Don’t get me wrong- I really don’t care where other people choose to live. But it is dumb to get into a situation where you can’t live without your license with absolutely no backup plan and THEN do totally voluntary stupid stuff that gets your license suspended.
It’s like those people who build houses on known flood plains. If you want to pay the insurance and take the risk, go for it. But don’t then go around digging holes in the levies.
Absolutely agree with you there. I live in a very car-centric suburb, built in the 60’s and 70’s, but when you really think about it, there are still a lot of options. None quite as convenient as a car, granted, so I’m not selling it just yet. But there are people who bike in December in Minnesota. A small fraction of those who bike in the summer, granted–but there are ways to do so if you wanted to or had to.
I don’t think its like that at all.
And not only food. Frequently there must be a beverage, too.
a TASTY beverage
ice cold…
Considering that generally people lose their license over doing very dangerous crap that could kill people around them, I think they’re stupid for doing it, period. My scorn towards them has nothing to do with where they live and how their life will be affected by their behavior. If they lived in a walk-centric location they would not suddenly be less dumb in my mind for extreme speeding or DUI. It’s stupid and dangerous either way you cut it.
Yes, I know people can lose their license from the point system. If you go through that many points in 3 years, you’re dangerous. And not in a good way.
Okay, how about these: if you take more than 30 days to pay your court fine, they suspend your license.
So you get a ticket for letting your inspection expire, and then were too broke to pay the court quickly, and now you’re suspended.
OR, they will suspend your license for letting your insurance expire. That doesn’t even need a traffic stop: they send you a letter saying “prove you had insurance on thus-and-such car on thus-and-such date, and if you can’t you owe us $1000 and your license is suspended”, so even if you stopped driving entirely until you got insurance back, you’re screwed.
Or my personal favorite, where they suspend your license because they caught you driving on a suspended license.
In my misspent youth, I managed to get caught driving on a suspended license 5 times. After three, they declare you a “habitual offender” and suspend your license for 10 years, unless of course the only offenses on your record are driving on a suspended license, and your habitual offender status is the only thing keeping you from having a license.
In that period, I never had a moving violation. No speeding tickets, no reckless driving, no DUI. I never had an accident. And I was driving about 22,000 miles a year.
Some people whose licenses were suspended were doing “dangerous crap”, but many of them weren’t. Many of them were driving cars that were perfectly safe but hadn’t gotten the inspection that proves it renewed. Many of them had money troubles and let their insurance lapse. Many of them were just having trouble paying the fines from minor infractions. Many of them did things that, while illegal, placed no one at greater risk.
And the world is FULL of reckless assholes who never get in trouble at all.
Choosing to endanger other people is evil. Choosing to endanger your own lifestyle is stupid. The two are not mutually exclusive.
I just have to shake my head at the question. Unbelievable.
Yet we’re three pages in. I grabbed the proverbial popcorn when I saw the OP.
It does however make apparent how different living situations can be. I live near the center of a small town, so all conveniences are met within a 1-2 km radius. More specific stuff can be found at 5km or so.
I know this is GQ but, and I’m not going to call names, but I am amazed at how unaware so many of the posters in this thread are about how many places in this country are uninhabitable without personal vehicular transportation . . . I almost can’t believe people are being honest.
The town in which I grew up has (had?) a population of around 3,000. There is no grocery store, three convenience stores (the closest being a little over 3 miles from my home), and no sidewalks aside from a short, 1 mile stretch along a portion of the state highway. This was not “out in the middle of nowhere,” but a fairly populated area surrounding a much more densely populated urban center.
The suggestion that it is irresponsible to live in a non-urban area is unpractical enough to be laughable. Millions of people in thousands of municipalities are beyond walking range of basic necessities and their places of employment. Driving without a license is not a ‘good’ thing to do, but is certainly a necessary option for anyone without the family, friends, or resources to provide a flexible, door-to-door, long-distance transportation alternative.
The mind does boggle.
Nobody is saying it is irresponsible to live in a rural area. My point is:
Making all three of those choices together is not precisely irresponsible, but is certainly going to make your life a lot more difficult than it needs to be. It’s not my problem at all, but I’m also not at all sympathetic to who plan so poorly.
Until every person can be comfortably accommodated in places with comprehensive public transport or until every person can afford long-term transportation-independent lifestyles, I have to respectfully disagree that either of these are true “choices” when talking about people generally. Maybe I can move to a place that is walkable or has public transportation. Not everybody can. I think you wildly underestimate how many people live in car-centered communities. Millions more than could fit in our cities currently.
Doing something to get one’s license suspended is a poor choice, and I’m not trying to argue otherwise. But the fact is that it is exceedingly hard for a significant portion of the population to maintain financial independence, health, a job, and participate in their communities without a car. I would hardly blame a person for continuing to drive on a suspended license if they were in such a situation.
Yes, people do live down 20 mile mountain trails. People do live in rural areas where the nearest gas station where they could get a frozen burrito is 5 miles away. People do live in suburbs where the nearest grocery store is 3 miles away.
But more people live in dense environments where there are lots of people and closer services. That’s what makes the dense environments dense, lots of people live there.
