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A researcher asked 10 people to go car-free for 20 days. None wanted to continue
(www.brisbanetimes.com.au)
this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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Living in England would be so weird to me. You talk about going an hour like it's the trip of a lifetime. Just Saturday alone I drove something like 175 miles just to shop, pick up a load of bricks and a fountain for my garden. I watch shows like Clarkson's farm where his helper said he's never left their village and that blows my mind.
It's not a "trip of a lifetime" (closest I did to a driving "trip of a lifetime" in Europe was driving from Lisbon to Amsterdam, about 2000km which I did in 2 days), it's just part of my mental calculation of whether something is fun or not.
City driving is not fun for me, so having to spend 1h each way just to go somewhere to have fun reduces the overall appeal of it vs spending 15m in the tube each way to go somewhere to have fun.
Back when I lived in Lisbon I used to have a 1h commute by car to work because I lived in the outskirts and had to endure traffic jams on the way in, but over the years I lost patience with spending a significant fraction of my life in city traffic and, frankly, don't have to endure it anymore.
More broadly I would say that your use of miles vs my use of time isn't a like to like comparison: the problem isn't distance if you can get there fast or at least in a relaxed way, the problem is when it takes quite a bit to get there and the driving is stressful. Driving out of the city starting from Central London would be like driving out New York from Manhattan: a lot of pain in the arse city driving in the transit just to get to the nearest freeway and then some extra pain from driving in a freeway with lots of traffic until you're far out enough that there's a lot less traffic and you can relax, and all this is if you're lucky and don't get a traffic jam.
Driving a long distance starting from suburbia can actually be fun, but driving anywhere starting from the center of a big city is not fun.