[promiseplum]

Not really without a car but maybe banned using car at least once a week I guess?

[Beery1]

I can't imagine how more than a few percent of the US population can live without a car. Not everyone can live in downtown Chicago, downtown New York City, or downtown Washington DC.

You don't have to live in a city to do without a car. I'm 51 years old, I've never lived downtown anywhere and I've never owned a car. If you don't see how more than a few percent can do it, the problem is a failure of imagination.

Anything within 5 miles is walkable. Anything within 20 miles is easily bikeable. I've walked 5 miles on numerous occasions. I've cycled 90 miles in one day. The problem is that people who own cars do not see even distances shorter than 5 miles as being even within the realm of possibility without a car. Like I say, it's a failure of imagination caused by the fact that motorized transportation has made wimps out of pretty much all of us.

[Shaved Monkey]

My dads in his late 80s his licence runs out in a few months and it probably wont be renewed.
It will make it very difficult for him to live independently.
Miles from shops, doctors and a fair hike for an octogenarian from public transport.
He bought his house 50 years ago when he had a car not thinking one day he wont.
Plenty of people making the same mistakes today.

[dinopello]

My dads in his late 80s his licence runs out in a few months and it probably wont be renewed.
It will make it very difficult for him to live independently.
Miles from shops, doctors and a fair hike for an octogenarian from public transport.
He bought his house 50 years ago when he had a car not thinking one day he wont.
Plenty of people making the same mistakes today.

With the baby boomers, this is going to be a huge issue. Same thing happened to my Dad in his 80's - became legally blind due to Macular Degeneration and gave up his license (although many elders wait too long to do this because of their dependency on driving). Fortunately for my parents they had neighbors that would drive them to the stores etc. But from when he lost his license to a year before he passed, he was able to walk pretty good. My parents actually used to walk about a mile to the Walmart for a coffee since that was the closest place. And, this was along basically a country highway with no shoulder. After my Dad passed, my mom would make this walk herself and was on many occasions picked up by the sheriff because they couldn't believe a 90 year old woman should be walking along the highway (they were right). My mom didn't like asking the neighbors for rides so she walked. Eventually we had to move her about 200 miles closer to us so we could help her. We were happy to do that, but she really liked living in her own house.

Around here we have great walkability and great transit but it is pretty daunting for a 70 year old to navigate with the city-like traffic if they aren't used to it. And the long-time residents in their 70's are the most resistant to doing things to enhance the walk safety (which makes turn radius tighter for vehicles and narrows lanes etc, but makes driving more difficult). The people in their 70's I guess are thinking that they are old and shouldn't be walking. They should be thinking what they are going to do when they can't drive.

[dixonge]

In 2010 we downsized and moved into the center of the town where we worked. We both could have walked to work, and I often did. The wife briefly scootered to work. It wasn't ideal, and we were in Texas with almost no high-rise buildings anywhere, but we probably could have gone down to one car if we had been committed to the idea. We definitely drove a lot less.

Sold our last vehicle in early 2012 and have lived in Mexico and Central America since then. A good percentage of the locals own vehicles, but we've gone everywhere we needed or wanted with either walking or public transportation. Saved a lot of headache, hassle and expense by not having a car.

Having said that, I'm not sure how feasible this is for most of the US. All of the culture and infrastructure was set up presuming vehicle ownership and commuting.

[dolanbaker]

It appears that car replacement is too slow for manufacturers to cope with!

http://www.vincelewis.net/unsoldcars.html

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=sheernes ... m&t=h&z=16
Above is just a few of the thousands upon thousands of unsold cars at Sheerness, United Kingdom. Please do see this on Google Maps....type in Sheerness, United Kingdom. Look to the west coast, below River Thames next to River Medway. Left of A249, Brielle Way.

Timestamp: Friday, May16th, 2014.

There are hundreds of places like this in the world today and they keep on piling up...

