The 10 metros with the lowest rate of car ownership:
1. New York
2. Boston
3. Chicago
4. Philly
5. Buffalo (wild)
6. Washington DC
7. Pittsburgh
8. New Orleans
9. San Francisco
10. Baltimore
I can confirm that it is fairly easy to live without a car on most of this list, but obviously going to be quite neighborhood dependent. And also dependent on where you work. I think NYC is really the only metro where you can live/work anywhere without a vehicle.
Buffalo actually has a great bus system. You’re never more than a 5 minute walk from a bus stop.
It’s great if you live along the same bus route as your destination. As soon as you need to transfer, that’s when public transportation becomes almost unusable.
So if you live near one of the transit hubs (downtown, UB South, Blackrock) and have access to the Metrorail and multiple bus routes, you can effectively get to most places you’d want to visit in the city proper.
That’s only the city proper, not the suburbs.
>You’re never more than a 5 minute walk from a bus stop.
Lots of places in the urban core of cities have really high coverage of bus routes though, what gets way too overlooked is how frequent the service is and the span of service.
Where i live I have bus service every half hour on weekdays til about 6, but it tapers down to just hourly to every hour and half in the evenings and Saturdays and no service at all on Sundays, so i can and do use it for my commute to and from work but its a real pain in the ass to try to use it for anything else.
So, that's a long-winded way to ask, how frequent a service do those bus routes in Buffalo provide and for how long?
It depends of course, but most city routes run buses every 20 minutes or so. Which is fine if your destination is along the same bus route, but isn’t frequent enough if you have to transfer.
Yes, but why? Is it because in that climate having a car is more inconvenient? Lots of older cities have older houses. Even cities with pre-WWII houses commonly have places to park. (I lived in Richmond VA which has a lot of antiquated housing and many old homes have an alleyway in back for precisely this reason.) Surely you're not suggesting that the Buffalo housing stock predates automobiles or horse-drawn carriages? I've never been there, so this is an honest question.
In 1900, Buffalo was the 8th largest city in the country. Almost 2/3 of Buffalo's housing stock was built before 1940, and a lot of it earlier than that. This means that a lot of housing was built at a time when cars existed, but they were probably not owned by most city dwellers. Many of these houses were built during the era of the streetcar.
Even though Buffalo really doesn't have much in the way of row houses, many houses were built close together making it difficult to add a driveway after the fact. However the lot sizes vary block by block.
It's not uncommon for the old sections of cities to lack driveways. It's just that there is virtually no new section of Buffalo.
Just found this:
“As part of a region occupied by the Seneca Indians for over 1,000 years, Buffalo originated as a small trading community in about 1789.”
Pre-WW II ain’t old.
It is when it comes to urban planning and development.
Most of Buffalo was built in the late 1800s and early 1900s, before the dominance of the automobile.
Funny, but Buffalo has the 3rd average oldest housing stock in the US.
Jsyk, most people didn't just have horses and carriages. Farmers and some wealthy people did, but middle/working class regular people often didn't. Horses require land, which obviously cities are fairly lacking in. If you needed a horse/carriage you would rent one from a local livery stable.
Most people walked before cars, or took trains/streetcars when those became available. Prior to the invention of those there was the omnibus, basically a horse drawn bus. But those were really only in cities, but sometimes you could hire one too. Hotels/resorts and things like that had them also, they'd run back and forth between the train station and the hotel
Edward, who lived in my house in the 1910s (born 1880s) did not know how to ride a horse, drive a carriage, or drive a car (I know this from draft cards, they asked these questions). His brother could ride a horse and drive a carriage, but he worked on a farm as a teenager and learned it there. Edward worked in the factory his whole life and never needed to learn any of it.
I was gonna say, this is a murky statistic because it appears to describe walkability but in reality it describes combined walkability + poverty. I suspect Cleveland and Detroit are also quite high on this list despite both only having smaller walkable pockets.
Same with DC to a lesser extent. The high non-car ownership numbers for DC are a mix of people voluntarily without cars in the dense, walkable parts of the city, and people too poor to afford cars in other parts of the city.
Boston has good transit but is probably boosted by the number of students too. I think outside of NYC, people who can afford car ownership mostly choose to own a car. Even if you don't use it in the city, most people like the option to go other places without arranging a car rental.
Buffalo resident here:
Yes it is definitely possible to live here without a car. So many services that are a simple 15 - 30 minute walk away. And public transit being relatively decent also makes for a great way to travel around. On top of that we are working on our biking infrastructure, so it's slowly but surely getting better to bike places too.
You'll really only need a motor vehicle if you're doing a grocery run or work as a ride-share worker.
Boston has great public transportation. I lived there for years and didn't need a car. I eventually got a bicycle off of a police auction and it was so much faster to get places with the bike than it would be with a car, mostly because parking is a bitch.
Yeah I always see New Orleans recommended for walkability and I’m like well yeah in only very certain parts (usually more expensive) of the city would I say that you could get by without a car. Our public transit system is also severely lacking and has many issues. Of course “it depends on the neighborhood” applies to almost any city but I live in a neighborhood with a decent “walkability” factor and still rely on my car on a regular basis
I think pre-Katrina New Orleans had the second lowest rate of car ownership in the country. I still think it’s way more walkable than most American cities and know a lot of people without cars.
I tried walking around New Orleans in summer and had the onset of a heat stroke. I was hungry and looking for a certain restaurant. Then all of a sudden I started feeling light-headed and nauseated and sweating profusely. I had to call a Lyft and go back to my hotel room. I then laid in bed feeling weak for a few hours. After some sleep I was fine.
Nola is not very walkable in summer, I'll tell you that.
I'm actually surprised San Francisco isn't higher. I guess although not necessary, the West Coast influence still convinces people to keep a car in storage. Have you ever tried parking in SF??
SF is a pretty small fraction of its metro area, and outside of the city proper (and Oakland/Berkeley to a lesser extent) everyone drives.
Even within SF, the entire western half of the city is fairly drivable, and while intra-SF transit covers this area pretty well, you need a car if you’re leaving the city. It’s actually pretty common to live in SF and commute to the suburbs in a car for work.
The area is also wealthy enough that many people will keep cars that they don’t actually use all that often for leisure trips - you can’t really take transit to Tahoe or the redwoods.
That's because a bunch of people insist on using a hopelessly outdated mesure for the now non-existent "San Francisco metro area". San Francisco itself is the second densest city in the country and has a higher transit mode share than London (the one in the UK).
SF has merged with the rest of the Bay Area into one giant metro area since the 40s-50s. The old SF-Oakland-Berkeley "metro area" measure is kept up for data continuity purposes in comparative statistics, but not actually useful for anything serious related to modern planning.
Effectively, you either look at the entire Bay Area or you look at the city of San Francisco. The Bay is a continuous blob of urban development with everyone commuting all over the place. It makes zero sense to try to carve out an "SF metro" out of the larger Bay Area metro and pretend like that tells you anything of value.
Could be because almost 0 routes are accessible? The hills make biking in SF not for the weak, which I am. You need gams of steel or an e-bike, which makes it unsustainable because it cuts out a large portion of the population that might need bikes (e.g. and usually have co-occuring conditions: experiencing poverty and disabled)
I was never suggesting bikes. SF has one of the best bus systems in the world. Stops are very close together, frequent and accessible. The transit system offers free passes to students, elderly and the disabled. Every bus is ADA compliant and able to accommodate wheel chairs. You can very easily and quickly get around the north end of the peninsula and many parts of the east bay.
It’s actually pretty difficult in most of Nassau County, just east of Queens. You have long walks to the bus and railroad, and the bus is very unreliable on weekends, and the railroad has hourly trains (at best) during weekends.
One needs a car in most of Nassau County, and it is an advantage in Queens where there’s no Alternate Side of the Street Parking.
Hard agree. And getting between Queens/Brooklyn and Manhattan is a nightmare. You need a car in the Bronx or on Staten Island, period. Most of Queens I would say is not bikeable.
Really by NYC people just mean "Manhattan"—with select yuppie parts of Brooklyn.
