This is the way. I've learned after too many concerts, fairs, games, various other large events, that is just not worth it. I'm taking public transit, petal taxi, Lyft, whatever. I don't want to spend 2 hours of my day doing nothing but staring at tail lights.
I park as far away as I'm able to walk in order not to drive around to find parking. I've found that it saves time on the long run, gas, and mor importantly my own stress and mental health.
I do that to. What I love is that while walking the last hundreds meters to the place you are going you can see all the people who try to park close that are all getting angry in their cars, proving you were right to park further away.
Tourism taking all the parking in your small European town?
Can't park at the only town store because tourists are everywhere and I can't park my car and don't want to be a dick and leave it on the street with 4 blinkers on like any random BMW douche?
Go home hungry and wait till the next day?
Yeah, I'm laughing in European too.
I personally can drive, but living in a european medium/small city I know a lot of people in their thirties that doesn't even know how to drive because they don't need to.
It’s way before that for me. When I get word of the event, I look up the venue immediately to see the parking situation. If it’s bad and the event isn’t too important, I’m not going.
The event might be groceries and I just don't have the mental fortitude to deal with both a full parking lot I will have to walk from the other side of, but also wade through the sea of people inside.
The walking doesn't bother me, I usually park more than halfway to the far side anyway since there's less cars and I can pull through the spaces to park easier.
As yes, in the immortal words of Kris Kristofferson, "Freedom's just another word for deciding where you want to go based on other people not wanting to go there, too. (And somebody building a road to get there.)"
"I'm going home because I didn't find a parking space" sounds like someone who drove there entirely alone. Look how much space a car takes up for just one person.
I don't drive a car and hate them very much, but I have this in common with motorists. Only what I'm looking for is a secure place to lock my bike. Which is somehow often rarer than a parking space for cars.
I got my bike stolen while it was locked by the side of a Walmart, so now I'm much more careful about the "parking situation" and I use a bike share or public transit if I fear for the safety of my vehicle.
Yes, and no. Theft can be a strong possibility, but not "all the time". It depends a lot on where you lock the bike, its value, and how you lock it.
I have had two bikes stolen twice in about 10 years. One was a hybrid worth about $1k. It was locked with a cable by the side of a Walmart in a neighborhood of questionable reputation. It took me about 15 minutes to get in and out and the cable was cut when I came back. The other was also a hybrid worth about $1k. It was stolen while locked with a cable, in the underground garage of my building. However I have another "cheap" bike from a big retail store locked with a very cheap cable lock in the same garage, and nobody stole it.
So now even if my contract says I can't bring a bike in the apartment, my "expensive" hybrid takes the elevator with me and stays in my living room. I also now use a thick U-lock because cables are risky. But even then I know very well that leaving it locked with a U-lock outside for any prolonged period of time is also risky.
If you have a "nicer" bike than average, you have to be mentally prepared to have it stolen at some point. Not "all the time", but maybe a few times in your life, depending on your luck and locations.
I never had a bike stolen even during the few years I was using one as my main form of wheeled transit. It helped though that I never had an expensive bike, always locked it up when I left it (average cable lock), and had somewhere secure to leave it at night.
As LPL will tell you, you don't need to have the most secure thing on the planet, you just need to be a hard enough target that the thief gives up or picks something else.
If you don't lock your bike, sure it'll get stolen from some places.
Bike theft is a crime of opportunity. Nobody is stalking a specific bike to take, it's usually "oh shit there's one that looks easy imma take it"
I have a hardened steel U-bolt lock and a thick AF cable (do not get any cables under 1/2in as they can be easily cut with side cutters or even good wire strippers) the U lock goes through the frame, the cable and disc lock go through the wheels as well. I also like to take my seat with me in my bag, since nobody wants to ride a bike without a seat.
Speaking of opposite experience, absolutely. Even if you lock it down, high likelihood of getting stolen, especially if left overnight, and if it's a 'high value' bike, especially an e-bike.
Get an old bike that's in good mechanical condition but looks shitty.
Alternatively, figure out how to take the bike with you on the bus. My transit system's buses have bike racks on the front, but if yours doesn't, get a folding bike (e.g. a Brompton).
