this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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I don't own a car anymore and haven't for two years now. I walk everywhere. Around 10 miles most days through the countryside and coast from town to town.
Healthiest I've ever been, I can eat what I want a lot of the time too. I've got basically no body fat and I have a ridiculous amount of energy. I feel constantly refreshed too, before I was lethargic and overweight.
I live in the UK however in a very pedestrian orientated location where I can do this without issue. Or get a bus or train if needed. I have absolutely no idea how it would be possible in a rural area or a car centric city. I guess it wouldn't be, and the people in charge are not willing to change.
I live in a car-centric city, and am relatively civically engaged. Speaking from personal experience, for most of the people in charge, it's not that they're unwilling to change; it's that they're so indoctrinated from having grown up in American car-centricity that they don't understand the problem or the alternatives enough to realize that there's anything to change to. They're like the people in this thread, who think "infrastructure" means things like adding EV chargers to suburban-sprawl parking lots or trying to get public transit to serve neighborhoods of single-family houses. They have no comprehension of the scope of the problem, which is that the Suburban Experiment is a failure and that the geometry of low-density, car-centric development makes it unsustainable, unaffordable, and unhealthy, regardless of how you power the cars.
Even when they support things like transit-oriented development or abolishing minimum parking requirements, they tend to think it's the exception to be implemented in certain areas instead of realizing that it needs to be the default way we do things now.