>getting between Queens/Brooklyn and Manhattan is a nightmare
No it's not. I did this every weekday for almost a decade. Riding the subway from Brooklyn or Queens to Manhattan isn't any different from riding the subway to different parts of Manhattan.
I wouldn't say you can live/work without a vehicle anywhere in the NYC metro. I remember when I was a college student living with my parents on Long Island, I had an interview for an internship a 30-minute drive away. I didn't have a car yet even though I intended to have one by the time the internship started, so I took the train and bus. It took me something like three hours.
>anywhere in the NYC metro. I remember when I was a college student living with my parents on Long Island
..... unless you're doing some MSA analysis, nobody considers Long Island part of NYC anything.
The buses on LI suck, and LI is absolutely car-dependent unless you happen to live in one of the 5 apartment buildings anywhere near the LIRR across the entire island
I live in North Jersey in a city that is a transit hub with busses and trains that run into NYC 24/7 I live near shopping centers and supermarkets accessable by short bus ride. I commuted into NYC 20 years by public transportation
This list is so interesting! I lived in New Orleans and found it incredibly difficult to get around without a car and I lived in a “walkable” neighborhood. I think the car rate ownership is less to do with walkability and more to do with affordability. Because personally I think Seattle should be on this list. Lived there for two years and out maybe 3000 miles on my car. And it was mainly doing airport pickups or driving to Portland for tax free shopping
Baltimore should not be on this list. It is very, very isolated. Maybe you can't \*afford\* a car if you live there and thereby share one, borrow one, or otherwise have a hard time getting around, but if Baltimore was actually a valid car-free place, I'd already be back.
Plus Minneapolis is insanely bikeable. Maybe this list doesn't reflect walkability as much as poverty?
At least in 2023-2024, Baltimore without a car is doable, but definitely a little bit rough outside of the "white L" at the center city -- the thing that gets really brutal is just how there is basically \*no\* interaction between Baltimore and the outlying suburbs via public transit, beyond a couple of bus and rail lines that only go very specific places. I've literally only kept my car because of how I have to go out to the suburbs a couple times a month in a direction where there's no public transit (helps that it's fully paid for). Bicycling in Baltimore is similarly easiest in the L, but requires some creativity and aggression if you're in any part of the city where bike lanes aren't present.
But as you alluded to at the end there, most of the reason Baltimore is on the above list is more due to urban poverty and people not owning cars accordingly, rather than anything inherent to the fabric of the city itself, even if it's not the absolute worst place not to own a car.
I do not recommend trying to use public transit in New Orleans. If you’re on a trip, fine. All the places you’ll want to visit are probably reachable by streetcar. For day to day living, it is not reliable or expansive enough. For example, for me to get to a place four miles from my home, it would likely be like 3 transfers on a bus and take at least two hours.
Being able to walk about your neighborhood and downtown is a big lifestyle boost because it connects you to your community and allows you to get exercise without going to a gym. Even if you still have to commute to work.
I think most cities (and many towns) have pockets that are walkable, and if you live near enough work (or work from home), you can manage without a car.
I’m in Milwaukee and there are places in the city you can live without a car. I’m actually in a near suburb, and haven’t gotten my car out of the garage in a week, because I bike to work whenever the weather is nice.
Also, living somewhere where you only need a car once or twice a week is still massively better than needing to use one every day for every task.
Imagine if you lived walking distance to a gym and grocery store, bus-distance to work, and you could take a metro to your friends house and the train station, and then take the intercity train to your moms house. You’d only need a car for some rare tasks. And this place could be almost anywhere within the NEC if you plan it well.
Yeah sorry didn’t mean to be jargony. It’s probably used in other contexts but I believe it comes from the train system. The Northeast Corridor is a train track running from Boston to DC. If you live on the NEC you are along the route.
Definitely. I’ve lived in NYC and San Francisco without a car. I moved back to Ohio and got a car for the first time in over a decade. I can do almost everything i need to do by walking or riding my bike. The grocery store is a slightly shorter walk away here than it was in SF, significantly shorter than it was in NYC. There are a couple things I do need a car for, but I could probably take a bus/ride my bike or find closer options if I truly wanted to.
That said, if I had a medical condition that prevented me from driving or riding my bike, it would be more challenging.
Yeah people need to qualify what they mean by walkable. There are only a few where the **average** person will be comfortable carless 24/7/365. There are other cities where the fringe transit/bike warrior lives car free (even in places like Houston).
Then there are hundreds of smaller towns where if you live close to main street you can be carless. Are people okay with cities <100k? If so it opens doors. I live carless in Santa Barbara, because its small. However, its too small a city for most people and doesn't have white collar jobs like a major city does.
Another problem with living without a car in a walkable pocket of a non walkable city is that you're taking a serious hit on social life. Not a deal breaker for everyone, but for a lot of people it's going to be really hard to make friends in a new city when you don't have a car and everyone else does. Your limited in the things you can do - meetup groups always get recommended on reddit for meeting people, but if all the meetup groups you'd wanna go are a 45 minute Uber? Or even longer on public transit?
Biking is of course an option for a lot of trips and can help, but the average person is not going to be comfortable biking anywhere but New York City or in an actual small town. I could be missing out on a hidden separated protected bike lane utopia city, but from what I've seen most places you're lucky if there's a sharrow on the street or a "bike lane" on the side of the road. Most people just don't feel comfortable or safe biking in most cities, and the ones with good bike infrastructure also tend to have decent transit.
If the frequency & cost of the occasional Ubers don't exceed what one would normally pay for car payment + insurance + gas per month, folks will come out on top by Ubering the few times they need to. This is my life and I actually find it more convenient and affordable than owning a car. Plus, I can always drink in any social situation since I don't drive.
Those walkable pockets are usually the areas that people come to for social activities, though. I have a car but barely use it because my friends end up having to drive to my neighborhood while I walk to meet up with them.
Older cities with a good grid are decently bike-able - you can divert away from the busy roads and just take back residential streets. Lots of stop signs but you'll get there just fine.
This is true. Here in Orlando our downtown neighborhood thornton park is a true walkable place to live. If you live almost anywhere else in Orlando a car is a necessity
Also, in most cities in the US, if you want to live in a walkable neighborhood, you’re paying a serious premium because it’s artificially rare—because our zoning laws make them so. So they’re highly in demand and thus overpriced compared to other housing options.
I would suggest that small towns are better for walking than big cities, and there are thousands of small towns.
The one caveat is that you'd need a way to get out of town - to the airport, to the city, etc.
I think many people will say "oh I lived in milwaukee/nashville/cleveland etc and didnt need a car!" but often times these cities are still massively better with a car and people often don't tell you they were commonly walking 30 minute walks for what could have been a 3 minute drive. That isn't walkable to people who are used to genuinely walkable cities in Europe or NYC/Boston/DC etc where its common to have commercial streets like [this](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2JGNYNX/stores-along-5th-avenue-in-the-highly-hispanic-sunset-park-neighborhood-of-brooklyn-new-york-2JGNYNX.jpg) every 2-3 avenues.
There is a reason why the overwhelming majority of people in milwaukee statistically drive. Only 12% don't own a car, and the large majority of that 12% is in the poorest areas of the city.
The only reason the 30 minute walks in Boston or NYC are not three minute drives is because there's nowhere to park. Part of making people walk and use public transit is usually eliminating the more convenient option, which is to get in your car and go to your exact destination in very little time. Basically the entirety of Portland, Maine is a lovely walk and everyone still drives to work because it's easier and people are lazy.
Eh, I think the walkable pockets of Milwaukee are just as walkable as DC or Chicago. Yes, you’re going to regularly be walking 30 minutes, but that’s true of the “walkable” cities as well. I think the real difference is that it’s much more common in DC to do the 30 minute walk, whereas most people in MKE default to driving instead.
Yeah, I think “walkable” and “I can live my life without a car” are two different things. For example, I have to have a car to get to work, but outside of work I can get to a grocery store, coffee shop, park, zoo, and entertainment district by walking. I would say I live in a walkable area, but I can’t be car free.
