Well either they figure out a workaround, they try for a hardship exception, they break the law, or they starve to death in solitude.
How do prisoners pay their mortgage? How do you walk the dog when you are on house arrest? If you are deployed, how do you keep up with your WoW raid schedule? Life is full of tough, you figure it out.
Could go? Possibly as a stunt if you had to in an emergency. Regularly, no. Most cities in the U.S. have many or most parts of them designed without any consideration given to walking. That includes many of our largest cities like Los Angeles, Houston and Dallas along with hundreds of smaller (but still large) ones. There literally aren’t any sidewalks or safe ways to cross the busy roads. It is illegal to do that in many cases as well.
For instance, my mother and stepfather live in a gated subdivision outside of Dallas. The subdivision itself is so large that it takes about 40 minutes of walking just to get to the exit gate from their house. There are absolutely no stores within the subdivision itself. If you decided to walk out of it, you would be met with a high speed access road also with no stores leading to an interstate highway (it is generally illegal to walk beside those except in cases of emergency). If you decided to do it anyway, the nearest place to buy anything would be another 5 miles and that is just a gas station. Theirs isn’t unusual. There are thousands of others just like them spread all over Texas and the West.
Tangentially. . .there is a woman who lives somewhere within 0.5 miles of me, who I’ve witnessed walking to work. I’ve seen here walking on the road near where I live, and she works at a supermarket 4.5 miles east of here.
No idea why she walks, and no intention to ever offer a ride to work because, 1) she’s kind of weird, and 2) I assume she’d scream and run off if I ever offered.
Shit gets done. 
Damn even sven, I didn’t’ realize you were developing libertarian tendencies 
That is the correct answer overall. People do just have to make it work based on what they are given or have earned themselves. To be fair though, it started out to be a factual question that can be a very serious problem for people in those situations with disproportionate real-world penalties for certain transgressions. I didn’t hear anyone give a cry for intervention to help them, it was just a question about what people generally do when it does happen.
Keeping in mind that this is GQ, the question was how in the fuck do people without a driver’s license get fucking food. Anyone’s Superior Judgement about why anyone else would live anywhere else is a tangential waste of time. Answer the fucking question, or shut the fuck up, politely.
Moderator Note
bobot, keeping in mind that this is GQ - as well as the fact that you are not a moderator - this post is completely out of line. Don’t abuse other posters, even indirectly, and don’t junior mod. The only reason this is not a warning because it’s your first offense. Don’t do this again.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I think you’ve got a kind of a strange idea about how choice works. If there’s folks who live in lead paint houses, do you think they’re like, “Well, we could live in a perfectly safe houses, but we really like the lead-paint option”?
Most of the folks we’re talking about are not in a position to buy any kind of a house anywhere, much less a house in a nice area, or a condo near the subway.
humble apologies :smack:
None of those are GQ answers.
The many GQ answers (ask a friend or family member for help, arrange through grocery delivery either through a service or through some private arrangement, walk or bike or take public transportation, consider moving to a place that fits your new circumstances, request a restricted license) have been well discussed in this thread. Many people have contributed their own firsthand experiences with car-less grocery shopping.
All that’s left now is “But what if I live in a lighthouse a hundred miles from civilization without a friend in the world and with only five dollars in my pocket? What then?”
That’s what we did back in the '60s, when we lived a mile outside a small town (~4500 pop) and didn’t own a car.
What I wonder is, what does the government expect people to do? For most people getting a first time DWI or DUI is a 1 year drivers license suspension. For many people work is a 30 minute drive. How does the government expect these people to get to work everyday?
And I live in a subdivision just outside of Dallas, and withing 1.5 miles of my house I have four grocery stores, 4 public parks, a public library, twenty places to eat, a Target, a YMCA, a rec center, a bunch of resale shops, two community pools, probably fifteen churches, five or more banks, my State Farm agent, a half-price books, an office supply store . . .Honest to god, there are not that many places in Dallas that are not walkable, and I have TONS of students in Dallas proper with no family car. They don’t starve for lack of access to shopping.
The government expects people to retain their drivers license by not driving drunk in the first place (cite for one state).
Okay, those are not nearly the same thing.
You want to live 20 miles from the nearest anything, yeah you need a car. You lose your license, you need to find a friend to live with until that’s over.
You live 3 miles from the nearest grocery store and lose your license, you need to buy some good walking shoes.
I grew up in a rural area, and I knew lots of people who didn’t have a car. Sure, a commute of over an hour sucks, but when walking is all you have, walking is what you do.
I have aunts and uncles who live is a VERY rural area, and when they got too infirm to walk a dozen miles, they moved closer to things. They either moved into town, or the moved closer to their children, or the had their children move closer to them. Easy enough to get your daughter to drive you to the doctor when she lives across the driveway from you.
I am AMAZED at how many people find it unthinkable to walk 3 miles along a busy road with no sidewalk. Scary? Yes. Impossible? No.
I live in an urban area with no though given to pedestrians and a bus service that barely exists. Losing my license gave me a very clear choice: find some way to get to work, or find a nice overpass to live under when I lost my apartment.
I have been biking to work for 7 years now, and I am middle-aged, pudgy, asthmatic, and have bad knees.
Yes, having your license suspended is supposed to be incredibly inconvenient. Yes, it is expected you will have problems getting to work.
I don’t think the argument is that there aren’t places where it’s easy to get by without a car, but that there are plenty of places where it’s difficult/impossible. Anecdotes about walkable lifestyles are not significant.
I’m genuinely curious : can someone point me to a google maps/streetview of such a suburban car-only area ?
I read that he was presenting an unwalkable location as typical in “cities like Dallas and Houston” and his anecdote was meant to illustrate how people in those cities can’t get around without a car. I don’t know about Houston, but in Dallas/DFW there aren’t that many areas that are truly isolated.