Can you smell it?
The Alley, Blagoevgrad
Category: Walking
For the love of cars
Daily writing prompt
If you had the power to change one law, what would it be and why?
I would find like-minded folks and come up together with practical ideas to reduce cars in cities. There have to be other ways to commute that don’t pollute as much and are not threatening to pedestrians and cyclists.
For example, very slow speed limit in the city, no free public parking, and stricter laws on safety ratings and vehicle size. Big trucks and utility vehicles should really only be used for commercial purposes with special vignettes.
I’m not winning elections with my agenda any time soon.
How to read more books
I like books. I like to read them, to watch them, and to slowly choose them in the bookstores. I also like my Goodreads archive with all the books I read in the last 10-12 years. I don’t like to keep them for too long as they take up a lot of space but otherwise, I love books.
One of my main issues with paper books is that there’s a commitment to read them once you buy them and not all books are worthy. This leads to getting stuck and lowers the joy of reading. Also, lowers my Goodreads score. So, after asking a couple of true readers about that and combining it with my own experience, here’s my short list of tips for how to read more:
- Buy a book when I plan to immediately start reading it. Buying because something got published creates clutter.
- Once I figure out a book is not engaging, useful, or interesting, I abandon it and put it aside for donation. Someone else may appreciate it more.
- I read on the subway. 30 minutes of additional reading per day can translate to 10-20 books/year. Okay, I admit. I hate driving in the city and used the opportunity to advertise the subway. You should use it as well 😊
Walking in Sofia
I had an appointment today that was not far from Loven Park. Decided to walk back home by optimizing for forest time.
Empty, birds singing, leaves and branches falling, and engines roaring from the nearby boulevards. A human here and there, not very often. About 4-5km of that.
Freedom
20-25 years ago, a friend who just turned 18 shared how he was about to buy a car. “Ok, but why?” – I asked. “It’s freedom”. It struck me as absurd. This was the first time I heard it but I kept hearing it over the years. How’s this giving freedom, given how much of an investment, costs, space, and maintenance it needs?
But I kept hearing it, and at some point my 9yo kid shared that he saves for a car. I wanted to understand and started thinking.
So here are my theories on why people associate cars with freedom.
- Little kids. We drive them everywhere because our car-first cities don’t make it particularly easy to do things while you have little ones with you. In case you walk, they will resist, want to be carried, and to be back home. If you put the seat belt on, they have nowhere to run – they come with you. From the parents’ point of view, it’s the freedom to do things with kids, like shopping, that would otherwise not be possible. From kids’ point of view, they’re the ones who go to places they don’t particularly like while locked to their seats. The car is controlling what they do and where they go. Owning a car is the actual freedom statement from the parents. So transporting kids provides two plausible theories combined in one.
- Independence. Close to freedom. Using any form of transportation that you don’t own makes you dependent on other people – taxi drivers, bus drivers, train schedules, and airplane schedules. You don’t need to go very far to experience being locked in an airport with flights delayed or canceled, or to board a shady taxi where you don’t feel safe.
I was torn between the two for some time, but after spending several months somewhat car-free, I now lean toward a third explanation. It comes from this:
(image credit – Cycling Promotion Fund (CPF) Canberra)
69 people on a bus make it a full bus, and people are very close to each other. Same people in cars would be separated from the others with a wall made of glass and steel. So I think we pay all that money to not be bothered by others, then lose our ability to walk and get addicted to cars the same way we get addicted to nicotine. It becomes impossible to do things otherwise.
Understandable intent, bad results.
I’ll keep thinking and exploring the subject.