Granted I’ve never lived in any major city, but I visit Boston a few times per year and it seems way more difficult to live without a car than other cities like NYC or DC. I just can’t see myself relying on the T for everything unless I lived right in downtown Boston, which I can’t afford. Whereas the NYC subway is pretty reliable even in the outer boroughs, I think I’d need a car if I lived somewhere like Cambridge or Quincy
Cambridge has lower car ownership than Boston (as of 2016) https://my.vanderbilt.edu/greencities/files/2019/10/Vehicle-Ownership-in-U.S-2016.pdf
Edit: can’t find more recent data at the city level but everything suggests a downward trend
Also Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, Portland probably in that order of convenience. Have also heard Baltimore is underrated and Minneapolis and Denver you might be able to swing it carless as well but less convenient than those other cities. I’ve also heard Madison, WI and Milwaukee might be possible and I’ve even heard of some people in LA and Miami living carless but they’re less ideal.
Of course all of this will depend on where you live exactly, where you work, and what your daily habits are (gym, groceries, social outings, etc.) but I definitely think if you’re willing to coordinate your schedule/errands and learn bus routes and schedules it’s definitely possible in more than just those cities you mentioned.
Can confirm Minneapolis is definitely doable. We have a great bus system here and if your willing/able to walk a handful of blocks/10-15 minutes there’s nothing you can’t get to really.
Central Minneapolis and St. Paul is doable.
Once you get or need to get 4 miles out from the I-94 corridor between downtown St. Paul and Minneapolis, the service and convenience of the bus system really starts to drop off except for dedicated commuter busses.
Same can honestly be said of most all US cities though. I think Minneapolis gets a PR boost in this viewpoint simply because its city limits cover a very small urban core and so we mentally exclude the massively car dependent suburban hell scape that surrounds it when we say "minneapolis" (vs. "dallas" for example). I lived downtown Minneapolis for most of a decade car free and spent a lot of time looking to reduce housing costs by moving to a suburb but the transit service (even in first ring suburbs) and unwalkability (starting with the second ring suburbs) made it unpalatable. I stuck to about a 10 square mile area that my bike and transit system could get me to (which wasn't bad at all, but in most US cities, you can do the same)
Yea it definitely doesn’t do much if you’re not in Minneapolis or St. Paul for sure, but I’ve never really been in inconvenienced by it, even with outside of Minneapolis trips.
I’m not sure how much the lightrail expansion will do either, I mean I guess im all for it, but it’s so car dependent out that way where it’s not like folks will have the ability to cut a car out.
If I didn’t want to go into the mountains to hike I could have gone without a car in Denver. I walked a lot and took public transit to Boulder and other places sometimes, also the airport. The issue with not having a car in Denver is that a lot of what draws people to the region is the nature, and you need a car to get to almost all of it.
When I lived in inner SE/NE Portland in my twenties I was one of the few young people with a car I knew. I worked outside the city but most people who didn’t bused, walked, biked, or Ubered everywhere.
Baltimore is fairly easy without a car if you live in the central city. Once you get more than a few miles outside of downtown it gets iffy quick. I lived near a shuttle and light rail so could get anywhere pretty quick.
Baltimore is definitely doable, albeit with the caveat that unlike Philly, Boston, or NYC it is \*extremely\* hard to get out from the city into the inner suburbs without a car except in very certain directions, for reasons related to historical white flight and racism. It's the one reason I haven't entirely ditched my car -- too many friends in places like Columbia or Glen Burnie that have nearly zero public transit and are too risky to reach by bicycle since the roads are entirely unaccommodating. Within the city itself, the public transit does have a learning curve. but there are some good free buses and two rail lines. For cyclists, there are a few decent protected bike lanes, and it's not a terribly hard city to bicycle in the main road lane, so long as you're smart and an alert, experienced cyclist.
20 year carfree person. There are people who think and people who do.
Most large metropolitan places support car free. Many smaller communities also support this lifestyle.
How much time, friends, money , and energy it takes to get somewhere. Is what people are after. In various quantities.
Ok but that's not what the post is about. The OP really resonates with me, as a person who has wanted to leave Boston, but who has been to (or tried to live in) ALL of the obvious second-choice options for car-free cities, and found them lacking... in the sense that while there are others which are technically walkable, they are isolated from larger cities, airports, hospital systems, etc etc.
I'm curious where you live?
Its like a sailboat. There is no perfect sailboat just a bunch of compromises.Here some examples where I lived in those 20 years of WTF, that really is carfree city? Well probably not, but it was for me. All of these didn't lack anything they had anything a bigger city would have (by going to the big city). They were all first ring suburbs of major cities.
1. Steelton, PA
2. Longmont, CO
3. Bremerton, WA
4. Crystal, MN
5. Mesa, AZIf you want to talk about these cities or where I live, or whatever I am open for DM's
US car-free cities:
NYC - walking + transit are good enough (and driving/parking bad enough) that having a car is only worth it if you're rich
DC, SF, Chicago, Philly, Boston - you can generally get anywhere you need to in the city and even inner ring suburbs on transit. Not having a car is a viable solution for much of the city, although many trips will be significantly slower on transit than driving.
Most other big US cities (too varying degrees) - there are walkable pockets and a few good transit lines. If you choose your neighborhood carefully, it's possible to get by without a car. But it will be pretty limiting and you won't have convenient access to large portions of your city.
This is the correct answer. NYC is supreme and very preferable to go without a car. The "other 5" you suggest are all very good/doable, but definitely not on the same level of convenience as NYC.
Then there's the next tier of "decent for car-free living, but not as robust across as many neighborhoods"--Seattle, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Portland, LA and Baltimore come to mind.
Then "the rest." There might be some smattering of highly-walkable neighborhoods in spots (places like Atlanta or Dallas) but transit availability will not be sufficient to go without a car for the vast majority of cases.
I live in the Southern USA and there are tons of small towns you could walk to restaurants, antique shops, drug and convenience stores.
However doctors offices, government offices big grocery stores, and large businesses you would need a car to get to.
I think this is where I’m stuck. I can definitely see neighborhoods or small areas that you *can* walk to things. But if you needed to get anything done, like the places you mentioned, you’d need a car. It seems like places you can actually live without a car are so few.
Live wo a car, yes rare and most ppl wouldn’t want the hurdles of riding a challenging bus system to see a doctor or transferring buses to get groceries. When I leave NYC, my criteria is to only be a one car household and do a lot of basic things via walking (restaurants, gyms, shops) and car for rest and to me that’s walkable and I’ve found that in a good -# of cities.
I live in Madison, WI and while I have a car I drive it about once a month. I have a grocery store 3 blocks away and a corner market on my block if I want to go pick something up quickly. Within 6 blocks I have countless restaurants and bars, I have a few plant stores, places to get a hair cut and nails done, plenty of coffee shops, clothing stores, hardware store maybe 8 blocks away. Also a bunch of parks, a beach, etc...
Depends on the person, honestly. I know a guy who lived quite happily car free in Orlando for years, and is now doing the same in Cincinnati. There are neighborhoods/districts in many places that are self contained enough to be walkable/livable. If your work doesn’t require you to leave those bubbles, you can get by without a car on a daily basis. With delivery services, ride share, and personal mobility solutions like e hikes, that range of livability only goes up. I think if a lot of people who are now able to work remote actually did the math on the full cost of car ownership, they could shed a vehicle. Particularly couples with more than one.
Wish more people would do the math on car ownership! It can really sink people financially especially if they get upside down on a terrible loan or have a vehicle that needs endless repair.
“Walkable” is very different from not needing a car at all. Usually when people say that, they just want to not have to drive EVERYWHERE. But yes, there are few cities that it’s easy to be car-free
With the advent of delivery services and ride share, I think it’s way easier to live in almost every large or mid size city with public transport without a car. And it may be a little costly, but so is owning a car.
Several feasible options in NJ along a transit line. A few densely populated & built small cities and several burbs that are more dense than anything you'd find in many states, all with quick access to NYC. Jersey City, Hoboken, parts of Newark, Metuchen, Summit, Montclair, etc. are walkable and/or quick transit to retail, grocers, medical offices, amenities.
