this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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As long as a majority of Americans live in suburban areas, car dependency will continue.
If suburbs were developed to be people-centric, you really wouldn't need a car for 99% of your daily tasks. Most trips by car are very short, and can very easily be replaced by non-car modes of transportation.
The argument I usually hear from car-brains is that we have to pRoTeCt RuRaL cAr DrIvErs.
Unless you’re transporting anything of a decent size which most people do frequently.
Define “decent size” and define “frequently”.
It's incredibly rare to see pickup trucks in the suburbs or city hauling stuff. Sure, there's that one guy who collects metal scraps once a week, but that's about it. He's using his truck to make a living, not to take his kid to school up the road.
Heavier or more awkward than you can comfortably carry. Weekly/monthly food shop, furniture, weekend getaways, etc.
Food shopping doesn't require a large truck, or even a car.
I've carried 120lbs worth of groceries on an old bike + a lightweight trailer. It's easy to haul stuff on a regular bike, and if hauling large loads is something that you'd often do, a cargo bike makes a lot more sense than a car.
These days, since I don't support Walmart anymore, I can walk to my local grocery store a few times a week with a handcart, and get all the groceries I could need (even pulling 60lbs+ with a handcart is easy). I can also get exercise and connect with other humans at the same time! It's a better way of doing it.
Furniture? How often? Most people get stuff like that delivered for free, or might rent a small van for the odd time they want to pick up themselves.
Weekend getaway is understandable. I don't know anyone who goes on them every weekend. Maybe on a holiday weekend, but even then, owning a car for the odd getaway seems... wasteful.
The majority of people would still benefit from people-centric infrastructure, and an even greater number of people don't need anything bigger than a small car (if that).
And I say that acknowledging that North American cities aren't even designed with people in mind, so imagine how useless cars would be if they weren't the priority?
Are you single? Food shop with a family is not feasible with the weather and roads here. Vegan too so a lot bulkier. Tins, bottles of juice, fruit and veg, dog food, etc. it barely fits in the car.
Move furniture about all the time, last week I took my garden furniture to my SILs for a party she is having.
Away doing something most weekends yes, kids demand it. Can’t exactly put the pram on a bike either so even with great public transport the weather makes doing anything without shelter unpractical.
Your experience basically flies in the face of how millions around the world live all the time without cars or needing them that much.
Maybe your particular situation, who knows, but yeah.
No. And before kids moved out I was shopping for four adults + extra for when the grandkids stayed over.
Even though the option to have groceries delivered is available, I get groceries by bike or on foot all year round. In Canada. We get snow and sub-zero temperatures.
Yes, also vegan. 25 years, now 🤩 I get it, we buy large bags of flour, rice, dry beans, and other bulky ingredients on a regular basis.
At peak-pet, we had five adult cats and two large dogs. At that time, I'll admit that ordering pet food online with free delivery was just what we did.
Grocery shopping does require planning if you're going infrequently.
Being in the suburbs or city, most people would have access to at least a few grocery stores within a 20 minute bike ride.
If all the time, then you are able to justify having a larger vehicle. Most people, including most SUV owners, are not moving furniture all the time.
When we had the grandkids over, I was using a child trailer (for two) and using panniers for the groceries.
Since all grocery stores since Covid offer curbside pickup, it was much easier than you'd think.
And I don't have a cargo bike, which would make things even easier.
My point is that a people-centric city plan would remove barriers for mostly everyone. Even within a car-centric framework, it's totally possible to avoid using a car for most trips.
I wouldn't have believed it until I tried.
Amazing! My 8th veganniversary is in a couple weeks.
That other guy has pets but I'll let it pass.
Ah. See, you're able to ride a bike and not die. My community is not there yet.
This is privilege. Funny how so many in here would immediately bitch about others not recognizing it but in here it's totally acceptable to be completely obliviously.
Tf happened here
Some guy fantasising about shooting up public spaces if any of his loved ones get cancer from exhaust fumes.
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.
That's not even true. E-bikes solve the low density suburb problem. You just need to actually build out appropriate bike lanes and trails. Suburban neighborhoods aren't unfixable.
No, they are unfixable. Suburban infrastructure costs far more to maintain than the tax and fee revenues it generates.
Many millions of Americans spend at least an hour commuting to and from work every day. I don't think they're going to want to do that on an e-bike.
Your vision is too small. What do you think the biggest problem is for deploying transit to suburbs? The last mile problem. You can have a train to the suburbs, but people still then need to drive from the train station to their home. With an e-bike, that solves this problem.
Sure, you can cite some hypermiler that commutes 2 hours across rural land between cities, but now you're just masturbating to edge cases, the equivalent of someone that justifies buying a giant truck because they move a couch once a year.
E-bikes solve the last mile problem of transit. Look at how trains and bikes actually work in countries like the Netherlands. People tend to bike to the train station, ride the train, then take a bike to their destination. With an e-bike, your train stops only needs to be within a couple of miles of both your start and destination. E-bikes make solve the problem of the incompatibility of low-density suburbs and transit.
I used to do something like what you're describing. I would drive my car to a light rail station then take the train into the city to work. I suppose what you're talking about is just replacing the car with an e-bike. That's fine, but I don't see a huge difference in this scenario between an e-bike and an electric car, especially since I wasn't just driving to the light rail station, I was also driving to the grocery store and to restaurants and to the houses of friends and family, etc.
Now, if I had lived in the city nearer to my work, and to stores, and restaurants, and shops, etc, an e-bike would have made a lot more sense.
Most people in suburbia have a stores within a reasonable e-bike distance of them. And yes, there isn't a ton of difference between the e-bike and an electric car in that context. Which is the entire point! The difference is that one costs a minimum of $30k, while the other can be had for less than $1k. And for the resources to build one electric car, we can build dozens of e-bikes.
That's true, yet I still think many people will opt to spend the additional money for a car. They're covered and climate controlled, and they offer more passenger and cargo capacity. In the Netherlands, which you mentioned as an example of a country with high e-bike adoption, there are still millions of cars. I'm sure there are fewer cars than there otherwise would have been, but cars are still very much in the transportation mix. Not a bad thing, necessarily. I definitely think it has reduced car dependency - cars are no longer as much of a necessity - but cars are not eliminated.
How am I going to bring home groceries for my family of 4 on an E-Bike?
I do groceries for 2 people once a week with a bus and my legs. With an e-bike and a cargo trailer it would be trivial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_bike
You get an electric cargo bike. The idea only sounds terrifying, no? But that's because you're imagining riding the thing with your kids through car traffic. If you have the infrastructure to make it practical to run errands with vehicles like this, without sharing paths with cars? Just other vehicles of similar size and speed? Suddenly it's much more sensible.
As long as new housing is built in suburbs due to zoning, people will continue to live there.
All of the housing in my city that is near downtown or near business districts is either abandoned, run down, or gets converted into businesses.