THE WORLDS UNSOLD CAR STOCKPILE

Houston...We have a problem!...Nobody is buying brand new cars anymore! Well they are, but not on the scale they once were. Millions of brand new unsold cars are just sitting redundant on runways and car parks around the world. There, they stay, slowly deteriorating without being maintained.

Below is an image of a massive car park at Swindon, United Kingdom, with thousands upon thousands of unsold cars just sitting there with not a buyer in sight. The car manufacturers have to buy more and more land just to park their cars as they perpetually roll off the production line.

[Pops]

That's pretty funny. Gotta remember tho, 50 or 60 million cars are built each year so there is bound to be a million or 2 or 10 somewhere between the factory and a driveway at any one time.

I'm of the age cohort that grew up in cars, probably conceived there, they were a big deal. TV shows like, My Mother The Car, 77 Sunset Strip, The Rat Patrol, and movies ... I grew up in the same town as George Lucas (who made the movie American Graffiti), maybe 10 years his junior but ate at the Mels drive-in on 9th st, and of course cruised every weekend. Cars were the thing.

My dream as a kids was to get a job, then get a pickup, and go. That's just what I did. Didn't necessarily need a car to do that but it was part of the dream. I bummed around here and there doing construction or Manpower (temporary work agency) and seeing the US. Some folks hiked Europe but I didn't really have the inclination, it was about the drive.

We have arranged our lives so we don't need a daily vehicle for our day to day. I work from home and we try to stack up errands to the little burg 5mi away to minimize trips to a couple of times a month and to the bigger burgs 20-40 mi. away to a couple trips a year. I haven't started the pickup in almost 3 weeks, actually it will be 3 weeks tomorrow.

Still, I feel vaguely uneasy ... no, actually I feel stranded and rather anxious without a working vehicle, whether I need to go anywhere or not.

[dolanbaker]

That's pretty funny. Gotta remember tho, 50 or 60 million cars are built each year so there is bound to be a million or 2 or 10 somewhere between the factory and a driveway at any one time.

True, but most of this current "glug" is basically down to newer models being introduced without discounting the previous model sufficiently to shift them. Here in Europe for example the vehicle specifications were recently changed to mandate that Daylight Running lights be fitted to all cars made after 2012, a lot of cars registered in 2013 in Ireland didn't have these lights fitted. So therefore these vehicles had to have been parked for at least a year before being handed as "new" to their owners.

We also have the paradox of having waiting lists for popular small engined cars.

[dinopello]

Still, I feel vaguely uneasy ... no, actually I feel stranded and rather anxious without a working vehicle, whether I need to go anywhere or not.

It is a big part of one's life - how you get around. Cars are great tools that are fun too, and as long as you try to not have a dependency on them there is no shame in having one in my opinion.

Here's my counter story to your statement -

Our office moved and I now live about 4 miles from work and drive most days. For about 10 years I lived about 1 mile from work and walked every day - great except when hot and humid. Anyway, once I drove because I had something big to bring to work. I forgot I had driven and walked home. It wasn't until about a week later that I had occassion to drive somewhere again. I went out looking for my car - and it wasn't there (still parked at work). I thought (for a bit more than a moment) that it had been stolen, until I remembered that I left it somewhere else. Dude, where's my car? moment.

[Pops]

Just stumbled across this refutation of the "unsold cars" bit

That Zero Hedge Article On Unsold Cars Is Bullshit

I usually enjoy reading Zero Hedge because the insights are often interesting and I think pessimism is an underrated virtue these days. However, this guest article on unsold cars is so demonstrably false I had to take a break from my Sunday morning to dispute it.

It is an admittedly appealing idea to think that automakers, unable to sell cars, are just wildly producing them and then dumping them around the world in an endless cycle of mass production hysteria. So much of the modern economy seems senseless and inexplicable, which is why an article like this seems to give some credence to the feeling many of us have inside that something is terribly wrong.