Instead, here's a plea to car-having readers who do not wish to live as I do: understand that your car is a luxury. Understand that when you get in your car to run a ten-minute errand, the same errand might take someone without a car two hours on the bus. When you turn your key in the ignition, please feel the same sense of wonder and good fortune that I feel every time I take my dirty clothes down to the basement instead of hauling them to the laundromat: what a lucky person I am to not only live in a world where someone was smart enough to invent this thing that makes my life easier, but that I, by some additional happenstance of good fortune, can have one.
via Not Crazy Just Resentful: On Being Car Free by Choice in Cleveland | Rust Wire
There's a similar pattern here in Calgary (without the 30% poverty rate, and depopulated city - we're on the other side of that curve, in a booming city that's growing faster than anyone can keep up), where it's normal to hop in the car and drive at 110km/h on a shiny new ring road, to travel 50km to walk around a sprawling rural shopping centre. We take cars (and the way they make distance and sprawl seem normal) for granted.
Now that I'm not driving (again), this is all coming back in a hurry. Things I can't do with Evan on the weekends, because it's not feasible to get there in time, without dedicating the day to travel via public transportation. Now that spring is nearly here, we'll be able to ride our bikes to more places, but even that won't get us to many of the places he needs to get to...