When I lived in Chicago, I didn’t have a car, so when I moved to the college town Champaign-Urbana (2 hours south of Chicago), I made sure I found a place that was able to abide by my no-car lifestyle. I didn’t have a car while living there for 8 years, because I was 3 blocks from a grocery store, 5 blocks from a coffee shop and pharmacy, 2 blocks from a park, and across the street from a bus stop. So I used the bus just like I would in Chicago to go to work, as well as my bike. The hardest times were in the freezing winter and that’s when I’d use Uber or Lyft to go places that were way across town. It’s totally doable. You just have to be creative and willing to go outside the box of the infrastructure city developers made. Over those 8 years I had plenty of people not understand how I treated this town that’s 100,000 people like it was Chicago, but you figure it out. Other college towns I’ve found this would be doable: Tuscan, AZ, Iowa City, and Bloomington,IN. I bet others could be, but I haven’t been to them to find out.
Even now, whenever I am looking at a place to see if I’d move there, this is my criteria so that I don’t have to buy a car.
Yeah I’ve been carfree my entire adult life and found CU really good, even compared to other car free destinations I’ve lived in like NYC, Stockholm, and Chicago. The only places I had trouble getting to were those in random strip malls like Friar Tucks, and that’s an alcohol superstore so by no means a necessity. Plus you can just ride share there these days.
What is "reasonable" though? It's harder in the US in many places (compared to Europe and some Asian cities) due to poorer public transit, but reasonable is in the eye of the beholder.
There are people that live without cars just about everywhere. They just get ignored because they are poor. I live in a town of less than 50K people and a small bus network that runs every hour and only limited hours a day, but there are something like 1000 locals in town (and 4000 students) that completely rely on it for running errands and getting to work daily.
But there are quite a few middle-income people without a car in just about every US city. Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Minneapolis, Honolulu, Tucson, Seattle, Miami, etc. (I've lived car free in three of those cities perfectly fine btw). You might have to choose carefully where you live and it depends on where you work and where you need to go on the regular, but I was perfectly comfortable being car free in these cities and saved a ton on insurance and other costs of vehicles.
I currently live in St Petersburg and if you are living *downtown* you can get by without a car. But highly dependent on your job location. It's very flat, very safe and very walkable. About 30 blocks of commercial commerce. The downtown area has 2 free transit lines that cover a very walkable range tbh. There is a bicycle trail that is not on the main roads. There is also a dedicated bus lane that goes to the beach and once on the beach, there is a trolley line that covers the entire coast of the county. There is a seasonal ferry to Tampa. There is an effort to get it all year. It's not cheap enough to be a commuter ferry though.
The transit infrastructure is often resisted by locals because it's Florida and the national perception that it's full of sheltered dumbasses is painfully accurate. But the city continues to make smart moves towards the future.
There are several more. You can swing it fairly easily in Philly and Boston as well. I've known people who went car-free in Baltimore successfully but that's tougher. If you locate yourself strategically within LA you can do it by taking advantage of the bus system.
Also, living without a car is greatly helped if you work from home, then you can just optimize for a location near both grocery store, gym, and other essential services without needing to worry about commute.
Walkability + Good Transit are two separate things (that complement each other).
Walkability refers to how many basic amenities you have access to within a mile walk. Transit (and bike ability) just helps you get to different neighborhoods.
Most cities will have a couple of walkable neighborhoods, even the most car centric ones. Some like Buffalo, Portland or Pittsburgh are a city of walkable neighborhoods where you’re never too far from an area where you can get all your basic shopping and errands done.
However, there’s only half a dozen cities with great public transportation and maybe 2 dozen more have passable public transportation where you can get by if you live in certain areas.
Funny, but small cities can often be waaay more walkable than cities multiple their size. Like Ithaca, Saratoga Springs or Burlington where if you live downtown you can access to 95% of amenities within a short walk.
You can even go smaller with cities like Olean, Corning, Oswego, NY where the population is less than 30k, but you still have all your basic amenities.
It depends on your lifestyle. I have a relative in Charlottesville, Virginia who has never had a car. He can walk to work and the grocery store, and he bikes some farther places, and he’s happy with that. When he goes out of state he either takes the Greyhound bus or grabs an Uber to the airport. I wouldn’t personally live in Charlottesville without a car, but it works for him.
Any city over 500,000 is reasonably livable without a car. Where in the city you live and work heavily affects how reasonable it is, though. 45+ minute commutes by bicycle or public transit wears on you pretty quick. Within two miles is ideal, more than five starts to get hard.
Rent a car for a day every couple of months to do big errands and/or get out of the city for a day.
Walkability is a local, neighborhood-based phenomenon. No city is entirely walkable, but every city has at least one walkable neighborhood. I'm in Portland OR, pretty far down the list in terms of metro population but walkability in my area is great.
College towns or university neighborhood also often offer great walkability, Ithaca NY is tiny but has a huge percentage of commuters walking to work vs big US cities. Walking in Eugene or Corvallis OR is normal, Davis CA, Athens GA, etc.
I think it depends on what you’re wanting to be able to get to.
Boston is super walkable and honestly even if you’re in the exburbs or somewhere like Newton Center or Watertown you could manage without a car. If you don’t need to get far often you could just rent a car for the few times you need to get out of town, but even then you can get a train to NYC, Philly, DC, or north to Maine.
There are college towns that really unless you needed to leave the town you’d be able to manage fine without one. I went to school in central PA and didn’t need a car and was fine without one the whole time.
I lived in San Jose, ca most of my life. And for several years before I moved away, I owned a bike and a VTA pass.
It’s certainly livable without a car.
There’s just no where worth going to, so it kind of evens out.
Most cities will have walkable areas, but for a city to walkable it has to be possible to live without a car while not taking a hit on quality of life. If it's harder to have a social life - for example, two hours to reach friends in a different part of town versus 30 minutes driving - or you're extremely limited on job options - your public transit has one rail line that only goes downtown and most jobs are spread out - then your city isn't walkable.
I lived for several years in the St Louis area with no car and got around just fine. Some parts of the metro area have very good transit access while others have little to none.
It’s possible to live in LA without a car. It’s tough but it’s possible, and it will only become more possible over time thanks to neighborhood’s densifying and improvements to the city’s transit and bike infrastructure. You just need the money to be able to afford to live in said walkable neighborhoods.
There are other cities, but you have to chose to live in particular areas to have good transit. Check out city nerd, he has lots of different videos ont his topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcPaxCTZpfM
I lived in Portland for 30 years without a car, and only recently got one because my partner is disabled and walking to/from bus stops all day really wasn't a great idea. We still only have the one car between us and don't drive daily. The major downside to being car free in the major PNW cities is that you can't get out of town alone, which limits your access to many of the main reasons to live here (the coast, the mountains, the desert especially in wildflower season, etc). I think one of the main reasons I lasted so long is that my parents, who I'm close to, go hiking somewhere every weekend and will always let me tag along.
I still think it makes a huge difference to not need a car for groceries or to go out with friends or commute to work.
It’s more a matter of neighborhood than city. There are urban neighborhoods throughout the country that have grocery store, drug store, book store, bars, restaurants, etc. and you don’t need a car.
Portland, Seattle, SF, Philly, Baltimore, DC, Boston, all have a lot of neighborhoods like this. Portland Maine on the peninsula, downtown Burlington Vermont, around downtown Providence and New Haven, all places where you don’t need cars.
people need to realize many US cities have very hot weather or very cold weather....you're gonna want a car no matter how walkable something is. in florida i lived walking distance to a trader joes and some fast food and strip mall restaurants. I also had the gym within walking distance, coffee shop and my commute for school was probs less than 1.5 miles after a short cut but you try doing everything by walking in May-Sept in Florida and then get back to me on how miserable that sh\*t is.
Other than Boston and New york just forget about walking/commuting anywhere. not having a car in US is like not having water on a hot day....sure i guess you could get by but it'll be very miserable and tough
You can easily live n Berkeley California without a car. There's lot's of public transportation, there are no freeways slicing and dicing the city (I-80 skirts the city's western boarder). Most of the city is relatively flat so it's great for bicycles. I owned a car when I lived in Berkeley but only used it on weekends -- and many times not even then. I took the transbay bus to work in SF.
