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

[youngsoulrebel]

Chicago and Philadelphia are both really good cities to live without a car in; 24-hour public transportation, and everything one could possibly need actually within the city. I currently live in Ann Arbor, MI (fighting my way back to Chicago), and this is one of the worst public transportation systems I've encountered — especially when one considers that the city's entire economy and culture is directly tied to the University of Michigan, you can't get a bus between 10pm and 6am, Monday-Friday, and not on the weekends between 6pm and 8am.

Los Angeles public transit isn't as good as Chicago or Phila, but it's still no-where near as bad as Ann Arbor's -- the trains may stop at 2am(??? -- yep, before the bars close), but the major lines in LA proper and all through to Long Beach run 24-hours. It flabbergasts me that people claim you can't "survive" Los Angeles car-free, but I managed to.

[steorra]

Thanks for the information. It's good to know that Los Angeles isn't as bad transit-wise as I'd gotten the impression that it was.