Originally Posted by
Robert Foster
I understand and car light makes sense if you can live where you can reach the places you need to get to without having to drive 30 miles. Now that is an advantage some cities have that is rare in Southern California. It is that lack of infrastructure that makes Southern California the Car culture capital of the world. The comedians from other parts of the country always make a joke of how necessary we have made cars here.
I will also agree with the post that owning things are a trap.
One of the strange things about living where I do is the lack of places to lock your bike if you do decide to use one instead of driving. I have a Trek 800 I got at a garage sale that I use if I am going somewhere that I can’t lock the bike to anything. I never leave my road bike where I can’t see it so it doesn’t go shopping. But still I can do my grocery shopping if I go by myself with my Revive and a trailer. The Store I shop at has a rack bolted to the concrete. I can bring home a weeks worth of groceries and I can go to the post office or the mall and I don’t need my car. That is one of the reasons my bike may have more miles this year.
This is not to pick on you again Robert because I respect where you are coming from.
A lot of people say that SoCal is uninhabitable by the car-free. I realize that this is true in some places but I lived in San Diego car-free for about a year and it was great. Again, I am not in your situation so I get it when some people say its hard down there. San Diego had pretty decent mass transit IMHO, or at least as good as we have it here in Sacramento. Also, the weather is much much better almost year round so biking, even very late at night in the winter is pretty comfortable.
I am glad that you own your own home and were able to climb the ladder before the market tank! However, I dont think that that is the norm for most people who "buy" a home. The topic came up because we were talking about the advantages to being car-free when you can easily move around closer to work when that happens to change. Most of people, I admit I do not know the statistic, do not "own" their homes. The bank does. I dont see how that is all that different from living in an apartment. Yes there is the potential for your home to be an investment so that you are not necessarily "throwing away" your money away on rent. However, all investments come with risk, and a lot of people are starting to realize that home investment is not as safe as we have all been lead to believe. In a way then, renting is an investment because a renter takes no risk and there is no upkeep or repairs to pay for. All depends on your perspective.
I think that a lot of the difference in opinion can attributed to a generation gap.