this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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Unless you’re moving furniture or have a physical disability it’s not really an issue. It’s also easy to use Uber/Lyft/etc and book a large vehicle on the occasions you do actually need it.
I guess if you’re buying a ton of pet food/litter or drinks regularly it could be a pain, but if an area is actually designed well you won’t be carrying it very long. And if you plan ahead and have one of those little luggage/shopping carts you don’t have to carry it at all.
Source: have lived for the past 15+ years without a car.
The juice and alcohol would barely fit in the carts
Move furniture frequently, do have a physical disability, pets, kids. Not feasible without a car. Using taxis all the time would be a fortune and kinda defeats the purpose, no?
A cargo bike would probably be better for you, then, or just a cargo attachment to a bike. E-bikes are strong enough for hauling and getting around that I see a parent and 1-2 kids being hauled around by them all the time, and I doubt your groceries outweigh that.
If you haul furniture for work or are constantly doing free deliveries for friends or something then yeah, you’re going to need transport that accommodates that. But that’s an edge case and doesn’t really negate the societal need for communities to be built around human beings and not cars. If you lived where I do you would be eligible for door to door service from the disabled transit to take you to and from the grocery store. There’s not a reason for you or anyone else to need to spend (tens of) thousands of dollars on a car, insurance, gas, and maintenance to access food or your job when we could just be doing mass transit and improving pedestrian/cyclist access.
I wasn't arguing against building communities to be built around human beings, I'm saying they aren't so it's infeasible.
I've never seen anyone with kids on bikes here because it'd be miserable. Narrow roads, parked traffic, and no safe routes from A->B for most things. No bike routes, can't go on the motorway, backroads are a death sentence. Looking at a cargo bike - never seen one IRL - that would fit a small weekly shop. Then you have the kids and all their stuff. God forbid we want to take the dog also.
There's no need to spend on a car. There's a shop for essentials within walking distance like there is anywhere I've lived in the UK, you could just not visit people who live further than walking distance from you, rely on other people to drop off things for you. Spend a lot more time commuting doing smaller trips to avoid being overloaded, spend more in the expensive local shops. Order a delivery from ASDA instead of driving around the zero waste shops, local co-ops, etc. Just a lot less practical and more restrictive. Not really edge cases, people use their cars to transport stuff regularly. New homes take time to build up, new family members, refurbishments, events, etc. If you don't drive then someone else is doing it for you or you're just doing less.
It would be miserable to bike with kids where you are right now because of who your local government decided public space belongs to and how they should get to use it (ie, people in cars and they should use it by driving around). It doesn’t have to be that way and it’s absolutely possible to live perfectly happily without a car when communities choose to prioritize public space being for things other than cars.