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Laughs in European
Hon hon hon
Fill in the blank with any EU country after shaking hands with France lol
I park as far away as I’m able to walk in order not to drive around to find parking. I’ve found that it saves time on the long run, gas, and mor importantly my own stress and mental health.
I do that to. What I love is that while walking the last hundreds meters to the place you are going you can see all the people who try to park close that are all getting angry in their cars, proving you were right to park further away.
Once you start you never go back.
If you can bike, bike. Bike parking always within 50m of the venue 😎
I will drive 20 extra minutes not to wait 10 minutes in gridlock.
I will park a mile away and walk in rather than circle for 10 minutes for a parking spot.
I wife is not a fan of either of these traits.
Driving further to avoid traffic makes sense: it seems to cause stress:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/(SICI)1098-2337(1999)25:6<409::AID-AB2>3.0.CO;2-0
Wait, you’re telling me we don’t have a return plan EITHER?
Head exploding…
The event might be groceries and I just don’t have the mental fortitude to deal with both a full parking lot I will have to walk from the other side of, but also wade through the sea of people inside.
The walking doesn’t bother me, I usually park more than halfway to the far side anyway since there’s less cars and I can pull through the spaces to park easier.
I don’t own a car, I don’t need one. One excuse less.
I have been driving for 20 years without having to pay for parking, and now I’m struggling to find free parking anywhere.
First world problem, but still dystopian compaired to what i grew up with.
More rent seeking. Some company convinced cities that pay for parking would make the city money…with a nice cut for the company.
it’s more about the city not losing money by offering parking for free. infrastructure and space aren’t cheap
now the private companies, fuck those
Free parking is a massive subsidy for drivers at the cost of everyone else. Don’t go painting “barely nudged this back towards the neutral column” situations into oppression. It’s a bad look.
Yes, the companies suck (Chicago selling their parking to a private org that recouped the price they paid in like 3 years is top of this list) but the law bends over backwards to make private transit seem appealing, cause literally no part of it makes a lick of sense, otherwise. It’s only treated like this because it’s the most profitable transit methods, which is why it got shoved down our collective throats.
Don’t forget that in a lot of the USA public transport simply doesn’t work. For example in my state the only town u can get around in reasonably in is the big city, and even then your isolated to that city. In my town, (second biggest city in the state with a population smaller than the “small town” in mass I moved from, where everybody said I lived in the “sticks”) there is a small bus network that can get u around town and to the next town, but not enough of a network to make it feasible to commute to work unless u live and work in the same town and are willing to hoof it through snow. Rural areas and public transport simply don’t work, there are some places where private transport simply is the only solution. Now the cities getting planned around cars is another story, but every city I have been in in New England has been a nightmare to traverse in a car and a breeze via public transport so YMMV
Meh, in so many places (in the US) you would need to flatten the entire city and start from the ground up to make no parking and instead here is public transportation that would work. That’s the unfortunate world we live in. Or because of how public transportation so often works, you spend the ‘poor’ tax of so much more time getting places. Oh need to get to work that is five miles away? it’s 1 hour each way by public transportation, or 20 minutes by car with traffic.
That’s just a lack of imagination.
Actually you don’t really have to “flatten” anything, the parking lots are already flat enough. Remove asphalt and build mixed-use housing there. Take away a couple lanes from cars and build a tram line or at least a dedicated bus lane. It’s not that difficult if there’s political willpower for it.
We took a long time to get here, yeah. But you’d be surprised how little work it takes to make things easy better, too.
A little bit of car dieting in the last decade where I live and there’s, like, 3-4 times the pedestrians as there once were
Funny thing, flattening the entire city is what did happen in the 20th century. But for cars.
Bad transit and big parking lots are a policy choice, and many cities around the world are showing that we can still make better choices. We don’t just have to put up with car shit.
Nah it’s not first world problems. Our cities are selling us out.
One of the cities I live near had a scandal recently where a company just decided to put meters in public lots. No permits, no permission from nearby businesses (who don’t even own the lot or care for it) and yet cops still enforced tickets for “going over the time limit”
There was a lawsuit last I heard, but someone went ahead and smashed the kiosk, cut all the meters down, and left everything in a pile by a dumpster.
It’s crazy to me how many companies are just doing things and expect the people to just go along with it. Even crazier how often the company is right about that…
It’s way before that for me. When I get word of the event, I look up the venue immediately to see the parking situation. If it’s bad and the event isn’t too important, I’m not going.
Then why did you take your car?
“I’m going home because I didn’t find a parking space” sounds like someone who drove there entirely alone. Look how much space a car takes up for just one person.
Because public transport sucks in USA, due to car companies bribing/lobbying the corrupt government.
There’s no USA mentioned in the post
Agreed. Americans don’t mention usa. We just assume we are the center of the universe.
I’m not from the USA. I was speaking generally.
I’m at the age where I don’t even have a car.
12?
I did have a lot of cars at 12 but they were all of the matchbox variety.
