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Anyone else car-free?

I'm coming up on about 6 months of car-free life in Seattle. It's certainly been challenging at times, and it's only possible at all because I work from home, but I'm making it work. I'm curious if anyone else is trying to do the same thing. There are a ton of anti-car communities online, but very few people seem to actually go car-free as, like, an ideological thing

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  • I'm in Nanaimo BC and I live more or less car free. I own a car but I just put storage insurance on it and don't drive it unless I absolutely need to. Otherwise I use my ebike to get around town. This works because we have some good multi-use paths that can take me from one end of town to the other and I don't have to mix with traffic often.

  • I've been car free since my catalytic converter got stolen in 2020. Didn't feel like replacing it since I didn't drive much anyway and I donated the rest of the car. I'm not fully free though because my gf has a car and we live together. So on trips to the store and stuff I still benefit from a car

  • Car-free since a year. Couldn't be happier. Had once to carry a computer case in a bus, but that was a direct line for 15 minutes.

  • I lived for 5 years car-free in Seattle. I'm still car-free, but I'm currently doing a bit of traveling so no longer in Seattle (although I may ultimately end up back there).

    It's definitely challenging. I wish there was more train coverage and greater frequency in general of transit service in Seattle. Back when I first moved, car shares were plentiful which made it really easy to hop in a car if I really needed to — maybe 5 to 10 times a year — but that whole thing mostly fell apart. When I left a few months ago, Gig seemed to be doing pretty well.

    I lived for 35 years in Knoxville, Tennessee, and it would have been near impossible there. Your world gets very small when you go car-free, and that's a problem in places where everything is spread out assuming everyone will have a car and can quickly traverse the miles between places you might want to be. There's a downtown in Knoxville, but until the last 10 years, almost no one lived there. There's a lot more housing now, but basic amenities like a grocery store and drug store are, so far as I'm aware, still missing. Downtown Knoxville is less a place to live and more a theme park.

    I was sad to hear the only full-service grocery store in downtown Seattle closed during the pandemic, but there are still plenty of neighborhoods that are totally livable car-free. Could be better, but it could certainly be worse.

  • I wish I could. It is impossible to live car free in my state though. I'd have to move somewhere that would better support it like Philly or Chicago.

  • Currently car minimal. I'd be free if my real estate agent wasn't so good and got me a parking space for free 😔

    There are times where I still use the car and if it wasn't there I'd probably figure out an alternative but since it is there, I just default to it when doing things like larger scale grocery shopping or going to places that public transit would take a long time to get to 😩

    One day, perhaps!

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