#and i've never felt more disabled more consistently than when trying to get around walkable infrastructure

[rickktish]

Maybe it's because I'm a product of my time and place, idk, but sometimes the anti-car posts I see come across my feed get to me in a silly and purely emotional way. Because as much as I love the idea of implementing better public transit, both for the sake of the environment and for the impact it would have on citizen's wallets, I actually know that I personally would almost never use it.

Both for practical reasons, since my work covers an extremely broad area and I frequently drive over a hundred miles each way to and from work in a day, but also because my car is a part of my support system. It's a marker of my independence and ability to care for and provide for myself in spite of the fact that I can't live on my own. It's a safe space that belongs to me and isn't limited by someone else's ownership or control over that space. I bought it with my money, and I pay all the insurance and gas and repair costs. When I'm exhausted and feel alone and trapped I can literally just get in and go anywhere, and I don't have to worry about having a panic attack because someone can see me or hear me breathing or be annoyed that I'm taking up space, because it's my space and only mine alone. Sometimes that means driving around the block to the local park, sometimes that means going two or three miles to a grocery store, and sometimes that means picking a road and just driving in a straight line until I feel less crazy again, but none of that would be possible without my car.

I used to walk 20k+ steps in a day, and when I could do that maybe I could go on a walk to clear my head instead, but for the last three years going more than 3k steps in a single day means I have to spend the next day in bed recovering.

And yes, driving-- especially driving stick, which I prefer massively over automatic-- has its own toll. Today I wasn't able to drive the four hours each way it takes to go visit my brother at school like I had hoped because I drove two hours each way to work yesterday.

But because I spent yesterday driving, I got to spend today getting things done that I wouldn't be able to do otherwise. Today I walked around the kitchen to make myself food. I worked on daily tasks like cleaning and organizing, hell, I ate more than one meal today because I could actually get out of bed to do so. I can't do that on a day after I've had to walk around a lot.

If I lived in one of the "walkable" communities that have been cropping up all over my area, I would need to get myself a wheelchair to achieve the same level of independence I currently have, and likely still have less of it because I would need to plan around a whole different kind of fatigue from buying groceries or spending time with friends than I currently deal with. Driving five minutes to the store and spending a thousand steps there leaves me with more steps for things like showering and making dinner than walking five minutes to the store would, and that's so important to me. It's necessary in order for me to have the quality of life that I do, even as limited as I am by my body. I may not be able to work full time, but at least I can spend three days of my week doing a job that I love and value because I don't have to plan around distance from bus stops or adding public transit time to my already-fucked sleep schedule.

I don't know. Mostly I think I get a little bit tired of the posts that spend so much time denouncing the evils of personal cars and declaring that we have to replace them with public transit because I honestly think that ideally, we ought to plan for both. Public transit works really well for people living close together who don't go very far, and that needs to be supported better than it is in most places at present. It's also really good for people who need to go relatively far away at predictable and plannable times. But we shouldn't dismiss cars wholesale as evil; we need to try to strike a balance, for the sake of those whose lives or jobs aren't predictable and plannable, and for those who don't or can't live in communities structured for "walkability."