I actually used to ride my bike to the closest stop when I lived further away from town.
Locked it up somehwre close, come back and ride it home.
Nowadays my bikes are a little more expensive so I don't like to lock them where I can't see them all day, but I'm fairly sure it will still be there when I come back.
The one time it DID get stolen, it was specifically because I forgot my lock that day. I called a friend, we drove around town for a bit and I spotted some guy on it, called the cops and told them I'm about to confront the guy who stole my bike and if they care to show up we're at the park. (don't bother saying you want them to intervene, tell them you are confronting someone and they'll show up thinking maybe someone is about to get shot) and when the guy tried to say he bought the bike heads ago, I told the cop I'm taking the handlebars off to prove something. Took them off with the toolkit I keep in my bag, and pulled out a piece of paper with my name,partial address, and phone number on it. The guy started sprinting the second he realized I have proof it's mine. I also pulled out my New Bike Day photo of it but the paper with my details inside the frame is a lot harder to argue against.
It's illegal where I live to lock a bike to "urban furniture", and a pole is also often not the safest place. If not stolen, it will be removed by the city.
Depends where you live and how that area is designed. In much of the US unfortunately public transportation isn't even an option or is an option that is so slow or so expensive it isn't affordable. Vehicles may not be either, but that's not how many people see it.
My drive to the store: 10minutes,with traffic and hitting red lights.
My public transit to the same store: 15 minutes of walking, 30-45 minutes of waiting for a bus at the closest stop to me, it's late or will skip my stop as usual. 20 minutes to get to the next stop that will get me to the store but I have to wait another 5-10 minutes for the bus that actually gets closest to the store to arrive, and 5-10 minutes for it to make it's closest pass. 10 more minutes to walk to the store.
Now do it all in reverse! Luckily the route is slightly faster on the way home because the first bus I take usually chills at the hospital for a little bit and I can just hop a few fences to get to my house quicker than the bus.
So that 10 minute ride in a car now takes me many hours.
Legally I'm not allowed to bike there since I have to cross highways and private property. I still do it when it's cool enough to bike. For the same reasons, I can't walk to the store either, even if my knee could handle the distance.
More rent seeking. Some company convinced cities that pay for parking would make the city money…with a nice cut for the company.
Edit: the parking is already paid for because taxes paid to pave the roads where the parking is. Paid parking is an additional tax with a corporate middleman skimming off the top.
Free parking is a massive subsidy for drivers at the cost of everyone else. Don't go painting "barely nudged this back towards the neutral column" situations into oppression. It's a bad look.
Yes, the companies suck (Chicago selling their parking to a private org that recouped the price they paid in like 3 years is top of this list) but the law bends over backwards to make private transit seem appealing, cause literally no part of it makes a lick of sense, otherwise. It's only treated like this because it's the most profitable transit methods, which is why it got shoved down our collective throats.
Don't forget that in a lot of the USA public transport simply doesn't work. For example in my state the only town u can get around in reasonably in is the big city, and even then your isolated to that city. In my town, (second biggest city in the state with a population smaller than the "small town" in mass I moved from, where everybody said I lived in the "sticks") there is a small bus network that can get u around town and to the next town, but not enough of a network to make it feasible to commute to work unless u live and work in the same town and are willing to hoof it through snow. Rural areas and public transport simply don't work, there are some places where private transport simply is the only solution. Now the cities getting planned around cars is another story, but every city I have been in in New England has been a nightmare to traverse in a car and a breeze via public transport so YMMV
Meh, in so many places (in the US) you would need to flatten the entire city and start from the ground up to make no parking and instead here is public transportation that would work. That's the unfortunate world we live in. Or because of how public transportation so often works, you spend the 'poor' tax of so much more time getting places. Oh need to get to work that is five miles away? it's 1 hour each way by public transportation, or 20 minutes by car with traffic.
Actually you don't really have to "flatten" anything, the parking lots are already flat enough. Remove asphalt and build mixed-use housing there. Take away a couple lanes from cars and build a tram line or at least a dedicated bus lane. It's not that difficult if there's political willpower for it.