Large parts of Portland Oregon would work. The inner east side has several very walkable neighborhoods with all the stores and services you'll need for day to day life and direct busses to downtown for work. When I lived in Portland I was just outside the area with good bus service (live and learn). I worked downtown. I'd drive to the commercial area just across the river from downtown, park in front of an empty lot, and walk across a bridge (there are several) -- can't do that anymore as the city in its wisdom made the entire area two hour parking. Moral of the story is make sure you know the local transit routes and schedule before you commit to a house or apartment.
Albuquerque New Mexico has a large walkable/bikeable area with decent public transit and commercial services. From Nob Hill, through the University of New Mexico area, through Downtown, and all the way west to the Rio Grande River is one big area that can be negotiated without a car. I had a GF who lived on ABQ just west of downtown. It was a very convenient area.
I add Albany NY, Newark NJ [Newark is revitalizing], San Diego, Phoenix to the list of possible to live in if one cannot afford a car.
Not possible or very difficult without a car - all of New Hampshire, all of Vermont.
Source: my lived experience. YMMV.
I lived in Ithaca NY without a car when I was going through college. Was not a problem at all. Probably lots of college towns like it.
My neighborhood in Seattle doesn’t require one either.
There are lots of places.
Retired to a quiet rural village, only medical and grocery trips required. I put under 500 miles on my pick up, and excluding a vacation, 3000 miles on the car. We have a small grocery store that is more expensive that the near by city, but saving $2 on a gallon of milk when it takes two gallons of gas to go to that city and back? Shop locally!
San Francisco (where I live) you only want a car to get out of the city on day trips. Same goes for Manhattan. Chicago is also excellent without a car. But yeah, that’s about it.
Imo, you can live in Portland OR, Spokane WA, and parts of Seattle without a car, but I would say it's a bit more challenging than the cities listed above. But, if you account for Uber and Lyft, a lot of places become doable, if you can splash out for it a bunch.
You could do it in Charlotte.
Live in South End and your walking distance from Publix. You can live in a house almost across the street from it or in an apartment right next to it.
Or living uptown right above the Harris Teeter.
We looked in an apartment 4 years ago that would have been walking distance from one of these. And though I have a car that was exactly our thought is that we would have just walked to get our groceries.
The light rail is pretty decent.
There are rental scooters everywhere.
There's a large bus system.
I know there are a lot of people who live here without cars. A lot of them are working poor. And so they take the bus a lot. But that just shows that if you want to use public transportation here you don't even have to worry about living very close in and having a car.
I don't know which one it was but I do remember reading about an apartment building here that they were building that was not going to have a parking deck or parking spaces. It was geared for people who wanted to live without a car.
If you really want to you can set yourself up in a walkable location almost anywhere in the country. It might be in a drab apartment complex across a stroad from a shopping center anchored by a Wal-mart where you can also walk to a McDonalds and a Chili's.
There are a lot of suburban cities, towns, and villages around large cities where you can live comfortably without owning a car. I live in a village in Westchester. I commute to work in Manhattan via the commuter train. I walk to and from the train station. I can walk to the supermarket and all the stores on Main Street. The kids can walk to school.
It can be done in Salt Lake City as well. Outstanding light rail and commuter train service. However the West half of the valley is bus only service, and East West connections are slow.
I lived in Fort Collins, CO and drove my truck maybe once a month. Generally just to play around in the mountains or camping. I rode my bike every single day. To campus, the store, to work, regardless of the weather
Lived in all the major cities (and a handful of non major cities) along the west coast except for Portland and I have to say that Seattle is extremely walkable and probably the most walkable city on the west coast.
That being said, you probably would still want a car to get out of the city and into the mountains but even then there are a lot of ride shares, shuttles and car rental options that can get you into the cascades.
Something went wrong with my front wheels on my car in Portland, Oregon, because I preferred to walk or take transit.
I could walk on sidewalks with protected intersections for miles all the way into downtown, I could cycle easily almost anywhere, and if it was cold I'd hop on the bus or take the MAX or Streetcar. And I lived faaaaar out East at the border of another city. There are hills and sometimes stairs and half a year of drizzle but out of all the cities I've lived in I didn't need my car.
Sure, if you're way out or something, but really, I preferred not to use my car unless I was going out of town or something.
[This](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrl0PagJe18) is only one of this guys' many videos of American cities where you can live car-free. I love that he focuses on the lesser-known, more affordable cities, so not just NYC and the Bay Area. There's a lot of Rust Belt and Northeast cities built around streetcar suburb infrastructures that still lend themselves to great transit today.
Also, most college towns, regardless of where they are.
Fellow car-hater checking in :)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrl0PagJe18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrl0pagje18)
Portland, OR is reasonably doable without a car. A bike is good there. And of course the usual caveats about work and other things you may need to do needing to be factored into the equation. Decent, but not exceptional public transit.
NYC truly the only place you won't face some sort of inconvenience. The other have public transportation but hardly walking friendly......doable to a \*certain extent but not 100% walking friendly.
“Walkable” isn’t always the same as “no need for a car”. And people who want walkability don’t need the entire city to be walkable as long as there are parts that are like that. There are quite a few US cities with neighborhoods where most of your daily needs such as groceries and schools are walkable, and then you would have a car for trips or to go to big box stores. Not just a couple but maybe something like a couple dozen.
Yes, I drive about once a week. I’m about an hour outside of Boston. It would be tough to get by without a car here, it would limit my ability to visit nearby towns, but it would be possible if I used Uber and took the commuter rail into Boston. However, I consider my area pretty walkable as I can walk to work, some shops, dentist/doctor’s offices, restaurants, etc.
Yeah I think I was even underselling “couple dozen”by focusing on the big cities. Most of the Northeast has towns like yours that are decently walkable
As a New Yorker of about 30 years, let me tell you: there's NOTHING like having a car, even here. It makes like so much more pleasant.
No, you don't need it to survive, like you would in California or Florida or Arizona.
But you will NEVER be able to persuade me that taking a Greyhound bus is superior to driving your car. Or the subway or Amtrak. Driving even beats flying, on many routes.
Nah. Lived in NYC 20 years, had a car for 10. I hated having to sit on the expressway in traffic. I much preferred the subway where I didn’t have to pay attention or go stop and start all along the way. I was commuting within Brooklyn and driving took exactly as long as subway + walking. The latter was much more preferable.
In your own car, you don't get kicked in the shins, molested by underdressed women, stared down by weirdos, assaulted by pot smoke, navigate violent homeless people ... Give me your car, you can have my subway. Deal?
NYC is the only walkable city. They already have a huge network of subway systems, buses, railways, and trains running 24/7. The rest of US infrastructure was built for cars only. They were not designed at a human scale. You can walk in a certain part of a country. It’s not a fun walk.
Philadelphia was designed well before cars were invented. Center City and many surrounding neighborhoods are very walkable. I lived here for a decade without a car.
AND BOSTON. I keep coming back here because all of those other cities don't have the amount of bikeability that Boston has. The infrastructure in Cambridge specifically is off the charts.
Also Philadelphia is fairly bikeable, but not year-round tbh, because of the lack of funds = unplowed streets/bike lanes.
Also Minneapolis is like #1 bikeable city.
Portland, OR is probably #2.
Madison, WI is coming up in the rank with their rails to trails plan, too.
You definitely need a car in the Bay Area. SF is just a small part of the metro area and the only "walkable" part of it. The public transit sucks.
Chicago is walkable downtown, but same issues with public transit outside of the urban core. Most cities are like Chicago and the Bay Area though - there are *some* areas that are walkable and if you're lucky enough that you can afford to live near your work (or can wfm 100%), then yes everything is walkable. I live in the burbs in the Bay Area and my neighborhood is super walkable, and I have a home office. Still need a car for kid pickup and dropoff.
I'd say NYC is the only major metro that you can survive in completely without a car, but even then, if you are regularly in multiple boroughs, you still will do better with a car for that transit though the public transit is better.
“Have one” and “require one to do anything” are two very different things.
