Hi - good resources on car-free living? Good places to live car-free?

[steorra]

Hi. I just joined, but it seems like it's up to me to make the first post. I am wondering if anyone can point me to good resources on living car-free, and how to make that work well in a society that's quite car-dependent, as most of North America is.

Also, I would be interested to know about cities that are particularly good for living car-free. I have lived in three cities in adulthood - Vancouver, BC, Canada; Calgary, Alberta, Canada; and Columbus, Ohio, USA. My experience of them is that Vancouver has good public transit and is fairly easy to live car-free in; Columbus has barely adequate public transit, and it's been awkward but possible to live car-free in it; and Calgary is somewhere in between.

Comments

[damerell]

By externalising costs on others, I am referring to the way that some activities impose costs on people who aren't doing the activity. I don't drive, but I can still be killed by a car, be injured by one, suffer respiratory disease (and I do), find local shops and facilities replaced by vast out-of-town retail monoliths, have half the country's railway network disassembled in the 1960s, find that bus services are a bad joke...

An activity that externalises costs looks more attractive than it should. If drivers bore the full cost of driving - and not-drivers could live somewhere car-free, without the danger and inconvenience - many fewer people would drive. As it is, we get to live in a world blighted by the damn things whether we use them or not.

I certainly mean that I don't accept lifts. Since I've never had a licence, resolving not to drive myself would not be much of a decision. :-)

The only private motor vehicle I've been in in the last three years was a removal van when I was moving house.