I live near Seattle, which is a pretty dense urban environment. However, I live on rural Vashon Island. There’s a central “village” type town, and lots of people live within walking distance of the two grocery stores. I used to do that. Now I own a house that’s 6 miles away from the core, and 3 miles away from the nearest convenience store. And I like it that way. I love living in the woods and not seeing my neighbor–I only have one, and in the summer when the bushes are leafed out I can’t see her house.
And if I lost my ability to drive I’d be seriously screwed. I don’t drive to work, but I have to drive to get to the bus that takes me to the ferry that takes me to the bus to get to work. Without a car I’d have an hour walk before I could reach the bus line. But of course, I could get my wife to drive me to the bus stop, and then pick me up in the evening. If I didn’t have a wife? Well I’d be fucked. I’d have to move, and find a different place to live.
If you have a crappy job with no savings and live in the middle of nowhere and don’t have close social and familial ties with reliable people and then you lose your ability to drive, you’re in big trouble. You can’t afford to move, you can’t afford to stay where you are, you can’t drive to work, you can’t walk or bike, you can’t afford to stay home, you can’t ask for help because everyone you know is in the same boat.
If you’re permanently unable to drive, then you have to move, regardless of how much you love where you live and how much it will cost. Expect to pay higher housing costs for much crappier living space. Expect tasks that used to take 10 minutes to turn into hours. Expect a permanent reduction in your standard of living. If it’s only temporary–like for a year–well, you can tough it out. If you can keep your job. Drive anyway, what are the odds you’ll get pulled over and get another year added, or another and another, Judd Nelson in Breakfast Club style. Mooch off your car-driving friends and family.
Or move now, because if you’re the kind of person who loses their license once, you’re probably going to lose it again. It’s like getting banned from the Dope for being a jerk, and you come back with another account. But if you were capable of not being a jerk you wouldn’t have got yourself banned in the first place, so you’re going to be spotted pretty quickly.
So live near town or a few blocks away from the bus line. Yeah, it costs more and you don’t like it as much. Because you can’t drive you’re going to have to pay higher monetary, convenience, and social costs for everything. That’s tough. But there are solutions other than starving to death on the floor of your house way out in the country.
Everyone makes choices and trade-offs as to where they live. You wouldn’t move into a house that was an obvious fire trap, right? Or a house that’s full of lead paint and arsenic? Or a house next to a needle exchange?
I’m looking at houses right now, and what I’m finding is that I can afford a small two-bedroom condo in a dangerous neighborhood with transit, or a large four bedroom single-family home in a very nice area away from the subway. Nobody can make that choice but myself, but if that choice bites me in the ass at some point in the future, that’s nobody’s problem but my own. It certainly doesn’t give me moral permission to break the law simply because I chose not to plan for an alternative in case I run into one of the many situations (age, disability, legal issues, financial troubles, gas prices…in my case, I have vision problems that could become worse) that driving becomes unviable.
Communities also make choices. No community is inherently unservable by transportation. China is full of areas as vast and remote as anything we can come up with, and most of those are served by fairly reliable trains and busses. But we’ve chosen not to invest in transit, and indeed we’ve built communities to be actively hostile towards transit (for example, by placing schools and shopping at the far edges of housing developments, rather than in the walkable center.) We can choose to change that if we like, but so far it doesn’t seem to be a priority.
Though the thread has turned into a discussion of these points, still, I feel like the OP’s question is being lost. Okay, so it’s a choice. Got it. Meanwhile, there’s this other interesting question: How do people live after they’ve made these choices?
I’ve seen threads started by people who live far out in the country, asking about high-speed internet options, because DSL and cable modem service aren’t available where they live. Clearly these people chose to live in the country because that appeals to them but at the time, the fact that high-speed internet wouldn’t be available wasn’t a consideration then. For me, I wouldn’t want to live out in the country, partly because I want high-speed access, and partly because I’d be bored out of my mind there. People make choices. Some choose to live far from public transport and good internet access options and I don’t begrudge them those options. But then when they need alternative transport or fast web access, that’s going to be a problem.
I live in the greater Boston area (one of the supposedly enlightened cities that has great public transportation systems) yet I live in the outer suburbs. I could get food now if I lost my license and didn’t drive because I live about a mile from a major shopping center but that is just a fluke. The house I had before my ex and I got divorced (and she still has) has about the same level of accessibility as it did in 1760 when it was built. There is absolutely no store to walk to unless you want to take camping gear with you and no public transportation whatsoever. It is drive or get out.
The house where I grew up in Louisiana was the same. I had a job a the nearest supermarket starting when I was 15 and there was a mix-up on my ride to work one day. I didn’t want to lose my new job so I started hiking through the woods (because it was much shorter and safer than walking down the highways with no sidewalks) and it took me a mere two hours to get there one way in the Louisiana July heat. Someone that didn’t know the woods as well as I did or have the ability to cross streams and such would have been SOL.
I lived in a farmhouse in Vermont once too by myself. It was so remote that if you couldn’t drive or you got hurt, you could very literally die before anyone found you. There was no phone, mailing address, or neighbors let alone stores that you could walk to in less than a day’s time.
I also find it amazing that so many people find it shocking that people live under those circumstances. Tens of millions of Americans live in areas like that and probably close to the majority live in areas where a car is essential for basic functions. Don’t they have rural areas in Britain and other parts of Western Europe where the same idea would apply?
I know there are lots of places where that is the case.
I also think there lots of places where people underestimate how far a person whose ability to walk isn’t impaired can go.