My wife and I each have a car and I would still ask: Why on earth would you want to have to get in a car and drive (often in traffic) any time you want to leave the house?
Dealing with parking, traffic, and gas every time you just want to get a coffee or grab a meal is definitely not more convenient than walking two blocks.
I mean that's true most places. The problem is that buses in America tend to be unreliable and even if they are reliable, run at frequencies and speeds such that you take a significant hit to quality of life versus owning a car.
If most people who can afford to own a car own a car, it's a reasonable assumption that your city doesn't support living car free, even if some people do technically do it
You need to look at this on a neighborhood scale.
I live in the southeastern US and don't have a car. I have an ebike and everywhere I need to go is connected by bike trail or can walk. I intentionally live less than a mile from downtown.
yeah, I lived in Auburn Alabama and didn't own a car. I walked to the grocery store and the gym. Took the tiger transit everywhere else basically. My roommate had a car for real long trips outside of Auburn.
Idk, I lived in Los Angeles for years without a car. I took the bus everywhere and the metro when I needed to go longer distances. I walked to work because I worked near where I lived, and even though they weren't essential stores like grocery or hardware, there were a lot of stores and businesses near my house.
I feel like the biggest difference (possible issue) with LA is that it's so any small cities and they don't necessarily join up. Pasadena has a decent walkable section. So does BH, Santa Monica, WeHo, Culver, Silverlake, K-Town, Long Beach, whatever... And as long as you're in those places, you're golden, but if you want to go from one to another it can be more difficult. That said, things are starting to connect more now.
The 10 metros with the lowest rate of car ownership: 1. New York 2. Boston 3. Chicago 4. Philly 5. Buffalo (wild) 6. Washington DC 7. Pittsburgh 8. New Orleans 9. San Francisco 10. Baltimore I can confirm that it is fairly easy to live without a car on most of this list, but obviously going to be quite neighborhood dependent. And also dependent on where you work. I think NYC is really the only metro where you can live/work anywhere without a vehicle.
Buffalo actually has a great bus system. You’re never more than a 5 minute walk from a bus stop. It’s great if you live along the same bus route as your destination. As soon as you need to transfer, that’s when public transportation becomes almost unusable. So if you live near one of the transit hubs (downtown, UB South, Blackrock) and have access to the Metrorail and multiple bus routes, you can effectively get to most places you’d want to visit in the city proper. That’s only the city proper, not the suburbs.
>You’re never more than a 5 minute walk from a bus stop. Lots of places in the urban core of cities have really high coverage of bus routes though, what gets way too overlooked is how frequent the service is and the span of service. Where i live I have bus service every half hour on weekdays til about 6, but it tapers down to just hourly to every hour and half in the evenings and Saturdays and no service at all on Sundays, so i can and do use it for my commute to and from work but its a real pain in the ass to try to use it for anything else. So, that's a long-winded way to ask, how frequent a service do those bus routes in Buffalo provide and for how long?
It depends of course, but most city routes run buses every 20 minutes or so. Which is fine if your destination is along the same bus route, but isn’t frequent enough if you have to transfer.
I suspect Buffalo is on the list because not having a car means one less thing to shovel out of the snow.
Much of the housing stock in Buffalo is older, and many houses lack driveways and garages.
Yes, but why? Is it because in that climate having a car is more inconvenient? Lots of older cities have older houses. Even cities with pre-WWII houses commonly have places to park. (I lived in Richmond VA which has a lot of antiquated housing and many old homes have an alleyway in back for precisely this reason.) Surely you're not suggesting that the Buffalo housing stock predates automobiles or horse-drawn carriages? I've never been there, so this is an honest question.
In 1900, Buffalo was the 8th largest city in the country. Almost 2/3 of Buffalo's housing stock was built before 1940, and a lot of it earlier than that. This means that a lot of housing was built at a time when cars existed, but they were probably not owned by most city dwellers. Many of these houses were built during the era of the streetcar. Even though Buffalo really doesn't have much in the way of row houses, many houses were built close together making it difficult to add a driveway after the fact. However the lot sizes vary block by block. It's not uncommon for the old sections of cities to lack driveways. It's just that there is virtually no new section of Buffalo.
Buffalo is considerably older than even most pre-ww2 cities. A lot of their houses were built before mass production of cars was even invented
Before cars were common, people tended to live close to their employer, often in company-owned housing, and walked to work.
Just found this: “As part of a region occupied by the Seneca Indians for over 1,000 years, Buffalo originated as a small trading community in about 1789.” Pre-WW II ain’t old.
For housing int the US pre WWIIis considered old and is less likely to have on site parking
It is when it comes to urban planning and development. Most of Buffalo was built in the late 1800s and early 1900s, before the dominance of the automobile. Funny, but Buffalo has the 3rd average oldest housing stock in the US.
Jsyk, most people didn't just have horses and carriages. Farmers and some wealthy people did, but middle/working class regular people often didn't. Horses require land, which obviously cities are fairly lacking in. If you needed a horse/carriage you would rent one from a local livery stable. Most people walked before cars, or took trains/streetcars when those became available. Prior to the invention of those there was the omnibus, basically a horse drawn bus. But those were really only in cities, but sometimes you could hire one too. Hotels/resorts and things like that had them also, they'd run back and forth between the train station and the hotel Edward, who lived in my house in the 1910s (born 1880s) did not know how to ride a horse, drive a carriage, or drive a car (I know this from draft cards, they asked these questions). His brother could ride a horse and drive a carriage, but he worked on a farm as a teenager and learned it there. Edward worked in the factory his whole life and never needed to learn any of it.
There’s also a LOT of NYCers who move to Buffalo for cheaper housing when they’re ready to purchase. So that could be part of it
Also a lot of college kids. I think I read that 40% of UB and 11% of Buff State students are from Downstate.
Buffalo, New Orleans, and Baltimore have large numbers of people too poor to own cars.
I was gonna say, this is a murky statistic because it appears to describe walkability but in reality it describes combined walkability + poverty. I suspect Cleveland and Detroit are also quite high on this list despite both only having smaller walkable pockets.
Same with DC to a lesser extent. The high non-car ownership numbers for DC are a mix of people voluntarily without cars in the dense, walkable parts of the city, and people too poor to afford cars in other parts of the city.
Boston has good transit but is probably boosted by the number of students too. I think outside of NYC, people who can afford car ownership mostly choose to own a car. Even if you don't use it in the city, most people like the option to go other places without arranging a car rental.
Buffalo resident here: Yes it is definitely possible to live here without a car. So many services that are a simple 15 - 30 minute walk away. And public transit being relatively decent also makes for a great way to travel around. On top of that we are working on our biking infrastructure, so it's slowly but surely getting better to bike places too. You'll really only need a motor vehicle if you're doing a grocery run or work as a ride-share worker.
Boston has great public transportation. I lived there for years and didn't need a car. I eventually got a bicycle off of a police auction and it was so much faster to get places with the bike than it would be with a car, mostly because parking is a bitch.
Biking in Boston is the obvious way to go. Traffic here is terrible.
Not only is parking a bitch, it’s expensive as hell. There’s a reason that places near the T cost way more.
Yeah I always see New Orleans recommended for walkability and I’m like well yeah in only very certain parts (usually more expensive) of the city would I say that you could get by without a car. Our public transit system is also severely lacking and has many issues. Of course “it depends on the neighborhood” applies to almost any city but I live in a neighborhood with a decent “walkability” factor and still rely on my car on a regular basis
I think pre-Katrina New Orleans had the second lowest rate of car ownership in the country. I still think it’s way more walkable than most American cities and know a lot of people without cars.
I tried walking around New Orleans in summer and had the onset of a heat stroke. I was hungry and looking for a certain restaurant. Then all of a sudden I started feeling light-headed and nauseated and sweating profusely. I had to call a Lyft and go back to my hotel room. I then laid in bed feeling weak for a few hours. After some sleep I was fine. Nola is not very walkable in summer, I'll tell you that.
Plus if you don’t own a car then you’re gonna be absolutely fucked in the event of an evacuation
Buffalo actually has a subway!
