City Life

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All topics urbanism and city related, from urban planning to public transit to municipal interest stuff. Both automobile and FuckCars inclusive.

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Anyone else car-free? (beehaw.org)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm coming up on about 6 months of car-free life in Seattle. It's certainly been challenging at times, and it's only possible at all because I work from home, but I'm making it work. I'm curious if anyone else is trying to do the same thing. There are a ton of anti-car communities online, but very few people seem to actually go car-free as, like, an ideological thing

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I lived for 5 years car-free in Seattle. I'm still car-free, but I'm currently doing a bit of traveling so no longer in Seattle (although I may ultimately end up back there).

It's definitely challenging. I wish there was more train coverage and greater frequency in general of transit service in Seattle. Back when I first moved, car shares were plentiful which made it really easy to hop in a car if I really needed to — maybe 5 to 10 times a year — but that whole thing mostly fell apart. When I left a few months ago, Gig seemed to be doing pretty well.

I lived for 35 years in Knoxville, Tennessee, and it would have been near impossible there. Your world gets very small when you go car-free, and that's a problem in places where everything is spread out assuming everyone will have a car and can quickly traverse the miles between places you might want to be. There's a downtown in Knoxville, but until the last 10 years, almost no one lived there. There's a lot more housing now, but basic amenities like a grocery store and drug store are, so far as I'm aware, still missing. Downtown Knoxville is less a place to live and more a theme park.

I was sad to hear the only full-service grocery store in downtown Seattle closed during the pandemic, but there are still plenty of neighborhoods that are totally livable car-free. Could be better, but it could certainly be worse.