- Ability to get a vehicle on-demand (say within 5-10 minutes) 24/7/365, anywhere in Upstate NY, from cities to boonies.
- That vehicle would need to allow me to transport large goods, bulky goods (to an extent), lumber <6', flammable solvents
- also needs to accomodate 2 medium dogs
- I'd need dedicated bike lanes to the nearby shops and groceries before I could even attempt to use that as an option. There's stores only a few miles from me but the roads to get there are treacherous
There's more but those are the bare minimums, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
I live in a dense city. I have a grocery store next door. I have car sharing cars in my street I can rent. This is feasible, because we're so many people within a few minutes walk. In a suburb this is impossible. Would be far too few people per shop or car.
You're kinda part of the problem talked about in an other comment here: you can't even visualize how things could be different. Basically you could only give up your car if you could live exactly as before..
But why can't your lumber get delivered? Do you need a car with huge dimensions just for the off chance you one time the next five years need to carry something big? Why not then rent something for the occasion?
Why do you constantly need to drive your dogs? Again, the reason is probably rooted in a car centric society. The solution isn't to fix all your needs, just without owning a car. The solution would be to make you able to do your hobbies and live your life without the gigantic sprawl.
That said, I currently find myself in a suburb, and bicycling is actually okay. I can bike out of my neighborhood to reach the main streets, and there are actually pretty decent bike commuting paths once I reach them. If you're wanting to haul things like pets and lumber, recent cargo e-bikes can haul a lot. They're expensive, but they exist if that's a priority for you. I think bicycles can be a pretty decent option for people in the suburbs, at least sometimes. Plus, bikes are just fun!
That said, using my car less is a big goal for me, so I sometimes take the less convenient option. My longterm goal is to find a way to leave the suburbs and live in a city, though, so I can be much less card-dependent.
Recently there's been a surge of 5-over-1 apartment complexes replacing old businesses and houses along my suburb's main road. Great, more dense housing, that's good. The main road has painted bike lanes in the middle of town, and dedicated multi-use paths further out in each direction. For some of these complexes, they had to tear up the road and sidewalk to add safe entrances. Not only did they NOT add more multi-use paths, but they actually approved the buildings to be closer to the road than ordinances typically allow, making a multi-use path unlikely to ever be put in.
A subway could be dug under everything, but the $$$ are too high. A gondola system could potentially go between houses and so serve a few cul-de-sacs before coming out at a suburban station - this looks like the lowest cost answer, but it still isn't cheap.
And many suburbs in the USA are actually technically their own towns, some older, some younger, and you can walk around just fine if you plan a bit and want to.
After all, if you live in a town of 10k people almost by definition you can walk everywhere that is available.
This is a great way to put it. Quite often these arguments against cars feel completely blind to reality. We've built our cities and culture around having cars, we can't easily change that. Starting with some small regulations, like having bike lanes everywhere, would go a long ways. I would love to not pay for a second car, and gas, and insurance, but where I leave, it's just not reasonable.
Then the busses can stay on the straight main roads while all the cars go get lost in the culled sacs, while people walking or on bike have direct paths.
Some studies show people will walk 3/4 of a mile, which is about 15 minutes. That's a "circle" that is 1.5 miles across, which is a an area of about 1132 acres (Ignore that straight roads don't have circles; pretend the "extra" area is support stuff, shops, whatever). 1132 acres of single family housing is 13,000 houses if "close", upwards of 20,000 units if we go to townhomes/rowhouses.
13k dwelling units all within a 3/4 mile walk from the edge; that should support at least one bus.
Most sidewalks you see are set back from the road already, leaving a grass median for snow collection, etc. You can put a bike path in that area, if anyone cares.
And every time I've touristed in Europe it's been great wandering around without a car (the times I've driven the backcountry with a car have been fun, too).
But all the people I've worked with when in Europe have a car (sure, it might be small) and drive when it makes sense, which is often.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-17/a-pew-sur...
Well, one could make an on-demand share taxi/microbus service that serves between those cul-de-sacs and the closest avenue that is served by full size fixed-route scheduled buses.
You are basically saying, "Why don't you just radically change your lifestyle?" E.g. I need to drive my dogs and partner to my parent's place (which is only across town) once a week for dinner. This is an activity all of us really enjoy. Despite being only a few miles away, the route is not safely walkable/bikeable. Which means: car, either mine or a rideshare. Rideshare service sucks here (because almost everyone drives). Huge chicken and egg problem.
Some of my hobbies involve building stuff. I can and have had wood delivered. It's an $80 charge (or more) for each delivery. That's a huge dent, and means I have to plan every material I need.
I go camping a few times a year. That would be outright impossible without a dedicated vehicle. I could rent, but again, huge cost.
But my most vital hobby revolves around spinning fire props, which involves numerous bulky large objects, heavy fuel dunks, and flammable fuel.
So yeah, pretty much all my hobbies and things I need to do for mental health revolve around car access. But that's kind of what happens when you spend your whole life in an ultra car centric suburb. I can't imagine anything else because I'd have to terraform all of suburban upstate NY to be more like Europe, and that's not happening (not that I don't want to). This is why the car debate is obnoxious: city folks with limited experience are telling folks with totally different lifestyles "have you considered... not?" and it's incredibly patronizing. I know that's not your intent, but that's how it's usually interpreted.
My one hope is for affordable FSD on-demand ride share with a variety of vehicles. Otherwise having a car (two actually) is a mandatory sunk cost for me.
Walking with the dogs the approx 400' to the nearest cul-de-sac is a harrowing affair. Bike riding is so intimidating that my bike hasn't even gone outside in months. Yeah people ride on it but it's way outside my comfort zone.
Pretty much all of suburbia needs to be magically terraformed, for any of these things to be feasible.
> If you're wanting to haul things like pets and lumber, recent cargo e-bikes can haul a lot.
I don't think you realize how big a 3/4 x 48 x 96 is. I can't even fit it in my Forester without ripping it lengthwise and driving with the hatch propped.
The main commercial thoroughfare which runs north-south and would be the ideal place for one since it has Walmart, Aldi, Depot, pizza places, etc, doesn't even have a sidewalk. That's how ass-backward this area is designed.
I need to import this whole place into SimCity, bulldoze and redo huge swaths of it.
I don't even think if the entire town got together and said "we want a sidewalk on the main drag with Walmart so carless folks don't have to contend with walking on the shoulder with cars doing 55 in a 45" it would go anywhere, cause there's nowhere to even put that without some huge eminent domain grab.
It's not just a political or environmental problem, it's purely a "where does this infra even go" situation.
One thing people don't realize is many US lanes are twelve feet wide, which is much wider than needed for slower traffic (in fact, one of the best ways to slow traffic down is to narrow the lane). An 18-wheeler is 8.5 feet wide, so even a 10 foot lane offers excess room.
If a stroad is three lanes each way, and they're 12 feet each, that's 12 feet that can be recovered simply by reducing lane width, and that doesn't even involve any sidewalk rearrangements.
But bike infra doesn't have to even follow the car infra, you can put a nice bike lane setup one block over from the stroad (more properly the arterial or collector). Nobody really wants to bike next to a bunch of cars anyway.
It does take a bit of will and time, but it's a great thing to grumble about at the council meetings; around here all new developments have to have a sidewalk plan (it's not required to be "both sides" but most do that anyway) and connect to the bike paths. They even had a fundraiser a few years ago to raise money to make a connector path, which is quite nice; every business had a little "bike path" jar and it got done.