cooker

Presumably if you are able to get around and do everything you need to do without a car the rest of the time, then getting to the car rental place when you rarely want to rent one should no big deal; and if you can't get to the car rental place without a car, then you probably can't live without a car.

However I noticed a TV ad for a car rental place in Barrie Ontario the other day, and they bragged that they had "the largest shuttle zone in the region" while showing a map, and it looked like they would drive quite a way to pick you up.

McBTC

It all depends on where you want or need to go and how bad you want to get there. It's always been that way--e.g., rafts, steamboats, horses, stage coaches, trains, planes, automobiles... walking. For anyone with options who wants to LCF, obviously that is where he or she must very badly want and need to go... Does that entail having to forego various activities in life? Sure but it's their choice; but, a lot of people live there too and not by desire and would love the opportunity to not LCF. They don't have a choice: that's their life.

cooker

You forgot scooters, skateboards and bikes, but otherwise yes. People live car-free because they want to or they have to, like everything else.

tandempower

I think you just have personal issues with me and the way I think and write. I was just reflecting on what I read about in your posts about your neighbor, the issues that affect his choices in a general way, i.e. the same way that anyone making similar choices would be effected. Maybe what seems like social/economic commentary is that I think about things in general terms and I don't take for granted aspects of life that I know can be different and change. You seem to always be arguing in favor of majoritarian will, norms, etc. so I think you are just a defensive conformist who gets upset at anyone who doesn't mindlessly accept everything the way it is.

Machka 

You're assuming again ....


And I have to agree with Mobile 155.

"I have to ask this. What is it about how you think that turns everything into a social or economic commentary? What does small talk look like in your life?" Are you incapable of just simply having a conversation? Occasionally, you almost do manage to converse normally ... but then it goes down the social/economic tubes.

Also, his neighbour did try ... he actually made an attempt ... he did something. It didn't work out for him, and sometimes that happens, but he didn't just sit around talking about it. He did it.

McBTC

...sailboat, rickshaw, litter, swimming, kayak/canoe/paddleboard, rowboat, golf cart, funicular (elevator), blimp, hot air balloon... to demonize a single form of transportation as a foil to push an ideologically-motivated agenda under the rubric of cycling in the Bike Forums is being deceptive.

tandempower

It's not that I can't see the difference. It's that I see them as different ways of managing sharing. Indeed, the profit motive of the rental business drives up the prices in this case, though in some cases it goes the other way. Amazon, for example, used to sell used books for pennies plus a shipping fee, which was like interlibrary lending but Amazon is obviously a business, not a library.

Anyway, the point is not to get hung up on statuses, identities, and definitions. A tool rental business is like a tool library, but depending on how the rentals are priced, it can encourage or discourage buying over renting. A car rental company does both by offering low daily rates to people who already have car insurance, but charging an arm and a leg to people who don't. In that way, it's like a car library that rewards people for owning and insuring a car outside the 'library.'

I'm sorry it makes you uncomfortable to think in these kinds of fluid terms, but I learned to do it as part of my education, and I find it very helpful for making sense of why/how things work the way that they do; as well as how they could work if people decided to modify them to suit other goals.

tandempower

The pictures represent a cultural ethos. People learn and experience culture differently based on their life experiences and histories, so the only way to know for sure what people think and feel is to talk to them; and even then people are not always honest about their true feelings. I have smoked in the past, so I can be honest about what is appealing about it, even though I am very glad to be free of the addiction now. I understand that some people may not resonate with the cultural ethos of smoking at all, while some people may claim not to because they don't want to admit it, while still others will deny that it's there because they want to deny every negative aspect of culture in order to pretend like it doesn't exist.

What is it you're doing? Are you denying the allure of smoking because it bothers you to acknowledge that it exists? Do you sincerely believe that people who smoke today don't feel empowered in some way by doing so? Or are you just playing devil's advocate because you don't like me and want to contradict anything and everything I say for the sake of being contrary?

cooker

All I can say is Anita Ekberg was smoking hot.

tandempower

I feel more empowered by forgiveness than the thought that I've never engaged in certain vices, but I can't say more about that without getting into religion so I'll leave it at that.

tandempower

You may have an interest in having everyone 'converse normally' in a certain way, but I don't share your values. I don't even think in terms of 'normal conversation.' I simply read and write in English. If I don't understand what someone means and I want to, I ask. If I don't like their writing style, I can skip reading their post and read something else. I don't get why some of you are so bent on controlling me or others in general, the way we think and write. It's like you're on this total mind/cultural-control trip.

I-Like-To-Bike

Couldn't agree more!

