> And don't forget that even with the driving, everything takes less time.
What do you mean by "take less time"?
My experience doesn't bare that out, but we might be thinking about very different things.
For context: I live in a fairly residential area now, where I drive to get groceries or to get food. I used to live in San Francisco, where I had four grocery stores and a whole bunch of restaurants and bars within four block.
> I think driving is much more convenient and nice for most things I like to do
Sure…is that because driving is inherently more convenient than walking, or because your city was designed so driving was more convenient than walking?
>I used to drive way to fast on the highways, now I often find myself realizing that I'm driving to slowly.
That's called getting old.
>The next time you've left late, are running late, are about to miss something; you need to consider is that extra 2 minutes and the higher risk of getting in an accident worth it?
If it wasn't a pretty good trade-off less people would do it. Do you avoid swimming in the ocean because of sharks?
> I always find that this person has a limited number of places he goes, with the rest being inconvenient to get to.
This is just a description of traffic patterns in the US, in general. You presumably don’t cruise through random suburbs on the other side of your city on your way to work, or while running errands, or really for any reason other than needing to.
Where I live, it’s both faster and cheaper for me to not own a car. It hasn’t hurt my traveling much, either, although you’ll have to take my word for that (until I figure out how to anonymize all the location data I collect for myself).
>Personally I don't understand why you'd want to drive more than 10 minutes by car to work, it's such a waste of your lifetime.
By choosing to drive 40 minutes to work, you can live 10 minutes from a national park or a beach or the rest of your family or a golf course or whatever works for you in your off hours.
> driving every day is more dangerous than not driving every day
Can't disagree there. Do you also do thing like having groceries/shopping delivered to your place of residence, to avoid having to leave the house. Or do you still walk/commute/drive/travel to things that most would consider part of everyday life?
> Living in the burbs requires a car, sitting in traffic, etc.
FWIW, this isn't always true. I live in the suburbs about 30 miles from work, and it takes about as much time for me to drive there as it does for my friends who live 3x closer, but in the city. They get all the traffic; I can literally just set cruise control at speed limit, and coast 20 miles out of those 30 on a wide open freeway.
> If I could, I'd give up ever having to drive again in a heartbeat.
Try it. I lived in Chicago years ago, where cars are expensive and inconvenient to own, at least by American standards. I would walk to the grocery store, which was about 4 blocks I guess, about a 10-15 minute walk. So your shop is limited to what you can carry back, so you have to shop every day or every other day, with the walk there, the shop, and the walk home taking the better part of an hour. Every other day or so. And on the way you are accosted by at least one street person asking for money, and with your hands full of grocery bags you feel a bit defenseless. And then there were the rainy days. And the cold days. Not fun walking 10-15 minutes at 6 degrees F with a 20mph wind in your face.
It had its charms, but overall it sucked. I prefer my rural house and easy weekly shop with a car now.
> 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.
>Do you ever find yourself on a road getting passed by all the other cars?
Yes, often.
>Isn’t that annoying?
No, it is much less stressful when everyone else is passing me than it was when I was driving about 5 mph over and always coming up behind cars trying to find space and time to pass them. (Or even now, the few times I come up on someone who is going under the speedlimit and I have to safely pass them.)
> don't involve spending an appreciable fraction of your day shopping.
if you're concerned about how your time is spent, i think you're missing a fundamental piece of the puzzle: how much time you spend driving. you could end up saving an enormous amount of time while still going out to shop more if you cut out driving and reduce the scope of your trips.
> if you want to drive from within the city center to the outside (e.g. go back from a shopping mall / restaurant / business meeting)
But I don't know if being able to do this is a reasonable expectation in the first place. Why do you have a car in the centre of a city? They aren't designed for cars. Live in the suburbs or countryside if you want a personal car.
> It prefers weird backroads with lots of turns instead of straight larger roads (and that's stupid)
Part of that could be driving style.
Getting to one nearby city really has two main routes for me—the single lane highway, or the backroads with a bunch of weird turns and stuff.
You hop on the highway and besides a couple of towns you pass through you more or less just space out for an hour and then you’re there. Your speed on the highway is pretty much fixed. There’s heavy enough traffic that even if you were to try and pass and drive aggressively you’re never really beating the map estimate. Often you come in a bit longer because it only takes one person doing 15-20 under the speed limit to just create a rolling roadblock.
The back roads, however, are basically empty. How fast you get there is pretty much up to you.
The highway is faster and less stressful for my wife. The back roads are faster and less stressful for me. I’m not even speeding much or driving aggressively. I’m just comfortable actually doing the speed limit through those areas and passing where necessary.
> Honestly I feel that driving faster is safer for me, since I tend to zone out if I don't have to pay attention to overtaking trucks.
If you don't drive while being sleepy this is just a matter of getting used to it.
I used to drive to family visits 160-170km/h, but switched to 110 km/h (or train+bike depending on the circumstances). It feels slow at first, but you get used to it. The same when you do it the way around.
> Not to your point, if you’ve never had a car or even experienced the joys of driving itself or simply being able to go far away on a moment’s notice
I own a car after living for years without one, and for every “I can go away on a moment’s notice” (what they sell you) there is 100 times you spend in traffic at rush hour moving at 4mph.
There’s something truly liberating in living in a city where you can just take the bus to a fancy restaurant, get drunk and not put other lives in danger. Or just walk to the park, the playground or the library.
Want to add, with walkable cities and less car centricism you absolutely don't have to drive.
Not meaning to be insensitive to less healthy people who enter into that condition through no fault of their own, but also, perhaps fewer people would be in a position that they are physically unable to shop for groceries if they didn't "have to drive", and got in the exercise of a daily walk to the grocer.
What do you mean by "take less time"?
My experience doesn't bare that out, but we might be thinking about very different things.
For context: I live in a fairly residential area now, where I drive to get groceries or to get food. I used to live in San Francisco, where I had four grocery stores and a whole bunch of restaurants and bars within four block.
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