2019-09-29 - Without car 
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I've never owned a car, and i'm quite pleased about that. Not only 
because it saves me quite some money (cars, insurance and gasoline 
are expensive), but also because of environmental reasons.

Now, i am lucky to live in a country where everything is at 
bike-distance, so that makes going car-less much easier than for 
example in the US. However, still i'm surprised how many people 
here own cars, and also use them for small distance trips (grocery 
shopping and such).

Every morning when i drive my bike to work, i drive alongside a 
four lane busy road for a while and see many cars, lining up to go 
places. It makes me wonder where everybody is going, and how many 
of these cars actually need to be on the road.

It also instills me with great fear for the future; When i see all 
those cars lining up on this single road, i imagine the same thing 
is happening throughout the whole country, every morning, every 
day. Year in year out. Well, actually, not only through the whole 
country, but throughout the whole world... Man, the scale of this 
is mindblowing.

With this simple thought in mind, it is not hard to imagine this 
would eventually cause these environmental problems that we're 
seeing now, and that we'll be seeing much more of in the near 
future. Strangely, it sometimes seems nobody cares a whole lot 
about that... 

Never having owned a car is a big advantage, because i have never 
gotten used to it. I think once you have a car, you get used to 
driving it everywhere. And once you're used to it, it's hard to 
get rid of the habit. It's a bit like smoking in a way. If you 
never smoked, it's not difficult to stay off sigarettes. However, 
once you start, it's very hard to stop again.

It will be very difficult to get people to use cars less, or to get 
people to use less cars. Or to have people abandon cars altogether. 
Especially for those who've been using cars for many years, and 
who've grown used to driving it.

As [Kensata] is outlining in his recent post [1], it starts to seem 
unlikely to have hope for the future. But hope is all we have. And 
without hope, all hope is lost. Thanks to the awesome swedish girl, 
people are waking up a bit.

Unfortunately humankind will need to first see some very tangible
consequences (catastrophies) caused by it's own behaviour, before 
it learns and sees the need to adapt in the radical ways that have 
been necessary for years. Let's hope this happens in a favorable 
timeframe, and it's not all too late.

Until then, you can find me on my bike, passing by the cars queing 
up in the four lane roads.

[1] gopher://alexschroeder.ch/02019-09-29_I_have_no_hope