this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
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You're not going to live your life within biking distance.
And I say that as someone who's lived their entire life without owning a car, in one of the most densely-populated areas of Germany.
Public transit is an absolutely essential part of life, not a "nice to have".
Even in the most walkable of all cities, you're going to want to get to a lake for swimming, meet friends who live two towns over, transit to the airport, or simply have a reliable option to commute during a thunderstorm or when it's freezing.
In my household, we:
And that's in Atlanta, a city not exactly known for its bike network, let alone for its public transit.
That's called "wearing appropriate clothes." I have bike-commuted through rain so hard that I had to re-grease the bottom bracket afterward because that's how deep the puddles were. We had an "arctic blast" last week with -10 to -15 C wind chill (not that it matters on a bike -- there's always wind chill riding at speed); my wife and I were commuting and taking the kids to school by bike anyway. IDGAF.
In practice, the only thing that causes me not to bike is mechanical failure, and frankly, my bikes are more reliable than my cars.
You drive a couple times a month.
To live car-free, you'd need another option for those trips.
And telling people that visiting their parents or shopping at specialty stores are "wants", not "needs" is a non-starter.
The fact remains that the local bike infrastructure is much more valuable to me than a transit system with shitty last-mile connections is. The reason I can't get to Costco via MARTA, for instance, is that the nearest station dumps you out on a six-lane highway with no bike lane. (The bike infrastructure is decent near my house, but not out in the suburbs where the Costcos are.)
Transit is almost entirely useless unless you can walk or bike from the station to your actual destination. That makes ped/bike infrastructure a prerequisite for transit, not the other way around.