Mobile 155

It is your process that makes me wonder. You make statements about things you have no evidence of and conclusions based on those statements. You seem to be saying that A: My neighbor is a human. B: Humans always make choices based on Social or economic pressure. C: Therefore my Neighbor gave up being car free for social or economic reasons. If one of those statements can be proven to be untrue then your statement becomes untrue. All that needs to be done is find a human that makes decisions based on any other reason and your critical reasoning falls apart. Here is another example. A. Mobile is a conformist. B. Conformists live a less sustainable lifestyle and bigger carbon footprint than non conformists. C. TP is a non conformist therefore he has a lower carbon footprint than Mobile. Do you think maybe this last statement can be false if you think about it critically?

tandempower

You're making a classical sociological mistake. I noticed this mistake first when reading Emile Durkheim's books on suicide, where he said something like that it was possible to find the suicide rate of a given population and then extrapolate that each individual of that population has a tendency to commit suicide that is the inverse of the suicide rate. E.g. so if France would have a suicide rate of 1/1,000,000 and Germany had one that's 2/1,000,000 then he would say each French person has half the suicide propensity of each German. In reality, you can't extrapolate in this way between general observations and particular individuals. Instead, there are things that are general that somewhat affect individuals, but the specifics depend on the particularities of each individual individually, and you can't scrutinize people at the individual level enough, except yourself of course, if you are really honest with yourself about things. You can, however, sort of see how culture works in a general way and see how individuals are exposed to cultural factors even though they have individual abilities to resist instead of going with the flow.

Exceptions only prove that rules aren't 100% absolute. They don't prove that the rule is 0% valid.

Yes, they are false because they are based on categorizing instead of on causative logic. A more logical statement would be that someone might choose to drive out of conformism and that by driving they burn more CO2 than if they rode a bike for transportation. So right there you have a specific example of how non-conformity can help someone reduce their carbon footprint. But of course if you buy a helicopter and fly it everywhere because you're a non-conformist, then that's going to increase your carbon footprint, so that's also non-conformity.

So instead of trying to generalize about categories in absolute ways, I would say try to think in terms of general aspects of culture and how they influence specific chains of causation. Each chain of causation is unique, but they are all products of the same general cultural influences interacting and playing out in different ways. It's sort of like the way each sunset is unique, but each is also the product of the same astronomical and geological/atmospheric factors interacting to form the specific sky pattern of that day.

Walter S

"Bike friendly" is a matter of degrees. I find my area about as bike friendly as I could reasonably expect and then it keeps getting better. Over my lifetime it's night and day.

Walter S

I make a phone call and schedule the rental. The car is delivered to my home. I get in, turn the ignition, drive.

Walter S

And many people are real good at projecting meaning that as you say is not discussed but implied by your supposedly wise and insightful interpretation

Mobile 155

You are doing it again. You are taking a simple example and pontificating things you have no evidence of. Knowing my neighbor and how he lives his life I know more about his motivation that you could ever know. He has been working towards a simpler life, lower carbon footprint, more self satisfactory life ever since I first met him. He Actually does some of the things you only talk about and he gave doing without a car a shot. No where in that reporting is there any room for social or economic term paper on why you think he may have reverted to driving. It doesn't fit with the evidence so you are as my lawyer friends would say, you are assuming facts not in evidence.

And to top it off you have tried to change the discussion to how others should view your assertion. You cannot continuously avoid the idea that you have no clue why someone would make the decision they make. I say he gave it a good shot, that he had adequate resources to make the decision. He gave his car away so it was not an economic hardship. He tends to be a loaner so it is no a social pressure thing. He tends to be a rather honest man so I have to believe him when he said he simply didn't want to trouble others for a ride.

I believe his story way more than I can accept your evidence of things that have nothing to do with his story. I cannot understand why you continually try to justify you social, political, economic dogma as being relevant to almost all of our discussions. Sometimes a flat tire is just a flat tire.

Walter S

It works for some people and not for others. Having the right circumstances is important. And "right" varies by the individual. The area they live, their family, reasons for being car free, etc. As things go for me, I find the challenges of being car free to result in practices that are self feeding and keeping me strong and happy with the situation. But only to a point. If I lived in a pretty rural area then I would get at least a car and maybe a truck. There's a lot to be said for hauling stuff including when you're saving on otherwise-delivery charges. You may need to haul your own trash etc. too. Or pickup your your riding mower after maintenance at the shop. Some these problems are issues in the city at times too but less so in my experience.

Mobile 155

That I understand. Knowing all he has done to even make the attempt was impressive to me. Of most of the people I know he was the one I would have thought was the best prepared to go car free. I guess I simply didn't take into account how important some of his other desires were, the DYI stuff and the gardening.

jon c. 

As I said, the cultural ethos you represented was from the middle of the last century. Culture changes over time and I don't believe the culture in the US today has a remotely similar view of smoking.

jon c. 

This part has really been resonating with me. He sounds like a busy sort and that always means a lot of errands arise to service the needs of all the projects. I can easily see how one can grossly underestimate what a time killer those errands really are. That of course is greatly compounded if the errands take longer, become harder to combine, and require more effort. So he may have quickly realized he just hadn't sufficiently accounted for this and it was negatively impacting the rest of his life to a large degree. He thought he was making one change and hadn't properly accounted for all the other changes that would ultimately entail.

Rje58

I really wanted to agree with you, but you must be making some kind of classic logical error! Tandempower will likely be along to explain the error of your ways, and why he is way smarter than either one of us.

Machka 

Machka 

Agreed ... even 10 or 12 years ago, a teenager I knew made the comment that only old people smoke. I thought that was interesting ... that the perception among the younger generation is that smoking is not cool.