I haven’t even acquired a bicycle; don’t need one.

So yes, it’s do-able in the UK with very little lifestyle angst. But you need to live in the right place, and these are few and far between.

By the way, the “folding bike plus National Express coach” combination is a very cheap (though not especially pleasant) way of getting round the UK.

Now that I live in the ‘burbs, I cannot do without my car. Things are just too spread out, and public transit is not of good quality. In San Francisco I could walk to the store, take a bus to the library, etc. Here I can’t unless I want to spend all day on busses.

A couple of things that work against the car-free life, in much of the US at least, have only been tangentially touched upon: time and safety. Given that many Americans work far more than 40 hours in a week, many of us love our cars because getting from here to there is so much quicker. Not to mention that if one can only go to market, go to the library, run all those errands on a Saturday, you can see where the idea of spending a whole Saturday on a bike or bus, toting bags and books and parcels, is a giant pain in the butt.

Second – especially for women – there is the safety factor. A lot of us women do not feel safe waiting for a bus alone at night, especially in a dodgy area. We can’t always go out with partners or friends, and we feel like mooches always trying to bum rides. A lot of women just feel safer driving if we have to be alone at night.

So living without a car is really much more do-able in dense areas with low crime.

hmm… did you factor in the purchase cost of the car, and all the maintenance, etc?

This thread seems to be a lot about people’s preferences; liking cars, or not liking them. i think that’s beside the point; here in the US we have built a society that practically requires you to own a car. and it has not been a product of the “free-market” but in fact was achieved through massive public spending and building and zoning regulations.

this is not to say that the market is not there for this kind of living. in fact, i live this way, (for the most part), my wife and i live in a single detached home, and share a car. i think there is a lot to be said for a balanced, multi-modal transport system that provides lots of different options for getting around, and different types of house (dense vs sprawl, apartment vs home, etc).

the current pattern of building more, and wider freeways further and further out is clearly not sustainable.

That boils down to an hourish a day saved, just on commuting, never mind other things (shopping is sure is ton easier!).

Now, in NYC, London, etc., you’ll save nothing by having a car. So part of this depends on where you live. But little of the US has that kind of density.

If you have a child in a pram (or young children who can’t walk as fast as adults), though, I could see the appeal of a car even in Tokyo. I saw parents lugging prams up and down the stairs in stations, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. Also, for families taking longer-distance trips, even with the cost of gasoline and tolls, a car for four people is less expensive than the cost of four train tickets (not so for a single or even a couple).

Mass transit is wonderful, and critical for the creation of exciting, livable cities. And bicycles are fabulous. (In Amsterdam, bicycles, too, are family social spaces—look up the amazing “bakfiets” for more on this.) But people love cars for a reason. We just need to get them running on electricity or fuel cells, and make them expensive enough that people use mass transit and bikes too to reduce sprawl. It’s all part of the mix.

I lived in London for two years and went everywhere by bike; although it was not as pleasant as Berlin, it was perfectly safe. I live in Syracuse, which has lousy mass trans, and ride my bike everywhere including in winter. I do not own a car. When I discuss this last fact with folks they all insist that 1) it’s insane 2) they need their cars. So, of couse it is not “true” that American’s “need” their cars, yet when push comes to shove they generally insist that they do.

Nah, that’s really not true—people can and do live without cars in big cities like New York and Chicago that have good mass transit systems. Chicago is also a very bikeable city when the weather is decent (and that is how we usually get around there when visiting). In fact, I’d much rather bike in Chicago than most European cities I’ve visited—the roads are wider, the traffic is less dense, the drivers are not as crazy, and there’s a great north-south bike-path system along the lake. From what I’ve seen, I wouldn’t rely on a bike for transport in London or Paris the way I would in Chicago.

I’ve lived carless for years in Cambridge, MA and Berkeley, CA; for months in Vichy, Madrid and Segovia; for long enough to buy groceries in several countries in northern Europe. I’ve lived as the nondriver in a one-car family in Providence, RI and Skokie, IL. But Israel (early 1990s) was far and away the easiest. Part of it is that the national bus line has so much patriotic resonance for Israelis (their Pony Express under the British Mandate, a melting pot for new immigrants, and since 1996 a notorious target) that they don’t grudge it funding, but mostly it’s just urban planning. Build a city so everyone who doesn’t drive on the sabbath can cope, and you’ll find you can cope without a car there the rest of the week.

As to people choosing to drive cars; if you’re an American the idea, or so my car driving friends tell me, is that you have no choice. Cars are a necessity. Cleaner personal motorized transportation sounds fine but where are these mythical beasts?

People in cars move are self-enclosed and isolated they do not “see” the things that cyclists see. One has a more direct connection with one’s city or countryside moving along unprotected at 20 mph than hermetically sealed in tons of metal, glass, and whatnot at fourty, fifty, or whatever. It is easy to ignore the decay and crime when the radio blares and the cell phone rings. Plus and also, if you drive be honest with yourself and keep a record of all the laws you break in the course of one day, speeding, rolling stops and so forth. Pedestrian and cycling unfriendly cities are just those in which motorists assume that the rules of the road apply to others.

For those of you who wish to get the wilderness, how wild can it be or will it remain if you get there in a car?