Living Car Free - best places to live car free

Austin, TX is OK... expect to take 2-3 hours to hop buses to get across town, but you can plan routes on Capitol Metro's website. All the buses have racks in the front so you can stuff your bike there (preferably locking it), hop the bus, then yank your velo off and be on your way. A good number of people live here car-less.

However it sucks when you have to leave Austin for a job or something else. Live in Austin and work at Dell, you pretty much have to buy a car [1].

[1]: One compromise is a motorcycle. Texas is one of the best parts of the US for motorcycles due to sunny weather. The bad thing... you always have to watch out for the idiots in the Suburbans watching movies on their video iPods. [2]

[2]: Yes... I pass people who are holding a video iPod atop their steering wheel and attempting to drive, watching movies with the white earbuds in their ears.

The city I'll say isn't very internationally known (heck, it's not even known throughout Canada) but it's St. Catharines, Ontario (http://www.st.catharines.com/index.asp). Toronto is directly across the lake from us, about an hours drive by car or a half an hour to Buffalo also by car.

Population is about 135,000, and in a span of a couple years, bikes have more than tripled in use here. On an average day, I'll see about 100 different people going to work/school by my house on bikes.
We have a pretty mild winter, which makes it nice to bike throughout the winter months (even though we still do get snow).

I can get from the North-end of the city (where I live) to the south-end in 10-15 minutes during peak traffic hours.
Many nice trails here and any roads that are being redone are having bike lanes put in. Could still do with more here though.

I've lived in Boston without a car for 6 years, and I haven't missed it at all. The reason for this has more to do with Boston's very small size and bearable public transit system than its cycling infrastructure. I cycle to work almost every day, and I always see lots of other cyclists out and about, even in the winter, but to be perfectly honest, I feel like we're all kind of crazy. The drivers are arseholes, the roads are ridden with potholes, and there are a lot of intersections that were designed by people who must not have ever considered that someone on a bicycle might one day transit through them.


I think there are actually two questions to answer:
1. What places are good to live in without a car?
2. What places are the best for people who use a bicycle as their chief form of transport?

mg