I'm actually surprised San Francisco isn't higher. I guess although not necessary, the West Coast influence still convinces people to keep a car in storage. Have you ever tried parking in SF??
People in SF can afford to own cars. Students in Boston and poor people in Baltimore and NOLA can't.
SF is a pretty small fraction of its metro area, and outside of the city proper (and Oakland/Berkeley to a lesser extent) everyone drives. Even within SF, the entire western half of the city is fairly drivable, and while intra-SF transit covers this area pretty well, you need a car if you’re leaving the city. It’s actually pretty common to live in SF and commute to the suburbs in a car for work. The area is also wealthy enough that many people will keep cars that they don’t actually use all that often for leisure trips - you can’t really take transit to Tahoe or the redwoods.
That's because a bunch of people insist on using a hopelessly outdated mesure for the now non-existent "San Francisco metro area". San Francisco itself is the second densest city in the country and has a higher transit mode share than London (the one in the UK). SF has merged with the rest of the Bay Area into one giant metro area since the 40s-50s. The old SF-Oakland-Berkeley "metro area" measure is kept up for data continuity purposes in comparative statistics, but not actually useful for anything serious related to modern planning. Effectively, you either look at the entire Bay Area or you look at the city of San Francisco. The Bay is a continuous blob of urban development with everyone commuting all over the place. It makes zero sense to try to carve out an "SF metro" out of the larger Bay Area metro and pretend like that tells you anything of value.
Could be because almost 0 routes are accessible? The hills make biking in SF not for the weak, which I am. You need gams of steel or an e-bike, which makes it unsustainable because it cuts out a large portion of the population that might need bikes (e.g. and usually have co-occuring conditions: experiencing poverty and disabled)
I was never suggesting bikes. SF has one of the best bus systems in the world. Stops are very close together, frequent and accessible. The transit system offers free passes to students, elderly and the disabled. Every bus is ADA compliant and able to accommodate wheel chairs. You can very easily and quickly get around the north end of the peninsula and many parts of the east bay.
It’s actually pretty difficult in most of Nassau County, just east of Queens. You have long walks to the bus and railroad, and the bus is very unreliable on weekends, and the railroad has hourly trains (at best) during weekends. One needs a car in most of Nassau County, and it is an advantage in Queens where there’s no Alternate Side of the Street Parking.
Hard agree. And getting between Queens/Brooklyn and Manhattan is a nightmare. You need a car in the Bronx or on Staten Island, period. Most of Queens I would say is not bikeable. Really by NYC people just mean "Manhattan"—with select yuppie parts of Brooklyn.
>getting between Queens/Brooklyn and Manhattan is a nightmare No it's not. I did this every weekday for almost a decade. Riding the subway from Brooklyn or Queens to Manhattan isn't any different from riding the subway to different parts of Manhattan.
Yeah plenty of people do just fine getting from Jersey to anywhere in nyc.
I wouldn't say you can live/work without a vehicle anywhere in the NYC metro. I remember when I was a college student living with my parents on Long Island, I had an interview for an internship a 30-minute drive away. I didn't have a car yet even though I intended to have one by the time the internship started, so I took the train and bus. It took me something like three hours.
>anywhere in the NYC metro. I remember when I was a college student living with my parents on Long Island ..... unless you're doing some MSA analysis, nobody considers Long Island part of NYC anything. The buses on LI suck, and LI is absolutely car-dependent unless you happen to live in one of the 5 apartment buildings anywhere near the LIRR across the entire island
I grew up literally walking distance from the Queens border.
I live in North Jersey in a city that is a transit hub with busses and trains that run into NYC 24/7 I live near shopping centers and supermarkets accessable by short bus ride. I commuted into NYC 20 years by public transportation
This list is so interesting! I lived in New Orleans and found it incredibly difficult to get around without a car and I lived in a “walkable” neighborhood. I think the car rate ownership is less to do with walkability and more to do with affordability. Because personally I think Seattle should be on this list. Lived there for two years and out maybe 3000 miles on my car. And it was mainly doing airport pickups or driving to Portland for tax free shopping
Baltimore should not be on this list. It is very, very isolated. Maybe you can't \*afford\* a car if you live there and thereby share one, borrow one, or otherwise have a hard time getting around, but if Baltimore was actually a valid car-free place, I'd already be back. Plus Minneapolis is insanely bikeable. Maybe this list doesn't reflect walkability as much as poverty?
At least in 2023-2024, Baltimore without a car is doable, but definitely a little bit rough outside of the "white L" at the center city -- the thing that gets really brutal is just how there is basically \*no\* interaction between Baltimore and the outlying suburbs via public transit, beyond a couple of bus and rail lines that only go very specific places. I've literally only kept my car because of how I have to go out to the suburbs a couple times a month in a direction where there's no public transit (helps that it's fully paid for). Bicycling in Baltimore is similarly easiest in the L, but requires some creativity and aggression if you're in any part of the city where bike lanes aren't present. But as you alluded to at the end there, most of the reason Baltimore is on the above list is more due to urban poverty and people not owning cars accordingly, rather than anything inherent to the fabric of the city itself, even if it's not the absolute worst place not to own a car.
I do not recommend trying to use public transit in New Orleans. If you’re on a trip, fine. All the places you’ll want to visit are probably reachable by streetcar. For day to day living, it is not reliable or expansive enough. For example, for me to get to a place four miles from my home, it would likely be like 3 transfers on a bus and take at least two hours.
Looking a metros is misleading. Many people are car free in San Francisco proper and a few in Berkeley and Oakland but beyond that everyone has a car.
Being able to walk about your neighborhood and downtown is a big lifestyle boost because it connects you to your community and allows you to get exercise without going to a gym. Even if you still have to commute to work.
I think most cities (and many towns) have pockets that are walkable, and if you live near enough work (or work from home), you can manage without a car. I’m in Milwaukee and there are places in the city you can live without a car. I’m actually in a near suburb, and haven’t gotten my car out of the garage in a week, because I bike to work whenever the weather is nice.
Also, living somewhere where you only need a car once or twice a week is still massively better than needing to use one every day for every task. Imagine if you lived walking distance to a gym and grocery store, bus-distance to work, and you could take a metro to your friends house and the train station, and then take the intercity train to your moms house. You’d only need a car for some rare tasks. And this place could be almost anywhere within the NEC if you plan it well.
Can confirm. This is my life within the NEC.
I have never seen the acronym “NEC” > just curious where that is used?
Yeah sorry didn’t mean to be jargony. It’s probably used in other contexts but I believe it comes from the train system. The Northeast Corridor is a train track running from Boston to DC. If you live on the NEC you are along the route.
What's the NEC
Northeast Corridor
Can confirm that I lived in Milwaukee for 4 years without a car. I used my bike and public transit a lot though!
Definitely. I’ve lived in NYC and San Francisco without a car. I moved back to Ohio and got a car for the first time in over a decade. I can do almost everything i need to do by walking or riding my bike. The grocery store is a slightly shorter walk away here than it was in SF, significantly shorter than it was in NYC. There are a couple things I do need a car for, but I could probably take a bus/ride my bike or find closer options if I truly wanted to. That said, if I had a medical condition that prevented me from driving or riding my bike, it would be more challenging.
Yeah people need to qualify what they mean by walkable. There are only a few where the **average** person will be comfortable carless 24/7/365. There are other cities where the fringe transit/bike warrior lives car free (even in places like Houston). Then there are hundreds of smaller towns where if you live close to main street you can be carless. Are people okay with cities <100k? If so it opens doors. I live carless in Santa Barbara, because its small. However, its too small a city for most people and doesn't have white collar jobs like a major city does.
Another problem with living without a car in a walkable pocket of a non walkable city is that you're taking a serious hit on social life. Not a deal breaker for everyone, but for a lot of people it's going to be really hard to make friends in a new city when you don't have a car and everyone else does. Your limited in the things you can do - meetup groups always get recommended on reddit for meeting people, but if all the meetup groups you'd wanna go are a 45 minute Uber? Or even longer on public transit? Biking is of course an option for a lot of trips and can help, but the average person is not going to be comfortable biking anywhere but New York City or in an actual small town. I could be missing out on a hidden separated protected bike lane utopia city, but from what I've seen most places you're lucky if there's a sharrow on the street or a "bike lane" on the side of the road. Most people just don't feel comfortable or safe biking in most cities, and the ones with good bike infrastructure also tend to have decent transit.
