Retread

I'm American and have lived without a car for over a decade. One day, I got exasperated and started this blog called Walking While American (obviously riffing on the expression Walking While Black). 

For a long time, it had one half-assed post about some incident where I ended up cussing at car people as they whizzed past me, probably pointlessly because they likely didn't even hear me. I've made a few stabs at developing it but it failed to gel. 

I'm probably not angry enough about this issue to routinely complain about the well-known fact that pedestrians in America traverse an actively hostile environment. I'm also not really that interested in doing so.

I'm generally more solutions oriented than most such spaces. In spite of the pedestrian-hostile built environment in the USA, I've been generally happier without a car and my life has mostly worked better than before.

I ran the numbers once and for most working class Americans, simply making a car payment every month equates to a substantial percentage of your paid work hours. On top of that, you need to pay for insurance and gasoline and maintenance and you spend substantial time on things like renewing your plates annually, waiting in the usually awful waiting rooms in car service places that are typically in the middle of nowhere with no place you can get to without the car you can't use because it's being serviced.

Whatever time I spend walking places counts as exercise. With walking consistently, I've gotten quicker.

Giving up my car has been like getting a pay raise and cut in work hours at the same time with a free gym membership thrown in as a bonus.

I can't work a conventional job anyway. So the challenges of getting to a regular job without a car are irrelevant for me.

But you know what makes me absolutely crazy? 

Trying to travel in the US without a car.

I've written about that frustration elsewhere once.

Where am I GOING with this?

NO CLUE!

But writing a single post about the issue seems to have not magicked up a free app that fulfills my wish list.