Funny thing, flattening the entire city is what did happen in the 20th century. But for cars.
Bad transit and big parking lots are a policy choice, and many cities around the world are showing that we can still make better choices. We don't just have to put up with car shit.
If the U.S. is so large, then don't we have plenty of room to build the necessities of life (stores, schools, offices) near where people live? The size of the country has next to nothing to do with the layout of a city. That's absurd.
One of the cities I live near had a scandal recently where a company just decided to put meters in public lots. No permits, no permission from nearby businesses (who don't even own the lot or care for it) and yet cops still enforced tickets for "going over the time limit"
There was a lawsuit last I heard, but someone went ahead and smashed the kiosk, cut all the meters down, and left everything in a pile by a dumpster.
It's crazy to me how many companies are just doing things and expect the people to just go along with it. Even crazier how often the company is right about that...
Depends on the event. I don't mind parking further away just for ease of pulling in and out, the walk doesn't bother me unless my knee is acting up.
If it's my nephews baseball games, I will park around the next block or two and walk, but if it's a store and the lot is full? Pass.
It depends on where you live, mostly. In my experience, people who live in suburbs don't like to walk very far from their parking spot, dense city dwellers don't mind at all. Either owning a personal vehicle is pointless because everything is within 15 minutes of walking or because owning a car in a packed city is expensive and difficult.
Americans do walk sometimes, but only if it's a special event raising money for charity, or on vacation to a theme park like Disney World or Europe. Otherwise, if you can't park your car literally within sight of your destination, "there's no parking!"
Walking through an American car suburb is nothing like walking through a European city. Racism is still racism, even if the target is Americans. Don't be a racist.
Thankfully, calling out dipshits for the dipshit things that they do is not racism. Houstonians have a choice, and they choose.... that kind of abomination.
It's racist because you're ascribing it as an innate characteristic of the American people. Plenty of people have to and do walk through Houston, as that video documents. The wealthy oil oligarchs just had the city built in a way that required car use.
Nah, I feel like you're really reaching. Walking is an innate characteristic of all humans. One of the defining characteristics, some say. That poor people walk in Houston is not a revelation. However, it is unconsciously making cars an instrument of punishment for the poor (forced to walk in a car-dominated hellscape), that is the dipshit behavior, and hell yes I'll judge Americans all day for being so cruel. It's anything but innate; you can't choose your skin color or sexual orientation, but you certainly can choose not to scream about removing a few street parking spots for an important bike lane.
The observation that Americans don't walk unless it's a special event comes from a lifetime of observing my fellow Americans. Hell, I watch my neighbors drive 4 blocks to the grocery store almost daily.
My ex spouse is like this drove me batshit. Going to where they worked that's a 15 minute walk I'd just walk and they'd drive, by the time they found parking I was already inside sitting. Sometimes parking was so far away they'd end up walking nearly 10 minutes anyways. Years of trying I could never convince them to just walk to work. I never understood it, still don't, why would they prefer that?
Wtf, so they drove just for like a bit over 1km? I used to work somewhere a bit over 2km away from my house and usually walked or biked there. I'd drive there when it's bad weather, and even then it took me longer than biking.
About 1.5km, literally on the same street as us it was a straight shot. On their way back they didn't have to deal with finding parking but they did deal with rush hour traffic so that straight shot was still longer than walking
The only smart excuse I could come up with would be that parking is cheaper at work than at home? 😅 My current job is only like 6km away and I still drive there usually, but mostly because street parking is like $4/hour during working hours, whereas I have free parking at work.
A fully acceptable reason for someone to become an ex, though I assume there were many other reasons as well.
I love driving but hate weird parking situations. So much that I won't even pull into a fuel station if I have to wait for a pump. In big parking lots I park way out at the end and walk instead of dodging all the cars and people up closer to the buildings.
My closest city HAS a bus route, but they are long past their peak of public transit. The bus routes are longer because funding cuts forced them to cut back on the number of busses they have. The drivers are always nice, but they skip stops when they fall behind schedule.
A 30 minute trip to and from the store in a car becomes a 4-5 hour slog on loud uncomfortable rattling busses where I have to sit next to some rando who sometimes smells like piss.
