rail transit from Ann Arbor to Detroit other than an occasional bus and Amtrak. It is this type of system in addition to better inner city systems which will give people the ability to go to work and escape Detroit for it. Detroit is installing a rail system up and down Woodward.
Michigan (and indeed In, OH and IL) had a very good intercity transit system a 110 years ago called the interurbans (or Electric Railroads).
I looked at a old topo map of a city between Detroit and Ann Arbor where used to live and found that in 1906 there were two interurban lines that ran to Detroit. Likewise in In. It was supposedly possible to ride interurbans from Buffalo to Chicago at the time. However the market decided by the 1920s that these were uneconomic and they gradually faded away. So in one sense on the mass transit issue its a been there done that, issue. Note that these were all private operations. However it turns out that all failed as private operations by the 1930s.
I have been steadily driving my 15 year old passat less and less. I am now averaging about 100-200 miles a month or a tank of gas every other month.
After Deepwater Horizon in 2010 just went on and on I quit driving downtown for shows. Now I take the bus or the train and find my life is a lot less stressful even though it takes a little more planning/forethought.
Young people already squeezed by lousy job prospects are increasingly seeing vehicle ownership as an expensive and dangerous luxury item. Thus the reversal of a 30 year migration to the suburbs.
I meant to mention that like Edward I think my increased use of transit has helped me make a better connection to my neighborhood and community. I am seeing a side of life I would never be aware of from my car.
There was a good documentary made 20 or so years ago about the end of the street cars and the conspiracy that accomplished their demise. A lot of people mentioned the cross section of life on them – doctors and lawyers got on board right alongside pipe fitters and waitresses.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our cities became “unlivable” around the time we abandoned these daily interactions.
Now that the GOP is opposed to funding highways maybe car ownership will become even less popular. The dirty hippie tree huggers!
I worked for 35 years in Schenectady, NY without owning a car (although I rented one on company trips and occasionally to visit relatives). There was a great bus service linking Schenectady, Troy, and Albany, with near bus routes running every 24 minutes during the day, and an Albany-Schenectady bus (15 miles) every 55 minutes. I walked about 1-1/4 miles to and from work, 1 to 3 miles to local supermarkets/shopping centers and the nearest mall, and took the bus for longer excursions (or in winter snowstorms). You couldn’t walk through downtown Schenectady without seeing a dozen different buses.
Now I live in a suburb of Buffalo, and see a bus that goes into the city once a month or so on my walks (it makes the round trip once a day). There is no local bus service. There is a huge fleet of school buses for the local elementary, middle, and high school though. I wonder if they couldn’t be used for a local bus service to local shopping centers in the middle of the school day and in the evening and weekends. (I walk five miles to the nearest mall a couple times a summer, and 3-1/2 miles to the nearest cinema complex a few more times.)
I’ve spent time in three small towns (this one, the one I grew up in, and one I worked in in Ohio for a while), and they all used to have train stations which are now deserted, torn down, or converted to community centers. (Schenectady still has a working AMTRAK station.) An older worker who grew up in Schenectady told me that in his youth there was a trolley system which you could ride (with transfers) all the way into Massachusetts and back. Ah, the good old days. Not that I want to go back to them, but they did have better mass transportation (in the USA).
Before cars were railroads, in WW II large farms had railheads with feeder rails to bigger lines etc.
Before RR were canals.
Many RR right of ways remain unrepaired……..