I-Like-To-Bike

Thanks for your answer; your use of the term "car share" is what threw me. It makes me think of some sort of formal agreement/contract. Is it just another way of saying you borrow or rent a vehicle when you need it?

newenglandbike

You must be really frustrated by United States foreign policy of resource war, and by the exploitation and destruction of the livelihoods of entire societies in the name of big oil profits and the American abuse of automobiles.

The ultimate irony, of course, is that the way we live now dictates the way subsequent generations will be able to live. What often gets labeled as exercised 'freedom' now sinks ecological damage deep into the future of our children and theirs.

rockmom

We have a contract/agreement. But it just sets up an account so that we can reserve a car at a moment's notice and immediately go pick it up. We don't have it contracted for x hours per month or anything like that. We pay by the hour.

I-Like-To-Bike

And what makes you so special, riding a bicycle? Are you raising children while remaining car-free?
A post that sets the standard for self righteousness and OT PC babble instead of a logical response.

newenglandbike

Though this should be obvious or at least familiar- certainly anyone choosing to visit the Living Car Free forum- I'll explain it anyway. What makes me so special, or anyone living carfree for that matter, is that by not purchasing a car in the first place, I am not requiring the (roughly) 29 tons of solid waste and 1,207 million cubic yards of polluted air that go into the production of a single vehicle before it hits the showroom. What makes me, or any carfree person special, is that despite living in a country where there are more than two cars per household, we do not own one; and by not driving, we are not dumping 25 pounds of CO2 and volatile organic compounds (VOCs, benzene, toluene, xyline) into the air for every 15 miles we travel. Though we (USA) as a country produce half of the world's greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles, I and a lot of other folks are not to contributing to that, by not owning or using an automobile. Also, as such, we are minimizing our contribution to the fact that 100 million Americans live in areas where ground level ozone concentrations regularly exceed federal guidelines, or that 30,000 people per year die from respiratory illnesses (cancer, cardiovascular disease, etc) stemming from airborne toxins emitted by automobiles. Carfree people are not adding to the 100 million gallons of used motor oil dumped into the ground by car owners every year, each single gallon of which can pollute one million gallons of drinking water virtually forever.

Not having been killed by one yet, so far I (nor thankfully present company) am not contributing to the 40,000 violent fatalities every year involving automobiles, one fifth of which are pedestrians or bicyclists. I am not drawing from to the approximately $50 billion dollars a year spent on heart and lung disease perpetrated by overuse of the automobile. I do not require welfare from the federal government for the construction and maintenance of roads, in an amount two times what is actually collected in gasoline tax and road use fees, so that I can drive a car, to say nothing of the 2 trillion taxpayer dollars spent on wars in oil rich countries in recent decades. By bicycling or taking the train as a commuter, I do not require state government outlay of taxpayer dollars (to the tune of 20 percent of the state budget) for parking spaces and road maintenance. I do not demand the approximately $30 million dollars a mile for new roads that additional automobiles necessitate.

As for my post being 'babble', it clearly was a response to a previous post in this thread, and not one of yours. This one is just addressing your idiotic comment. Is it smug? **** yes, it is smug. But can you please explain your position? These are rhetorical questions, of course- because it's clear to anyone here that you can't explain anything. You have nothing to say- which must be difficult for you, given your propensity for injecting your bull**** into discussions anyway. If you are anything like your online persona in real life, you must have few, if any, friends. Evidence for this is borne out by the number of posts you seem to have made on Bike Forums. My advice to you would be to get a life, as they say. Being a full-time troll cannot be that rewarding. Come back when you have a point to make. Barring the unlikely event that you heed my advice, I-Like-To-Bike, please do everyone a favor, and **** off.

I-Like-To-Bike

1. Your smug self righteous, stuff about the goodness that emanates from someone like yourself who apparently gets by by grazing in the forest and receives no benefits from motorized transportation or the the existing road network is a real piece of work.

2. This attitude of moralistic high horsemanship simply because you use a bicycle to meet your immediate needs should be an embarrassment to any adult who wishes to promote bicycling as an activity for adults, or as a tool/enabler for "living a simpler life"; promoting bicycling as the activity of simple minded holy rollers with political bombast and puritanical zealotry will only convince/fool people with similar attitudes.

3. As far as explaining my position on the thread topic - already done. As far as your ad hominem arguments:
See https://www.bikeforums.net/showthread...1#post12869439
and
See https://www.bikeforums.net/showthread...1#post12869419

Six jours

Not half as frustrated as I am with pseudo-intellectual goofballs who think a dorm room level understanding of foreign policy and an autographed copy of An Inconvenient Truth qualifies them to lecture strangers on the internet.

Oh, and you need to look up the definition of "irony".

Six jours

Of course, for a true exercise in frustration, one can spend time trying to get members of the car-free forum to stop being smug and self-righteous...

JusticeZero

It's almost as hard as getting the dedicated car drivers to stop being smug and self-righteous!

Brontide

Just make the top 3 posters in the CF and VC forums duke it out in a PPV cage match.

