Can I Survive One Day Without a Car in an American Suburb? (It's Hard)

I think one of the worst things about America being so car dependent is that kids do not leave the house anymore. They don’t walk around town or bike anywhere. If they want to hang out with their friends they have to get their mom to drive them to their house, or get their moms to drive them to a specific location and then pick them up at a certain time later. Kids have no way of exploring the world around them without planning in advance what their ride situation will be.

While visiting a friend in the US, I once suggested we could go for a walk around her neighbourhood. You know, so I could get a feel for the place and to get some fresh air away from the roommates. She found this idea charmingly adventurous.

I live in Stuttgart, Germany. Getting groceries is a 4 minute walk, getting to a mall takes 20 minutes through walking and public transit and dinner is an 8 minute walk, but you can extend it to 15 minutes to have a wide variety of options of where to eat. Stuttgart is considered a car-friendly and car-infested city in Germany with lots of traffic in and around it, but you can get anywhere you need to go, without a car, in a reasonable amount of time. This video is shocking…

This also explains why drunk driving is so much more common.

Survival horror is my favourite genre of urban planning.

I just can't wrap my head around how or why people think this is in any way at all acceptable. Luckily, it seems like more and more people don't.

I'm 19 and live in the suburbs and I have no car, and I'm completely dependent on my parents and other people to get anywhere. The nearest bus is a 1.5 hr walk to the mall, which would be a 10 minute drive away. The nearest grocery store (Walmart) is a 30 minute walk away and there are barely any sidewalks, crosswalks, etc. A year ago I applied for my job because it was one of the few remote jobs available entry level, but now they've moved to a hybrid schedule and I need to walk over an hour to and from work part of the week because there's no public transport near me and Uber is expensive. People who cannot drive a car or do not have a car are almost kind of punished and ostricized. It shouldn't be this way.

In USA life without a car is so limited and distressing it causes hopelessness and depression. But we have a "Mental Health Awareness Day" now so that should help.

Walking in a car-dependent suburb feels so alienating, the sounds of the cars, the huge parking lots, how spread out all the businesses are, etc.

I had my first seizure when I was 19 due to adult onset epilepsy. The worst thing about it was the fact that I couldn't drive (I'm in TX). I spent a total of 2 years being unable to drive due to seizures and it was horrible. Made it super hard to do anything. I couldn't get a job because there's no public transit and there's no way to get a ride from someone every day, no rideshare either which even if there was it would be super expensive. I pretty much became a NEET for a lot of that time. Easily the worst 2 years of my life.

I am surprised the cops never tugged your collar & accused you of being a stray vagabond . From what I heard in parts of the USA if you don’t own a car ,they think you’re from another planet .

I remember waking home from the dealership when I was getting my car worked on... Literally no safe way to get home. Just had to run across a busy intersection.

I like how you just skipped the "how to bring back home your goods" portion of the trip because it was probably too miserable to bring up. From personal experience, carrying groceries in a backpack along a stroad in Florida summer for 20+ minutes is a character and strength builder to say the least. I also had many 7-mile treks from school to home after track practice since I couldn't get a bus home.

The United States decided "the car is the future" back in the 50s and overbuilt for it, not for people, while also actively removing the robust public transportation the country used to have. Now, everyone is forced to drive a car because all the other options are either inconvenient, nonexistent, or dangerous... and the constant "freedom" propaganda patting the backs of the motor vehicle and petroleum industries reinforces this economic dead end. It needs to do better.

To highlight just how "free" it is, consider this: the primary method of identification throughout the US is a driver's license. Now, if that does not seem unusual to you, it's likely because you grew up here.

So accurate and true, thank you for bringing awareness to the poor urban planning.

I didn't thought things in Usa are THAT bad, but this video really opened my eyes. I live in small town in Poland with around 3000 inhabitants. I could easily do all of these 3 things: go to grocery store, eat dinner and buy clothes, just under one hour by simply walking. Even if public transport sucks here and closest big city is 60km away. I have sidewalks on every street, bike lanes on main street and even some bike roads to closest villages. And suburb next to Minneapolis in "wealthy" country like Usa doesn't have any of these... I can't imagine how would I be able to live in such a horrible place like this?

It's funny. As someone from Europe, I'd often watch Kitchen Nightmares America with Gordon Ramsay. They'd talk about how their business is struggling and how they just don't know why! Being an innocent naive European person, I'd always look at the exterior shots of their Restaurant and be like "The location!! It's horrible! That's why they don't get customers, they're located on the most ugly street I've ever seen!" And I thought it was a coincidence that ALL the Restaurants featured on the show had similar locations. It literally took YouTube urbanists to let me know that apparently all food places in the US are located on horrible stroads. As someone who is used walking to a small little family owned place in the middle of a pedestrian zone near a little spring or surrounded by trees... this was quite the shock! Americans are really missing out. The soul needs peaceful places designed for people. Places you can discover spontaneously and organically. A Starbucks off an intersection ain't it.

Yeah, I remember visiting a friend who lives in a suburb. I walked to the store. Took like 20 minutes, which is fine. But I remember I was the only person walking outside. Everyone has a car in a suburb. And the people in cars stare at me walking like they never seen a person walk to a store.

As someone with massive fears of driving, the amount of roads with no sidewalks or bike lanes genuinely makes me think it should be a requirement so people can still travel with less fear of being hit by a car