this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
76 points (96.3% liked)

Fuck Cars

14899 readers
1205 users here now

A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!

Rules

1. Be CivilYou may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.

2. No hate speechDon't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.

3. Don't harass peopleDon't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.

4. Stay on topicThis community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.

5. No repostsDo not repost content that has already been posted in this community.

Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.

Posting Guidelines

In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:

Recommended communities:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

This is the question posed on CityNerd video titled "Walkable Cities But They Keep Getting More Affordable"

If you ditched your car, could you afford to leave the suburbs for a great urban neighborhood?

Ray Delahanty answers the question in the 26 biggest US cities.

The analysis assumes the all-in cost of owning and operating a car is $1,000 per month, including purchase, insurance, fuel, and maintenance.

In the city, transportation costs might total about $250 per month for transit passes, biking, ride-hailing, and other small expenses.

This results in an effective $750 per month increase in the housing budget for city center residents who do not own a car.

The results of the video are quite interesting, as you can get more m² in walkable areas in most cities

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Arkhive@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Short version: yes, 100% and I kind of already have…

I am (somewhat unhappily) living in a suburb, but I have transit stops for multiple lines within a 5 minute walk, and a bunch more options if I’m willing to walk 10-15 minutes. I was paying something like $500/month (lease, gas, insurance) for my car before being hit by a semi and not replacing it. That was 2-ish years ago and I haven’t really looked back.

Now I pay about $100/month for basically unlimited transit use. My commute time tripled, but in theory got slightly more consistent because car traffic could get bad on the route to work. The transit system here is far from perfect, so sometimes I’m still late, but I’m lucky enough to have a fairly flexible start time. I’ve got 3 roommates with 2.5 cars between the 4 of us (one borrows a car from family periodically). I’d love to be a 1 car household, but two of the roommates “can’t give up their independence”, which I kind of shake my head at. One works further out of the city fully in a rural area, so I suppose it is kind of necessary for them to have a car, and then still having one car at home available for the rest of us works out fairly well.

I actually quite like the longer commute. It gives me time to read, or just listen to music, browse the internet, nap, whatever. Plus I’ve discovered a ton of small, local businesses I now love!

[–] GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip 4 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Do you live with your roommates because you want to, or are you all working adults who cant find affordable homes on their own?

[–] Arkhive@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 3 hours ago

Bit of both. They’re my best friends, and the way the rent works out it was a cost improvement for all of us. I won’t get into the whole story. We are all mid to late 20s (I’m about to turn 30 😅) and all very far from being able to afford homes of our own. Though even if we did I think it would still be together. None of us want to have kids, so we operate as a family unit with two cats making up for the chaos of not having kids running about.