And yet there are people who rail (geddit?) against 15-minute cities and efficient public transit that ensures no one ever gets stuck like this
And yet there are people who rail (geddit?) against 15-minute cities and efficient public transit that ensures no one ever gets stuck like this
My point is that this entire situation is a massive systemic failure. You shouldn’t have to find yourself in a situation where your car breaking down means you’re stuck at the grocery store with no way to get home unless someone deigns to come and get you – hell, you shouldn’t even need to drive to get groceries, any well-designed city would have multiple grocery stores within a few blocks regardless of where you live, and a dense public transit network and/or cycling infrastructure so you can get to the ones that are farther away.
Living in London all my life, we grew up in a car-less household and my dad would do nearly all of the food shopping for our family of 6 himself (7 for a while when my uncle lived with us while he was studying), carrying it all home on the bus. I am still car-free and can get my shopping home using the bus or my bike on the way home from work. If you can’t do that in your city, then that’s the fault of your city’s planners. It’s a failure of providing good public transport.
Believe it or not, some people don’t care to live in cities, and prefer the outskirts. Explain, how should a train station or a bike lane get me to the grocery store when I live on a farm?
I’ve been in the situation where my car broke down and I had no way to get home without someone deigning to get me. That’s literally how life is when you’re living out of town. One of my least favorite part about this comm and the sub before it is the sheer ignorance and unwillingness to acknowledge that a non-urban perspective exists, it comes across as arrogant, ignorant, and condescending.
This situation happened at a high-density gathering point (a grocery store) in a major city (Columbus, Ohio.) The people in the story didn’t break down by the side of some lonely highway passing through the desert with no signs of civilization for a hundred kilometers either way. I am therefore speaking of systemic failures in major cities that render people in major cities stuck like this.
That said, I’ve been to (and briefly lived in) multiple tiny rural farming villages in the middle of nowhere in India that still had a bus stop and/or a train station within walking distance. When that isn’t the case there are minivans or even livestock carts that get people to where they need to be going (those count as public transport too.) Public transit is literally how people (and their groceries) get around in the heartland. Y’all bring up this point of how not everyone lives in cities every single time – we know. Americans aren’t the only ones who live on farms or out of the way. We do, too, and we get by just fine without cars.