Well you had no excuse. Didn’t even need to park those, just throw it in a pocket when you’ve arrived.
Surely I’m not the only one with a collection of negative camber cars because I was convinced that this one could work like a roller skate.
Lol big city europe that age is 30.
20k town Europe and way past 30 with kids.
I personally can drive, but living in a european medium/small city I know a lot of people in their thirties that doesn’t even know how to drive because they don’t need to.
Middle of nowhere, Europe, 40ish
Genuinely don’t get this, go by public transit.
Depends where you live and how that area is designed. In much of the US unfortunately public transportation isn’t even an option or is an option that is so slow or so expensive it isn’t affordable. Vehicles may not be either, but that’s not how many people see it.
Yeah, lived in most places in usa and its horrifically terrible :(
Many places don’t have public transit.
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My drive to the store: 10minutes,with traffic and hitting red lights.
My public transit to the same store: 15 minutes of walking, 30-45 minutes of waiting for a bus at the closest stop to me, it’s late or will skip my stop as usual. 20 minutes to get to the next stop that will get me to the store but I have to wait another 5-10 minutes for the bus that actually gets closest to the store to arrive, and 5-10 minutes for it to make it’s closest pass. 10 more minutes to walk to the store.
Now do it all in reverse! Luckily the route is slightly faster on the way home because the first bus I take usually chills at the hospital for a little bit and I can just hop a few fences to get to my house quicker than the bus.
So that 10 minute ride in a car now takes me many hours.
Legally I’m not allowed to bike there since I have to cross highways and private property. I still do it when it’s cool enough to bike. For the same reasons, I can’t walk to the store either, even if my knee could handle the distance.
Yeah had to bike to and from work and home almost daily am hour each way in a Maine and it was pain ++ dangerous lol
I don’t drive a car and hate them very much, but I have this in common with motorists. Only what I’m looking for is a secure place to lock my bike. Which is somehow often rarer than a parking space for cars.
I got my bike stolen while it was locked by the side of a Walmart, so now I’m much more careful about the “parking situation” and I use a bike share or public transit if I fear for the safety of my vehicle.
Yeah somehow finding a pole or something to lock the bike to is impossible sometimes.
That’s something I wonder about: don’t bike people get their bikes stolen all of the time?
Maybe I’ve just seen too many Lockpicking Lawyer videos.
I never had a bike stolen even during the few years I was using one as my main form of wheeled transit. It helped though that I never had an expensive bike, always locked it up when I left it (average cable lock), and had somewhere secure to leave it at night.
Speaking from experience, no, they really don’t.
As LPL will tell you, you don’t need to have the most secure thing on the planet, you just need to be a hard enough target that the thief gives up or picks something else.
If you don’t lock your bike, sure it’ll get stolen from some places.
Bike theft is a crime of opportunity. Nobody is stalking a specific bike to take, it’s usually “oh shit there’s one that looks easy imma take it”
I have a hardened steel U-bolt lock and a thick AF cable (do not get any cables under 1/2in as they can be easily cut with side cutters or even good wire strippers) the U lock goes through the frame, the cable and disc lock go through the wheels as well. I also like to take my seat with me in my bag, since nobody wants to ride a bike without a seat.
If your bike is expensive enough it’ll be targeted. People with very valuable bikes don’t leave them in the same place repeatedly for that reason.
That’s a relief. I’m walking from home to the bus stop currently, but considering a bike to help speed things up.
I actually used to ride my bike to the closest stop when I lived further away from town.
Locked it up somehwre close, come back and ride it home.
Nowadays my bikes are a little more expensive so I don’t like to lock them where I can’t see them all day, but I’m fairly sure it will still be there when I come back.
The one time it DID get stolen, it was specifically because I forgot my lock that day. I called a friend, we drove around town for a bit and I spotted some guy on it, called the cops and told them I’m about to confront the guy who stole my bike and if they care to show up we’re at the park. (don’t bother saying you want them to intervene, tell them you are confronting someone and they’ll show up thinking maybe someone is about to get shot) and when the guy tried to say he bought the bike heads ago, I told the cop I’m taking the handlebars off to prove something. Took them off with the toolkit I keep in my bag, and pulled out a piece of paper with my name,partial address, and phone number on it. The guy started sprinting the second he realized I have proof it’s mine. I also pulled out my New Bike Day photo of it but the paper with my details inside the frame is a lot harder to argue against.
Speaking of opposite experience, absolutely. Even if you lock it down, high likelihood of getting stolen, especially if left overnight, and if it’s a ‘high value’ bike, especially an e-bike.
But cars are freedom! They let you go anywhere you want, right? /s
Yes, like away from crowded areas.
As yes, in the immortal words of Kris Kristofferson, “Freedom’s just another word for deciding where you want to go based on other people not wanting to go there, too. (And somebody building a road to get there.)”
I love driving but hate weird parking situations. So much that I won’t even pull into a fuel station if I have to wait for a pump. In big parking lots I park way out at the end and walk instead of dodging all the cars and people up closer to the buildings.