I long for easy public transit, I don't want to drive anymore.
95 replies
I'm not driving to whatever it is.
This is the way. I've learned after too many concerts, fairs, games, various other large events, that is just not worth it. I'm taking public transit, petal taxi, Lyft, whatever. I don't want to spend 2 hours of my day doing nothing but staring at tail lights.
Same for when I get to work…
🤣
I park as far away as I'm able to walk in order not to drive around to find parking. I've found that it saves time on the long run, gas, and mor importantly my own stress and mental health.
I do that to. What I love is that while walking the last hundreds meters to the place you are going you can see all the people who try to park close that are all getting angry in their cars, proving you were right to park further away.
Once you start you never go back.
Laughs in European
Tourism taking all the parking in your small European town?
Can't park at the only town store because tourists are everywhere and I can't park my car and don't want to be a dick and leave it on the street with 4 blinkers on like any random BMW douche?
Go home hungry and wait till the next day?
Yeah, I'm laughing in European too.
Hon hon hon
Fill in the blank with any EU country after shaking hands with France lol
If you can bike, bike. Bike parking always within 50m of the venue 😎
I will drive 20 extra minutes not to wait 10 minutes in gridlock.
I will park a mile away and walk in rather than circle for 10 minutes for a parking spot.
I wife is not a fan of either of these traits.
wow this is the first time i have seen that word used in its original context in like YEARS lmao
Drive there, park 5 miles away and e bike in
Driving further to avoid traffic makes sense: it seems to cause stress:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/(SICI)1098-2337(1999)25:6%3C409::AID-AB2%3E3.0.CO;2-0
Wait, you're telling me we don't have a return plan EITHER?
Head exploding...
I'm at the age where I don't even have a car.
12?
I did have a lot of cars at 12 but they were all of the matchbox variety.
Well you had no excuse. Didn't even need to park those, just throw it in a pocket when you've arrived.
Surely I'm not the only one with a collection of negative camber cars because I was convinced that this one could work like a roller skate.
Lol big city europe that age is 30.
20k town Europe and way past 30 with kids.
I personally can drive, but living in a european medium/small city I know a lot of people in their thirties that doesn't even know how to drive because they don't need to.
Middle of nowhere, Europe, 40ish
It’s way before that for me. When I get word of the event, I look up the venue immediately to see the parking situation. If it’s bad and the event isn’t too important, I’m not going.
The event might be groceries and I just don't have the mental fortitude to deal with both a full parking lot I will have to walk from the other side of, but also wade through the sea of people inside.
The walking doesn't bother me, I usually park more than halfway to the far side anyway since there's less cars and I can pull through the spaces to park easier.
I'm at the age that the first train to the event being full is enough to make me go home.
Sadly the event I'm usually attending is called work
Woo, go boss! WOOOO! waves oversized finger all over, hitting several coworkers
WOOOOOOO
But cars are freedom! They let you go anywhere you want, right? /s
Yes, like away from crowded areas.
As yes, in the immortal words of Kris Kristofferson, "Freedom's just another word for deciding where you want to go based on other people not wanting to go there, too. (And somebody building a road to get there.)"
Then why did you take your car?
"I'm going home because I didn't find a parking space" sounds like someone who drove there entirely alone. Look how much space a car takes up for just one person.
Because public transport sucks in USA, due to car companies bribing/lobbying the corrupt government.
There's no USA mentioned in the post
Agreed. Americans don't mention usa. We just assume we are the center of the universe.
I'm not from the USA. I was speaking generally.
I don't own a car, I don't need one. One excuse less.
I don't drive a car and hate them very much, but I have this in common with motorists. Only what I'm looking for is a secure place to lock my bike. Which is somehow often rarer than a parking space for cars.
I got my bike stolen while it was locked by the side of a Walmart, so now I'm much more careful about the "parking situation" and I use a bike share or public transit if I fear for the safety of my vehicle.
That’s something I wonder about: don’t bike people get their bikes stolen all of the time?
Maybe I’ve just seen too many Lockpicking Lawyer videos.
