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A researcher asked 10 people to go car-free for 20 days. None wanted to continue
(www.brisbanetimes.com.au)
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this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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Fuck Cars
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Hopefully they got action items out of it - what do they need to work on.
Personally I loved the freedom of not having to deal with a car on a daily basis, but there was too much I couldn’t do.
One of the shortcomings that seems to surprise people is a lack of long term car storage. There will be an extended transition where many people can not give up their cars or think they cannot. Why not help with that? At one point I was driving my car mostly to move it for street cleaning because there was no permanent place to store it. We want the cars off the street to make room for more important road users. Garages in apartment blocks are too convenient and for-profit garages too expensive
You’ll get more people willing to try car-free if you give them a slightly inconvenient place to store their car, until they realize how little they need to use it. I wonder if making it cheap and easy to leave your car at a park and ride at the end of a transit line would work
I used to do this when I lived in New York state and would occasionally travel down to New York city. It was stupidly cheaper to drive (and faster - which WTF whhhhhy). So I would rent a cheap spot in a garage near the outskirts of the city for the day and use public transport for the rest of the day. I remember being mad that it was cheaper and faster to drive and pay to store my car then it would have been to take the train. That's a problem. Especially when I had a train station in biking distance to my apartment at the time.
I mean, if you search around you can probably find someone willing to rent out driveway or garage space for cheap. Or else if you head to the outskirts of your city or near the industrial areas, you'll find car/rv storage lots - usually near or part of storage units. So the solution already exists.
I think it'll be a hard sell to get people to, say, approve government subsidies for parking garages to make it cheaper for people to store cars that they arent even using. Especially if street parking is already free
The point would be to remove/recover street parking for more important uses. Especially in older urban neighborhoods you might have really narrow streets, no room for bicycle or bus lanes. This lets you compromise: car is still possible for those who need it, but less convenient so used less, neighborhood streets have reduced traffic and can be opened for cycling or pedestrians
I mean, if the point is to remove street parking, I'm in favor of that.
I don't think there should be any real government intervention to then create additional parking, though. Seems like a move in the wrong direction.
What I think would be good instead, though, is ending parking minimums and then declaring that businesses cannot restrict who parks in their lots to only customers. They can charge a fee for the use of their lot, but otherwise anyone can park there for any amount of time. This would vastly expand the amount of long term parking, drastically driving down the price, while also incentivizing landowners to now redevelop their parking lots into something useful
They do that in my town. Finding parking and garages and everything is not even an issue. I feel like you're more in a much more Cityfied area than I live in. Well I do live in a major match politen area I was making the comment the other day that the majority of the city I live in is more valley and suburbs than actual city. However at all of the train stops throughout the valley there is free parking. And you could even leave your car there for a few days if you wanted to. And at any of the major bus hub areas there's also large lots and free parking. They even provide random park and ride lots throughout the outer suburb areas so you are encouraged to carpool.
We’re probably more city. While it’s effectively a suburb to a major city, it was built out pre-car with a nice walkable downtown with larger buildings and a central business district, including the train/bus station. A small city
While there’s parking, it’s all pay, and all signed for no overnight. While there’s enough parking within a few blocks, the train/bus station used to fill up by 8am. It’s not expensive, $3.50/day in my town, but no overnight parking makes it tough.
I was annoyed when even our library started charging for parking, but they have a small lot and complained it was filled up with people looking for cheap parking for the day