I live in rural Japan and own a car. However, I lived here without one for over 5 years. My apartment building is surrounded on 3 sides by rice fields, so it gives you an idea of just how rural it is. I can walk from one end of the town where I live to the other in 20 minutes. In that space there are 3 grocery stores, 2 hardware stores, a butcher, 2 fish mongers, 1 tofu shop, 2 flower shops at least 5 barbers, 3 doctors, 2 optometrists, many bars, restaurants, cafes, etc, etc, etc. I moved from suburban Canada. In 20 minutes I wouldn't be able to walk out of my neighbourhood of cul-de-sacs lined with identical houses. Not even a single convenience store. It's a commercial waste land.
In rural Japan, cars are used. In suburban Canada, cars are necessary. There are definitely more rural areas in Japan than where I live. I live in an actual town. If you are up in the mountains, or live far away from a town, a car is probably necessary. However, for the vast majority of people who live in this country, it is not.
Why are you in a place where everything is a two hours walk away? The thing is that most people around the world live in neighborhoods or villages where everything they usually need to buy is within walking distance.
I explicitly said that I had a car when I was younger but opted to use public transport most of the time, and I kept the car because it was useful for random occasions (and coincidently I did actually fly to Australia).
Not really though. Plenty of people live in the burbs, take the bus or bike to a station and then express lines can whisk you downtown in no time. I guess it depends what you mean by the suburbs, but a home I lived in literally had a farm next to it and I still didn’t need a car there. Was 15 minutes by bus or 10 mins by bike to the nearest station, and then 20km from there to central Tokyo which took 20 mins on the train. Car would mostly be an optimization, or for some, a hobby.
Car ownership, if you're not acclimated to it, is absurd. Coming from outside the area, I rely on the city to massively subsidize my car parking that takes up tons of space for a vehicle that is used for about an hour a day. The rest of the time it is just sitting there, doing nothing.
I have to buy a car, pay for insurance, pay for gas, sit in traffic for an average of an hour a day, deal with strange/unpleasant/criminal drivers, never mind the dealing with car robberies and damage.
Jokes aside, but rural/suburban life is much more dependent than city-dwellers. 100% dependence on a single car every day, depending on subsidized roads and gas, etc.
Get a car then. In general folks aren't saying that you can't have a car. We're saying that we want cities to prioritize people over cars, which includes removing free parking, removing parking minimums, having protected bike lanes, having slow streets, having better public transportation, having denser cities, etc. Basically, build cities for the people that live there, and not for people who commute in.
You can still have your car, but the convenience is going to cost you. And yes, I'm very much saying you don't need a car every day, even if you maybe need one on occasion. I currently live in tokyo and I've used a car maybe six times in the past two years.
Not having a car is incredible. I love it. I'd argue the opposite in that having a car sucks. I don't have to worry about where it's parked. I don't need a space at my home dedicated to it. I don't need to pay for a car loan, maintenance, gas, insurance, etc.
In the rare cases when I need a car for a day or more, I rent one. In the rare cases where I need a car briefly in the city I call an Uber (or hail a taxi). My average transportation costs per month are $60. With the amount I'm saving, I can have temporary access to vehicles whenever I want.
Every time I visit relatives in rural and suburban areas, I'm so disappointed in having to drive everywhere. To me that infringes on some feelings of freedom, where you are entirely dependent on a car. I love where I live in a city, love not owning a car, and love the ability to walk or take the metro anywhere I need to go.
Spent the last 6 months in Seoul and the surrounding cities in Korea. Never needed a car. You can literally do everything without a car, everything is a short walk. I truly believe it makes a huge positive impact on happiness when you can just walk anywhere instead of having to drive. Also you'll notice that in Korea/Japan there are way more small businesses and things to do (eg. karaoke, cafes, etc) because people of this. In America there's relatively less to do because leaving the home is more of a hassle and less interesting, so people just stay in more.
My least favorite thing about living in America is the dependence on cars (outside of a select few cities like NYC). Now that my parents in the suburbs sold their spare car, whenever I go back to visit, I'm stranded there during the weekdays because the nearest bus stop is like a 40 minute walk, and the nearest subway would be maybe a 90 minute walk. If I need to go anywhere, I'm dependent on Uber/Lyft. Even if I get access to a car, there's relatively much less to do as I mentioned above.
