Day 8 : Your challenge for today is to slow down in your car…
The halfpintpixie household is a car-free zone.
Hubbie cycles to and from work and we get the bus when we go to town.
We’re lucky that we live on a good bus route, but that was one of the things we looked for when househunting. Not having a car means we’ll never be able to pack up and move into the countryside but I think that once-off country dwellings are a lot less environmentally friendly than (properly-planned) urban neighbourhoods.
We have a corner store, pharmacy, doctor, hairdresser, dentist, supermarket, playground, beach & woods all within walking distance and every two weeks we get a “big shop” of bulk items, freezer goods etc. delivered from Tescos.
When we go travelling, we use trains and busses, it’s still cheaper to get occasional taxis (even for long journeys) than to have a car sitting in your driveway every day. People think we’re insane, but being car-free suits us!
from thinksmall.org, here are their top ten reasons to go car-free:
10…. Cars and the roads that accomodate them do tremendous damage to our beautiful planet, not to mention the huge amount of oil resources burned as fuel which could be better used to produce durable goods. GLOBAL WARMING IS A FACT.
9…. Car-centric urban planning makes places less livable and more dangerous.
8…. You can save a ton of money by not driving. You no longer have to worry about car payments, gas, insurance, repairs, parking fees and tickets. Middle class people spend 20-50% of their income sustaining the automobile habit. If you lose the car, you could probably work less.
7…. Riding a bike or walking are great sources of exercise. Driving to the gym is absurd, isn’t it?
6…. Riding mass transit improves mass transit. When more people ride and put money into the system through fares, better equipment and new routes are added.
5…. Driving induces stress which leads to illness and ultimately death.
4…. Children who are not chauffeured everywhere grow up healthier and more independent.
3…. Cars are dangerous to people and other critters. More than 50,000 people die worldwide each year as a result of automobile accidents. Millions of creatures become roadkill every day. Roads disrupt migration routes and create deadly barriers to animals.
2…. Commuting on public transport gives you time to think, read, write letters, catch up on school work, meet the people around you, nap or just totally space out. When you bike, skate, or walk you have a more intimate contact with the world and the people in it.
1…. The more we keep driving cars, the more we’ll keep fighting wars for oil.
Couldn’t have said it better myself!
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We deliberately bought where we could walk to everything. Groceries, pediatrician, bookstore — everything is walkable. My husband can even walk to his office. It’s great. We aren’t car free, but we’re car infrequent.
Ah, yes. The joys of a small european village. Everything within walking distance. I hope you appreciate how lucky you are, here in the US such a life is harder to come by. I just got back home from a trip to the big city of Chicago where everything is within walking distance, and I allready miss it so much.
You have a cool little blog here, I hope you’ll keep commenting on mine.
-Joe
Thanks for visiting, I love when new people appear and comment!
a small european village… that sounds so idyllic….
Galway is a big town/little city (by Irish standards it’s a city, everyone else would laugh at it!) chock full of a nightmare amount of cars and most of the suburbs are a planning disaster.
We are really lucky to be living in just the right part of Galway for car-free-ness. I often envy big big cities like Tokyo and London where they have a whole infrastructure devoted to public transport, here our buses share the road with the cars and hence share the traffic jams…
ah well we can dream!
I grew up in the north, around Chicago, so I know and love public transit. Out here in Oklahoma City, there is nothing worth mentioning. There’s a bus system, but it doesn’t run as far out as we are, doesn’t go anywhere I’d need to go, and doesn’t run often enough to make it usable, let alone practical. There is nothing in walking distance. Shoot, we don’t even HAVE sidewalks on most streets. This is the third largest city in the world, in land-size, although there are less than one million people. Our traffic is horrid, and, even with so much space and so few people, our air quality is steadily dropping. *sigh* I wish we could afford to move…
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