KD5NRH

Or dishonest. They remind me of my old roommate when he "quit smoking." In reality, he just quit buying his own; he was bumming about a half pack a day from me and the same from his coworkers. (The funny part was that although he wasn't buying himself cigs, once we called him on it, he ended up buying a pack a day to pay back the people he was bumming from. The "car free" types always have some qualifier of how there's some sort of motor vehicle involved, they just don't pay for it.

robyr

Except, you know, the people who DON'T. I myself have no interest in using a car for anything but the most dire of situations.

Brontide

The idea that someone carfree must never ever use a motor vehicle is reductio ad absurdum. To me 'car free lifestyle' is one that rejects dependance on personal motor vehicle use for your day-to-day life. Bumming rides constantly seems like cheating, but not renting, taxi, or car share for things outside of the norm.

But heck, I'm not even 'car lite' yet ( would like to be someday ).

KD5NRH

No, it's not. "Sugar free" doesn't mean "we only put in enough sugar to make it palatable." "Smoke free" doesn't mean "we only let people smoke in here during breaks." "Car free" means no cars, period. No bumming rides, no catching the bus, no having somebody with a car haul stuff for you. I'd make an exception for ambulance rides, but that's about it.

Brontide

So the bus is out, but the subway is fine? Do I have to swim across the Atlantic to travel? How about delivery pizza? I'm just trying to figure out how far removed it has to be before it's ok.

palmersperry

Surely "no catching the bus" would in fact be "living bus free"? And I don't think we've got a board for that! :-D

What if they where hauling stuff for that journey already? Or how about when I went to visit a friend a few weekends back, am I no longer car free because I didn't tell him to p!ss off back home by himself when I discovered he'd come down to the station to pick me up?

cooker

Who made you "the decider"? "Sugar-free" applies to specific items, like a can of cola, not a lifestyle. And even there, it's based on ensuring sugar levels are below set criteria, not totally sugar free. There's no possible way to avoid motor vehicles in modern society: you might be required to share a cab with your boss or your kids might need to go to a school tournament, so all we can do is define the term pragmatically. Someone who doesn't own a car or regularily rely on someone else's car.

I-Like-To-Bike

Sounds reasonable to me. Seems that quite a few people who claim to be car free (not necessarily on LCF) either do depend on a significant other or other relative/friend/acquantance to provide motorized transportation whenever it is needed, and/or have a quite liberal concept of their own car free independence while relying on the generosity of those with less pure car free credentials.

Six jours

In that light, I'd like to suggest a new name for the sub-forum: "Smug, arrogant, and broke: Can I borrow your car, dude?"

KD5NRH

If you don't like the English language, take it up with Webster, etc.

Brontide

And there is no true Scotsman. Your post is also a great example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

Like it or not we often use distilled phrases that mean more complex things. "Calorie free" is not necessarily free from all calories and "Low impact lifestyle" does not mean that you swim and bike rather than run all the time.

cooker

Okay. From Merriam Webster online:

car-free (or carfree)
The word you've entered isn't in the dictionary. Click on a spelling suggestion below or try again using the search bar above.

carefree
carfare
carrefour
carryover
carry over
carafe

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/carfree

And from the FDA:

"Sugar Free": Less than 0.5 g sugars per RACC and per labeled serving (or for meals and main dishes, less than 0.5 g per labeled serving) (c)(1)

Contains no ingredient that is a sugar or generally understood to contain sugars except as noted below (*)

https://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceComp.../ucm064911.htm

Brontide

"Smoke free": So no camping, or BBQ? If you are reading it literally, that's what it means. Of course everyone know what you mean is no smoking tobacco, pot, or similar products. Of course you can chew tobacco otherwise you would have said tobacco free and then smoking pot or other substances would have been ok.
"Drug free": Well then, no sedation for your operation. What's that, you really meant no illicit drugs without a prescription?

Catch phrases are often too simplistic to convey the full extent of the meaning directly and can have many, often competing, meaning depending on who you talk to.

I'm really curious about your "no bus" and ambulance under protest way of thinking. How do you justify that under your "car free" theory? If you are really going to that extreme how would you justify receiving mail, UPS, or FedEX deliveries or traveling distances by bus, train, or airplane?

KD5NRH

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dict...ritish/free_14
"Without." Not "with just a little bit of." Or do you think somebody holding their phone to their ear with two fingers is using it "hands-free?"

Fizzaly

I'm car free just barely over 5 years now, and have a 7 year old son, I could probably have done it the first two years it would have been a pain but doable, now it's actually pretty easy. I only take public transit once or twice a month, my son throughout winter takes bus to and from school on nicer days he rides his bike. I chose where I live carefully to make my carfree life even easier, I don't live in the "sticks" and Boise itself isn't a huge city, and have gotten to the point where everything I need on a weekly basis is three miles which seems to be the sweet spot for my kids riding distance. Two of my friends are carfree and have a 5month old baby, I don't know exactly how they do it but they seem to manage just fine, I do remember that they took a cab home from the hospital I don't think mama was so ready to jump on a bike three days after giving birth. So I'm wondering how many more pages you guys are going to bicker for?