71–80 of 564 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can get delivered in most cities now.
Yeah this is what I do, and I think it's great! But it relies on there being a driveable street outside of the house, and not a stupid walk path.
Fantastic cultural divide. This is one of the reasons why I read HN. Most of Europe is more or less walkable - one reason is that the largest urban centers predate cars, but intentional design AF (anno ford) is also a factor. I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier. I am not very green or anything, I just like to keep things simple. You can c…
> the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier How large is your family?? We are five (2 adults and 3 kids) and we do most grocery shopping by bike.
We, for example, are a family of 4 and our shop for ten days is I would guess 30/40 kilograms. The grocery is 2.5 kilometers away and the journey includes one very dangerous roundabout.
So I think a car is reasonable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah but now you are optimising for the minority case at the expense of making the most common case worse.
The most common case is that I'm picking up about three days' worth of ingredients at a time, in which case I walk either five or eight minutes (depending on which shop has the better stuff for my list) and carry home one large grocery bag. Since I don't need to worry about parking or traffic, I can fit this into my schedule whenever and usually do so when I'm already on my way home from somewhere else. The actual mi…
Fantastic cultural divide. This is one of the reasons why I read HN. Most of Europe is more or less walkable - one reason is that the largest urban centers predate cars, but intentional design AF (anno ford) is also a factor. I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier. I am not very green or anything, I just like to keep things simple. You can c…
> the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier How large is your family?? We are five (2 adults and 3 kids) and we do most grocery shopping by bike.
Fantastic cultural divide. This is one of the reasons why I read HN. Most of Europe is more or less walkable - one reason is that the largest urban centers predate cars, but intentional design AF (anno ford) is also a factor. I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier. I am not very green or anything, I just like to keep things simple. You can c…
> I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier. Yes, you still want a car for such things, sure it's quaint and nice to have a "walkable" neighborhood, if you're a tourist, but if you live there and have to schlep around by foot with your groceries every day, in all weathers, it's just annoying. I want my neighborhood to be functional and efficien…
And just because there are nice places to hang out does not automatically mean there will be drugs and crime. That is not my experience at least.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never owned a car in my life, never got a drivers license. I live in a walkable city (Berlin, close to the border). When I need to haul things around the city I take the cargo bike. For decades I simply carried groceries in a big backpack and walked to the markets on foot (they are all within a 10 minute radius from where I live). I'd call the layout of my neighborhood functional and efficient. Adverse weather h…
Yeah and if you stopped doing that and instead used a car to buy your groceries or ordered them delivered to your doorstep, you would have more free time and more energy. People want free time and energy. Just because it "works" for you to walk in the cold rain carrying groceries in a backback, doesn't make it the best solution. If there are better solutions, why insist on doing it the worst possible way?
I have no interest whatsoever to involve cars in my life. Having to share the roads with them is bad enough. (The arrogance of space is ridiculous.)
Deliveries: these cost little because people aren't paid properly. If I wanted to pay them properly, I wouldn't be able to use their services much. So instead of normalizing exploitation in the name of convenience, I prefer not to use delivery services when it can be avoided. And with different supermarkets in almost every direction, within 10mins on foot they most definitely can be avoided. I don't mean to moralize, and I'll step right off this soap box, but keeping bad jobs alive is a disservice to my community.
More energy / more free time: neither the time nor the energy are wasted. If you want, you can see the time spent as an investment into health and focus, a tool for stress-reduction, an active period of mental rest, but really: this is not a zero sum game.
I don't think any of this will convince you, and I'm not trying to. But perhaps you can see that your view on the "best solution" is hardly universal and well-established alternatives exist that work for a surprisingly large number of people.
Fantastic cultural divide. This is one of the reasons why I read HN. Most of Europe is more or less walkable - one reason is that the largest urban centers predate cars, but intentional design AF (anno ford) is also a factor. I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier. I am not very green or anything, I just like to keep things simple. You can c…
> I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier. Yes, you still want a car for such things, sure it's quaint and nice to have a "walkable" neighborhood, if you're a tourist, but if you live there and have to schlep around by foot with your groceries every day, in all weathers, it's just annoying. I want my neighborhood to be functional and efficien…
You seem to be either contradicting your position, or not accepting other people's comments in good faith.
Here you are arguing against carrying groceries every day, whereas I expect most people would - even in the proximity of markets and grocery stores - do perhaps 2 or 3 trips a week.
In a comment below you fixed upon someone's en passant claim that they're happy to carry 20kg groceries a short distance (a few hundred metres).
Of course, no one is doing 20kg of grocery shopping every day, and there's clearly a happy medium in there between mass/volume and frequency. Obviously the grocery shopping by foot continues to work well for an awful lot of people through Europe and elsewhere, and seems to be well correlated with a higher (perceived) QoL - so I don't understand how you can argue against these realities?
Fantastic cultural divide. This is one of the reasons why I read HN. Most of Europe is more or less walkable - one reason is that the largest urban centers predate cars, but intentional design AF (anno ford) is also a factor. I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier. I am not very green or anything, I just like to keep things simple. You can c…
The walkability comes at the cost of tiny housing though. Like here in Stockholm even 60m2 is getting very pricy (~350-450k USD). The main issue is that there is just nowhere near enough housing to keep up with population increases, seemingly anywhere in the Western world. And housing has become a "store of value" against inflation for investors, driving up prices and becoming a retirement fund for landlords and home…
Isn't that still really cheap compared to NY or Silicon Valley? Rising housing prices has more to do with pressure to move to a select few cities rather than walkability or rising population. E.g. in Germany housing in Munich, Hamburg or Frankfurt costs multiples of housing in smaller eastern German cities.
apparently hundreds of millions of people already do it...
A provocative answer to your comment: would you like to raise your family where your kids can walk to school and play with other kids in a nearby park at walking distance and never be afraid of mass shootings?
I get the impression that huge houses are a symptom of a bigger issue: people in US feel they need a lot of "safe space" around them because the more they are isolated from strangers, the more they feel safe.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier How large is your family?? We are five (2 adults and 3 kids) and we do most grocery shopping by bike.
Think the double question mark is a tad disingenuous there. Everyone will have their own peculiar circumstances. We, for example, are a family of 4 and our shop for ten days is I would guess 30/40 kilograms. The grocery is 2.5 kilometers away and the journey includes one very dangerous roundabout. So I think a car is reasonable.
Well, if city is so poorly designed that it requires cars, then you will need a car.
For comparison, I have small supermarket 250m away (on the ground floor of an apartment block) - and I do not need to cross road to get there. And withing 250m there are several other shops like bakeries, pharmacies, haidresser, convenience shops, clothes shop, fast foods...