I lived there quite happily for 4 years without a car, and another 3 where we hardly used the car we owned.
For different reasons altogether…
Anaktuvuk Pass and Umiat, AK. I lived in both quite comfortably for months at a time w/o a car. There are no roads.
Easy-peasy, but it’s gotten a bit expensive on the Capitol Corridor train. I used to do a daily SAC-SF commute about 15 years ago. It is a l-o-n-g commute, but you’ve got an hour or more on the train to snooze, have breakfast, whatever.
There’s about 16 runs per day in each direction from Davis. If your destination in Sacramento is near Old Sac and/or the northwest side of downtown, it’s great. If you’re going to San Francisco, you can either hop over to BART at Richmond or take the Amtrak shuttle bus from Emeryville into downtown SF. IIRC, BART will get you downtown faster as the bus has to cross the Bay Bridge, which is normally jammed up.
Arlington, VA - it’s right outside DC, so it arguably doesn’t deserve a separate mention, but the County puts enough effort into the Arlington Rapid Transit bus system (and bike trails! yay!) that I think it deserves its own shout-out. For a place with just a couple hundred thousand people, it puts a lot of effort into making public transit useable.
By the way, a question - does anyone know if Baltimore is liveable without a car? Specifically, the area around Johns Hopkins Hospital.
If you can afford body armor…
All right - assuming plentiful Kevlar, is public transit sufficient to live in the city without a car?
Something like 50% of Montrealers don’t have a car, IIRC (which I may not). I’ve lived here since I was 13 and have never gotten a driver’s licence, and most of my friends don’t have one either except the ones who used to live out of town.
We have a huge central residential density compared to a lot of North American cities, which helps a lot.
NOTE TO READERS: check your policy; yours could differ. Assuming you are a licensed driver and assuming you haven’t stolen my car, you are covered under my insurance. And thank God for that because there are a LOT of people who have used my cars when I’ve had one. Almost community property.
If you rent a car, basically the same thing. Some companies, if you don’t have3 a car or insurance, will require a small additional charge and basically make their optional insurance required but its no big deal.
Baltimore around JH? I would believe so but with some frustrations. Friends have told me that a lot of attractive activities are hard to reach sometimes by mass transit and the cabs in Baltimore are something between basically reliable and jitney service. In other words, they didn’t like the taxis much. Never tried it personally though.
New York and DC have been mentioned. I’m told Portland OR is great.
Many small cities join the list if you can ride a bicycle.
I live in LA and don’t have a car. My partner does, but most of my travel is without one. I could easily afford one, but choose not to.
Berkeley, California
I’m not a native, but I’ve spent time in SD and thought the public transit system was pretty shoddy. My brother told me is it because San Diego was a city built after WW2, so it was built around an automobile, vs older cities (100+ years old) that were built around foot travel and horses.
The train in SD is really good, but the buses were disappointing to me. I once spent 2.5 hours riding the bus system to get somewhere it takes 15-20 minutes to drive to.
I would assume there are a lot of island towns/cities that don’t need cars. Mackinac Island in Michigan (besides being a tourist trap) is well known for not allowing cars on the island.
Portland, OR definitely has an excellent transit system.
I’m also sans car in LA. I suppose if I was more of an extrovert it’d be a problem, but I don’t feel not driving holds me back in any way. I go out where I want, as often as I want.
Like NYC and Montreal, San Francisco is one of those cities where having a car is probably more annoying that not having one.
I am on outlier in this regard, but I lived in Austin TX happily without a car for about 2 years. Of course, I had to pretend that all that sprawl to to north and south of the city didn’t exist, but most of the interesting stuff is in a pretty small area. For example, where I lived on 51st Street in the “north” (to me) of town was only about 6 miles by bike to say, the Continental Club on South Congress or Barton Springs on the south of the river. And it’s nearly always biking weather there, provided you don’t mind the ridiculous heat.
But don’t you want to get out of the city, sometimes? I feel like much of the appeal of Vancouver is its proximity to the mountains and water (and i’m not even a big hiker, snowboarder or kayaker, though I somehow become one when I’m in Vancouver). Maybe it’s because my friends there are weekend warrior types, but I feel like if I lived there without a car, I’d be missing out.
Yep. My brother lived in DC for the summer as an intern for our local congressman and didn’t own a car. Didn’t need one. Lived just off of the subway line, and just about everywhere we wanted to go was within walking distance of the subway.
Seconded, but ONLY in some parts. If there are no grocery stores within walking distance, you’ve got to take the bus or the Metro to go grocery shopping and that’s a huge hassle.
We lived near Dupont Circle for a while and the shopping options were quite bad. We tended to drive out to the 'burbs for that.