Yes, and no. Theft can be a strong possibility, but not "all the time". It depends a lot on where you lock the bike, its value, and how you lock it.
I have had two bikes stolen twice in about 10 years. One was a hybrid worth about $1k. It was locked with a cable by the side of a Walmart in a neighborhood of questionable reputation. It took me about 15 minutes to get in and out and the cable was cut when I came back. The other was also a hybrid worth about $1k. It was stolen while locked with a cable, in the underground garage of my building. However I have another "cheap" bike from a big retail store locked with a very cheap cable lock in the same garage, and nobody stole it.
So now even if my contract says I can't bring a bike in the apartment, my "expensive" hybrid takes the elevator with me and stays in my living room. I also now use a thick U-lock because cables are risky. But even then I know very well that leaving it locked with a U-lock outside for any prolonged period of time is also risky.
If you have a "nicer" bike than average, you have to be mentally prepared to have it stolen at some point. Not "all the time", but maybe a few times in your life, depending on your luck and locations.
I never had a bike stolen even during the few years I was using one as my main form of wheeled transit. It helped though that I never had an expensive bike, always locked it up when I left it (average cable lock), and had somewhere secure to leave it at night.
Speaking from experience, no, they really don't.
As LPL will tell you, you don't need to have the most secure thing on the planet, you just need to be a hard enough target that the thief gives up or picks something else.
If you don't lock your bike, sure it'll get stolen from some places.
Bike theft is a crime of opportunity. Nobody is stalking a specific bike to take, it's usually "oh shit there's one that looks easy imma take it"
I have a hardened steel U-bolt lock and a thick AF cable (do not get any cables under 1/2in as they can be easily cut with side cutters or even good wire strippers) the U lock goes through the frame, the cable and disc lock go through the wheels as well. I also like to take my seat with me in my bag, since nobody wants to ride a bike without a seat.
If your bike is expensive enough it'll be targeted. People with very valuable bikes don't leave them in the same place repeatedly for that reason.
Speaking of opposite experience, absolutely. Even if you lock it down, high likelihood of getting stolen, especially if left overnight, and if it's a 'high value' bike, especially an e-bike.
That's a relief. I'm walking from home to the bus stop currently, but considering a bike to help speed things up.
Get an old bike that's in good mechanical condition but looks shitty.
Alternatively, figure out how to take the bike with you on the bus. My transit system's buses have bike racks on the front, but if yours doesn't, get a folding bike (e.g. a Brompton).
I actually used to ride my bike to the closest stop when I lived further away from town.
Locked it up somehwre close, come back and ride it home.
Nowadays my bikes are a little more expensive so I don't like to lock them where I can't see them all day, but I'm fairly sure it will still be there when I come back.
The one time it DID get stolen, it was specifically because I forgot my lock that day. I called a friend, we drove around town for a bit and I spotted some guy on it, called the cops and told them I'm about to confront the guy who stole my bike and if they care to show up we're at the park. (don't bother saying you want them to intervene, tell them you are confronting someone and they'll show up thinking maybe someone is about to get shot) and when the guy tried to say he bought the bike heads ago, I told the cop I'm taking the handlebars off to prove something. Took them off with the toolkit I keep in my bag, and pulled out a piece of paper with my name,partial address, and phone number on it. The guy started sprinting the second he realized I have proof it's mine. I also pulled out my New Bike Day photo of it but the paper with my details inside the frame is a lot harder to argue against.
Yeah somehow finding a pole or something to lock the bike to is impossible sometimes.
It's illegal where I live to lock a bike to "urban furniture", and a pole is also often not the safest place. If not stolen, it will be removed by the city.
How long do you leave your bike somewhere fpr it to be removed by the city??
Me, arriving by train:
Genuinely don’t get this, go by public transit.
Many places don't have public transit.
Depends where you live and how that area is designed. In much of the US unfortunately public transportation isn't even an option or is an option that is so slow or so expensive it isn't affordable. Vehicles may not be either, but that's not how many people see it.
Yeah, lived in most places in usa and its horrifically terrible :(
My drive to the store: 10minutes,with traffic and hitting red lights.