Yup, in every European or Japanese town or city I've lived in (with the exception of one very small and isolated town), I never bothered getting a car. Everything was close enough to walk to (usually 2-5 minutes walk), and for things that were too far, I'd take the tram or train.
I've also lived in a few American cities, and it's a completely different experience. Even from downtown Philly it was inconvenient to get anywhere without a car.
I decided to move to a quite rural area that's still maybe 1.5 hrs away from a major city and airport. My car costs me maybe $200 a month in total and the commute is 25 mins of easy highway miles. Not the best, but not worst. Transport in so many American cities is truly torture
ottawa, canada. no car for 9 years, i live downtown but yeah everything is spread out pretty far outside the core dt area. Worst part though is the culture expects a car more than you actually need one in my exp.
In Europe, it looks like it is becoming the norm now for young people not to own a car. I'm not sure if it is price or ideology driven.
For sure it is becoming harder and harder to own a car in the city, you need to shell a lot of money to pay the parking and meet the emission criteria
Having grown up in a small village, requiring you to have a car, I can not imagine my life without a car
Coming from someone who grew up in a car culture city, learned to drive at 18, bought my first car at 19, and drove most days of the week... I'm much happier without a car. I don't want to have to own one again. In hindsight, car culture feels like a jail that I didn't realize I was born into.
I moved to Tokyo 5 years ago. If I want to get somewhere, I walk to one of three train stations within a 10 minute walk, hop on the train, and am there in – usually – about 30 minutes. There's always the option to take a taxi, but they're often no faster than train. I can still drive out to the mountains if there's no train to the one I want to climb, because there are more car rental shops within walking distance than there are train stations.
Sure, there are cars in this city. They're useful tools that make a lot of sense for many people to own. But the average person chooses to live without one, because in a city designed for people instead of cars, life can actually be better that way.
Living in a rural or suburban area doesn’t mean you have a car. There are plenty of poor people who don’t own one or have limited access and must share. At the Indian reserve by where I grew up almost no one had a car, they had to walk and bus into town 2hrs each way to get what they needed. I have met others with similar situations, single mothers who lost the car when their husband left, or families where the breadwinner works a second job and the rest of the family needs to make do without a car.
I live in Tokyo and I don't own a car. I take a 20 minutes train ride to commute to work and I do the groceries in the shops around my train station. I use online shopping as well and I receive my purchase the next day or two days after. To move around my neighbourhood I use a bicycle (if I was older I would have an electric one).
The weekend I want to go out of the city, I just go to the rent a car next to my house and I rent a hybrid car during 48 hours for about $150. If the place I want to go is really far, I take the bullet train and I rent a cheaper car there.
It's perfectly ok to live without car, it's just that the cities need to be designed in a different way.
30 miles one way doesn't sound uncommon in Tokyo as well, though the extensive public transportation system makes the need of cars much less than US. So I think it also depends on the policy of city design. I guess it's harder to omit cars for the rural parts of US rather than cities.
(I lived in LA about a year without car. It's ok if you're single, but if you have family it's a totally different story.)
I lived a few years in a 180k town that was dense enough that you didn't need a car at all. It was maybe 15km from one end of town to the other. Public transport was mostly busses and a Tram line.
The replies are full of people that can't imagine life without cars. I grew up in a suburb of Edmonton, I know what it's like to just "know" that cars are freedom and a way to get to ever conceivable place. I left that place 20 years ago and I could make a long reply about what it's like to live in various sized cities in Japan and Europe but let me just say that not needing a car to get from your house in a town to restaurants, grocery stores, shops, parks, etc offers much more freedom than needing a car to get to such things. And there are a lot of places where you can live in a town, even on an acreage and still be in the town and able to get to a train station to get to a nearby city, if your argument is that you can't stand cities and need your space.
Car-people can't imagine a town instead of a suburb and can't imagine that you can get from a town to a city by train or bus. Or that you don't need to travel to some far-off place with a huge car to get a ton of groceries because you can walk a few blocks and pick up the ingredients for dinner.
Anecdotally I used to have to drive 30 minutes through suburbia for any “stuff”, but then moved to a town of ~3000 people and everything is still available, and it’s at most a 5 minute drive away. I do have a car but also cycle quite a bit (eg to work) would do just fine with no car at all
In rural Japan, cars are used. In suburban Canada, cars are necessary. There are definitely more rural areas in Japan than where I live. I live in an actual town. If you are up in the mountains, or live far away from a town, a car is probably necessary. However, for the vast majority of people who live in this country, it is not.
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