City Life

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All topics urbanism and city related, from urban planning to public transit to municipal interest stuff. Both automobile and FuckCars inclusive.

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Anyone else car-free? (self.citylife)

submitted 1 year ago by jenbanim to c/citylife

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I'm coming up on about 6 months of car-free life in Seattle. It's certainly been challenging at times, and it's only possible at all because I work from home, but I'm making it work. I'm curious if anyone else is trying to do the same thing. There are a ton of anti-car communities online, but very few people seem to actually go car-free as, like, an ideological thing

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[–] crisisingot 7 points 1 year ago

I live in Atlanta and going entirely car free would be a challenge for my family of four, but we did manage to go from a 2 car family to a 1 car family which has been a nice shift.

It's had a few lifestyle changes for us, mostly me since I try to leave the car for my wife when I go somewhere by myself. The sale of our second car funded the purchase of 2 ebikes, so we like to ride bikes around which has changed the kind of place we like to go around our city. It's been a lot of fun for us.

When I occasionally need to go to work I've found that bike+transit works fairly well for my needs. Sometimes I'll also just take only transit on days when the weather is bad but it's a lot less flexible that way since the bus schedule is so infrequent.

Overall, I'd say that you don't necessarily need to go all in on being car free to care about urbanism and reducing car travel. There are so many things out of our control with regard to the state of our city so sometimes taking smaller steps to reduce our car usage is all we can do.