My public transit to the same store: 15 minutes of walking, 30-45 minutes of waiting for a bus at the closest stop to me, it's late or will skip my stop as usual. 20 minutes to get to the next stop that will get me to the store but I have to wait another 5-10 minutes for the bus that actually gets closest to the store to arrive, and 5-10 minutes for it to make it's closest pass. 10 more minutes to walk to the store.
Now do it all in reverse! Luckily the route is slightly faster on the way home because the first bus I take usually chills at the hospital for a little bit and I can just hop a few fences to get to my house quicker than the bus.
So that 10 minute ride in a car now takes me many hours.
Legally I'm not allowed to bike there since I have to cross highways and private property. I still do it when it's cool enough to bike. For the same reasons, I can't walk to the store either, even if my knee could handle the distance.
Yeah had to bike to and from work and home almost daily am hour each way in a Maine and it was pain ++ dangerous lol
I guess I've always been that age. 🤷
I have been driving for 20 years without having to pay for parking, and now I'm struggling to find free parking anywhere.
First world problem, but still dystopian compaired to what i grew up with.
More rent seeking. Some company convinced cities that pay for parking would make the city money…with a nice cut for the company.
Edit: the parking is already paid for because taxes paid to pave the roads where the parking is. Paid parking is an additional tax with a corporate middleman skimming off the top.
it's more about the city not losing money by offering parking for free. infrastructure and space aren't cheap
now the private companies, fuck those
We already pay for that parking with the taxes that paid for the paving of the roads. This is double-dipping. They aren’t “losing” anything.
Free parking is a massive subsidy for drivers at the cost of everyone else. Don't go painting "barely nudged this back towards the neutral column" situations into oppression. It's a bad look.
Yes, the companies suck (Chicago selling their parking to a private org that recouped the price they paid in like 3 years is top of this list) but the law bends over backwards to make private transit seem appealing, cause literally no part of it makes a lick of sense, otherwise. It's only treated like this because it's the most profitable transit methods, which is why it got shoved down our collective throats.
Don't forget that in a lot of the USA public transport simply doesn't work. For example in my state the only town u can get around in reasonably in is the big city, and even then your isolated to that city. In my town, (second biggest city in the state with a population smaller than the "small town" in mass I moved from, where everybody said I lived in the "sticks") there is a small bus network that can get u around town and to the next town, but not enough of a network to make it feasible to commute to work unless u live and work in the same town and are willing to hoof it through snow. Rural areas and public transport simply don't work, there are some places where private transport simply is the only solution. Now the cities getting planned around cars is another story, but every city I have been in in New England has been a nightmare to traverse in a car and a breeze via public transport so YMMV
Meh, in so many places (in the US) you would need to flatten the entire city and start from the ground up to make no parking and instead here is public transportation that would work. That's the unfortunate world we live in. Or because of how public transportation so often works, you spend the 'poor' tax of so much more time getting places. Oh need to get to work that is five miles away? it's 1 hour each way by public transportation, or 20 minutes by car with traffic.
Actually you don't really have to "flatten" anything, the parking lots are already flat enough. Remove asphalt and build mixed-use housing there. Take away a couple lanes from cars and build a tram line or at least a dedicated bus lane. It's not that difficult if there's political willpower for it.
That's just a lack of imagination.
We took a long time to get here, yeah. But you'd be surprised how little work it takes to make things easy better, too.
A little bit of car dieting in the last decade where I live and there's, like, 3-4 times the pedestrians as there once were
Houston it's taken 50 years with few regulations and while better is still very car centric.
Funny thing, flattening the entire city is what did happen in the 20th century. But for cars.
Bad transit and big parking lots are a policy choice, and many cities around the world are showing that we can still make better choices. We don't just have to put up with car shit.
A lot of place around the world aren't as large as the US either. It's not as simple as 'fuckcars' would make you believe.
If the U.S. is so large, then don't we have plenty of room to build the necessities of life (stores, schools, offices) near where people live? The size of the country has next to nothing to do with the layout of a city. That's absurd.
