Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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You can call literally call anyone you know we all have cars here. If you don't know anyone at all you can taxi or Uber. In smaller towns you may even be able to call the police non emergency number and get help from a community officer type employee who has a car and does minor non police related stuff. Many many many things would have to fail before you need to ask a stranger and even in that case you would be hard pressed to not find help within the first couple people you ask.
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.
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.
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.
No, it isn't underappreciated. It is severely overappreciated -- i.e., it's a bullshit excuse that's been debunked over and over again.
FYI, misinformation and bad-faith rhetoric, including whataboutism, is uncivil and violates rule 1 of this community.
I mean, yeah? That's the OP's point? That too much for North America consists of poorly-designed car-centric urban planning.
not everyone wants to live in cities
Ok? And?
and they will use cars to get to the city to get things from store that are not available locally, like home depots and wall arts.
Ok? And the relevance of that small minority to either the principles of good urban design, or to the story in the OP is?
a logical reason why someone would take a car to a supermarket in a city
There are lots of logical reasons why someone would take a car to a supermarket in a city. Even in a well-designed city many people will choose to do it.
The lady in this story got stranded when her car broke down after she drove it to the store. That should not happen. She should have alternative options.
I'm not sure what you mean. I didn't hold out Australia as some bastion of urbanism. I simply reinforced OP's point that North America is bad.
Australia is also terrible at this. It just wasn't relevant to mention.
Your car will not break down, if you just walk to the grocery store.
That's not an option for people who live in ~~good~~ food deserts.
Just fyi you got autocorrected (I swear, autocorrect feels like it's more and more often these days changing from one correct word to a different word that's grammatically correct but not what I wanted to say) from "food" to "good".
Anyway, django's point was the same as OP's: that car-dependent urban design is bad for people. Food deserts are a feature of car dependency. They're not a necessary feature (as in, it is possible to have car-dependent cities that don't also have food desert), but by definition a 15-minute city, the thing this Community exists to advocate for, cannot be a food desert. A well-planned city makes it possible to get to a grocery store within a 15 minute walk or ride.
And it is pretty sad, that people have to live like this. It takes me 10 minutes to walk to the store, 2 minutes by bike, or one bus stop.
There can't be food deserts in 15 minute cities.
Most people don't live in those
yeah, that's the problem
And pretty sad, to repeat the wording of the original post.