this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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I know plenty people who don't have a driving license, let alone a car. Curiously enough they all go to work.
I have managed for ages without a car. Usually hear "but that only works in big cities". I have never lived in a city. Spent all my life in various sized towns. Yes the bus route is shit, no I don't use it. Its faster to cycle to the next town over than it is to take the bus or drive and locking up a bike is free.
You must not live in the US. I don't really use my car these days because I can take the train into work and live close enough to the town center that I can bike there. But to get to the next town over? I have an ebike, and there's a well-kept bike path to the next town over (a very uncommon thing in rural US) and it is still significantly longer to bike than it is to take a car to the next town over. Like, 3-4x longer to bike than drive, even if I'm going 15+ mph on the bike.
A bike going 15mph will easily overtake a line of cars doing 0. But yeah I live in the UK
that explains it. in America it's way way worse to go without a car. suburban sprawl is literally the devil. look at some of it on google maps and then see if you can bike there
Things are different here in the US. In a city, cars get lined up and go 0mph. In more rural areas (even only an hour out of a city) it's a lot less likely to have traffic, so cars end up averaging 25-30mph if not more. Especially given that there are usually multiple miles (12 in my case) of road between towns, the cars end up being quite a bit faster unfortunately. Riding a bike will usually 2-5x the time it takes to get anywhere within a 15 mile radius. And because of how big the US is, in rural a 15 mile radius can get me pretty much one town over, two if I'm lucky. I'm not even in that rural a place, only an hour drive from a major city.