One of the cities I live near had a scandal recently where a company just decided to put meters in public lots. No permits, no permission from nearby businesses (who don't even own the lot or care for it) and yet cops still enforced tickets for "going over the time limit"
There was a lawsuit last I heard, but someone went ahead and smashed the kiosk, cut all the meters down, and left everything in a pile by a dumpster.
It's crazy to me how many companies are just doing things and expect the people to just go along with it. Even crazier how often the company is right about that...
Nah it’s not first world problems. Our cities are selling us out.
I don't drive but can't you park somewhere else and walk?
Depends on the event. I don't mind parking further away just for ease of pulling in and out, the walk doesn't bother me unless my knee is acting up.
If it's my nephews baseball games, I will park around the next block or two and walk, but if it's a store and the lot is full? Pass.
It depends on where you live, mostly. In my experience, people who live in suburbs don't like to walk very far from their parking spot, dense city dwellers don't mind at all. Either owning a personal vehicle is pointless because everything is within 15 minutes of walking or because owning a car in a packed city is expensive and difficult.
Americans do walk sometimes, but only if it's a special event raising money for charity, or on vacation to a theme park like Disney World or Europe. Otherwise, if you can't park your car literally within sight of your destination, "there's no parking!"
Walking through an American car suburb is nothing like walking through a European city. Racism is still racism, even if the target is Americans. Don't be a racist.
Thankfully, calling out dipshits for the dipshit things that they do is not racism. Houstonians have a choice, and they choose.... that kind of abomination.
It's racist because you're ascribing it as an innate characteristic of the American people. Plenty of people have to and do walk through Houston, as that video documents. The wealthy oil oligarchs just had the city built in a way that required car use.
Nah, I feel like you're really reaching. Walking is an innate characteristic of all humans. One of the defining characteristics, some say. That poor people walk in Houston is not a revelation. However, it is unconsciously making cars an instrument of punishment for the poor (forced to walk in a car-dominated hellscape), that is the dipshit behavior, and hell yes I'll judge Americans all day for being so cruel. It's anything but innate; you can't choose your skin color or sexual orientation, but you certainly can choose not to scream about removing a few street parking spots for an important bike lane.
The observation that Americans don't walk unless it's a special event comes from a lifetime of observing my fellow Americans. Hell, I watch my neighbors drive 4 blocks to the grocery store almost daily.
My ex spouse is like this drove me batshit. Going to where they worked that's a 15 minute walk I'd just walk and they'd drive, by the time they found parking I was already inside sitting. Sometimes parking was so far away they'd end up walking nearly 10 minutes anyways. Years of trying I could never convince them to just walk to work. I never understood it, still don't, why would they prefer that?
Wtf, so they drove just for like a bit over 1km? I used to work somewhere a bit over 2km away from my house and usually walked or biked there. I'd drive there when it's bad weather, and even then it took me longer than biking.
About 1.5km, literally on the same street as us it was a straight shot. On their way back they didn't have to deal with finding parking but they did deal with rush hour traffic so that straight shot was still longer than walking
The only smart excuse I could come up with would be that parking is cheaper at work than at home? 😅 My current job is only like 6km away and I still drive there usually, but mostly because street parking is like $4/hour during working hours, whereas I have free parking at work.
A fully acceptable reason for someone to become an ex, though I assume there were many other reasons as well.
I love driving but hate weird parking situations. So much that I won't even pull into a fuel station if I have to wait for a pump. In big parking lots I park way out at the end and walk instead of dodging all the cars and people up closer to the buildings.
I feel that.
Is 41 too young?
Am I just lazy??
I felt that in my 20s, so I'm gonna go with "not too young or lazy"
I'm 42, and don't own a car. Public transport or carpooling for me.
Just take the tram (if you got one)
Most places I’ve visited don’t have trams, but there’s sometimes a bus service.
My closest city HAS a bus route, but they are long past their peak of public transit. The bus routes are longer because funding cuts forced them to cut back on the number of busses they have. The drivers are always nice, but they skip stops when they fall behind schedule.
A 30 minute trip to and from the store in a car becomes a 4-5 hour slog on loud uncomfortable rattling busses where I have to sit next to some rando who sometimes smells like piss.
I long for easy public transit, I don't want to drive anymore.