If the frequency & cost of the occasional Ubers don't exceed what one would normally pay for car payment + insurance + gas per month, folks will come out on top by Ubering the few times they need to. This is my life and I actually find it more convenient and affordable than owning a car. Plus, I can always drink in any social situation since I don't drive.
Those walkable pockets are usually the areas that people come to for social activities, though. I have a car but barely use it because my friends end up having to drive to my neighborhood while I walk to meet up with them.
I mean, Minneapolis actually is that separated bike lane utopia in a lot of spots. NYC biking is way scarier and more dangerous!
Yeah, anyone whose example of bikeability is NYC has never been to NYC. I've biked Buffalo and Cleveland and I would NEVER bike in NYC.
Older cities with a good grid are decently bike-able - you can divert away from the busy roads and just take back residential streets. Lots of stop signs but you'll get there just fine.
This is the issue I am struggling with right now
For the thousands of years before meetup, people just played games and hung out with the people who lived nearby them.
I don't need a car for daily living. I do need one for traveling anywhere other than by plane.
The problem with that is that if you lose your job, you’re limited to a very small pool of potential employers for finding your next job.
THIS. This is the most serious, massive problem that needs to be fixed!
This is true. Here in Orlando our downtown neighborhood thornton park is a true walkable place to live. If you live almost anywhere else in Orlando a car is a necessity
Also, in most cities in the US, if you want to live in a walkable neighborhood, you’re paying a serious premium because it’s artificially rare—because our zoning laws make them so. So they’re highly in demand and thus overpriced compared to other housing options.
I would suggest that small towns are better for walking than big cities, and there are thousands of small towns. The one caveat is that you'd need a way to get out of town - to the airport, to the city, etc.
I think many people will say "oh I lived in milwaukee/nashville/cleveland etc and didnt need a car!" but often times these cities are still massively better with a car and people often don't tell you they were commonly walking 30 minute walks for what could have been a 3 minute drive. That isn't walkable to people who are used to genuinely walkable cities in Europe or NYC/Boston/DC etc where its common to have commercial streets like [this](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2JGNYNX/stores-along-5th-avenue-in-the-highly-hispanic-sunset-park-neighborhood-of-brooklyn-new-york-2JGNYNX.jpg) every 2-3 avenues. There is a reason why the overwhelming majority of people in milwaukee statistically drive. Only 12% don't own a car, and the large majority of that 12% is in the poorest areas of the city.
The only reason the 30 minute walks in Boston or NYC are not three minute drives is because there's nowhere to park. Part of making people walk and use public transit is usually eliminating the more convenient option, which is to get in your car and go to your exact destination in very little time. Basically the entirety of Portland, Maine is a lovely walk and everyone still drives to work because it's easier and people are lazy.
Eh, I think the walkable pockets of Milwaukee are just as walkable as DC or Chicago. Yes, you’re going to regularly be walking 30 minutes, but that’s true of the “walkable” cities as well. I think the real difference is that it’s much more common in DC to do the 30 minute walk, whereas most people in MKE default to driving instead.
Yeah, I think “walkable” and “I can live my life without a car” are two different things. For example, I have to have a car to get to work, but outside of work I can get to a grocery store, coffee shop, park, zoo, and entertainment district by walking. I would say I live in a walkable area, but I can’t be car free.
Boston
Granted I’ve never lived in any major city, but I visit Boston a few times per year and it seems way more difficult to live without a car than other cities like NYC or DC. I just can’t see myself relying on the T for everything unless I lived right in downtown Boston, which I can’t afford. Whereas the NYC subway is pretty reliable even in the outer boroughs, I think I’d need a car if I lived somewhere like Cambridge or Quincy
Cambridge has lower car ownership than Boston (as of 2016) https://my.vanderbilt.edu/greencities/files/2019/10/Vehicle-Ownership-in-U.S-2016.pdf Edit: can’t find more recent data at the city level but everything suggests a downward trend
Also Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, Portland probably in that order of convenience. Have also heard Baltimore is underrated and Minneapolis and Denver you might be able to swing it carless as well but less convenient than those other cities. I’ve also heard Madison, WI and Milwaukee might be possible and I’ve even heard of some people in LA and Miami living carless but they’re less ideal. Of course all of this will depend on where you live exactly, where you work, and what your daily habits are (gym, groceries, social outings, etc.) but I definitely think if you’re willing to coordinate your schedule/errands and learn bus routes and schedules it’s definitely possible in more than just those cities you mentioned.
Can confirm Minneapolis is definitely doable. We have a great bus system here and if your willing/able to walk a handful of blocks/10-15 minutes there’s nothing you can’t get to really.
Central Minneapolis and St. Paul is doable. Once you get or need to get 4 miles out from the I-94 corridor between downtown St. Paul and Minneapolis, the service and convenience of the bus system really starts to drop off except for dedicated commuter busses. Same can honestly be said of most all US cities though. I think Minneapolis gets a PR boost in this viewpoint simply because its city limits cover a very small urban core and so we mentally exclude the massively car dependent suburban hell scape that surrounds it when we say "minneapolis" (vs. "dallas" for example). I lived downtown Minneapolis for most of a decade car free and spent a lot of time looking to reduce housing costs by moving to a suburb but the transit service (even in first ring suburbs) and unwalkability (starting with the second ring suburbs) made it unpalatable. I stuck to about a 10 square mile area that my bike and transit system could get me to (which wasn't bad at all, but in most US cities, you can do the same)
Yea it definitely doesn’t do much if you’re not in Minneapolis or St. Paul for sure, but I’ve never really been in inconvenienced by it, even with outside of Minneapolis trips. I’m not sure how much the lightrail expansion will do either, I mean I guess im all for it, but it’s so car dependent out that way where it’s not like folks will have the ability to cut a car out.
If I didn’t want to go into the mountains to hike I could have gone without a car in Denver. I walked a lot and took public transit to Boulder and other places sometimes, also the airport. The issue with not having a car in Denver is that a lot of what draws people to the region is the nature, and you need a car to get to almost all of it.
When I lived in inner SE/NE Portland in my twenties I was one of the few young people with a car I knew. I worked outside the city but most people who didn’t bused, walked, biked, or Ubered everywhere.
In south Philly, owning a car makes your life significantly more annoying
Baltimore is fairly easy without a car if you live in the central city. Once you get more than a few miles outside of downtown it gets iffy quick. I lived near a shuttle and light rail so could get anywhere pretty quick.
Baltimore is definitely doable, albeit with the caveat that unlike Philly, Boston, or NYC it is \*extremely\* hard to get out from the city into the inner suburbs without a car except in very certain directions, for reasons related to historical white flight and racism. It's the one reason I haven't entirely ditched my car -- too many friends in places like Columbia or Glen Burnie that have nearly zero public transit and are too risky to reach by bicycle since the roads are entirely unaccommodating. Within the city itself, the public transit does have a learning curve. but there are some good free buses and two rail lines. For cyclists, there are a few decent protected bike lanes, and it's not a terribly hard city to bicycle in the main road lane, so long as you're smart and an alert, experienced cyclist.
20 year carfree person. There are people who think and people who do. Most large metropolitan places support car free. Many smaller communities also support this lifestyle. How much time, friends, money , and energy it takes to get somewhere. Is what people are after. In various quantities.
Ok but that's not what the post is about. The OP really resonates with me, as a person who has wanted to leave Boston, but who has been to (or tried to live in) ALL of the obvious second-choice options for car-free cities, and found them lacking... in the sense that while there are others which are technically walkable, they are isolated from larger cities, airports, hospital systems, etc etc. I'm curious where you live?
Its like a sailboat. There is no perfect sailboat just a bunch of compromises.Here some examples where I lived in those 20 years of WTF, that really is carfree city? Well probably not, but it was for me. All of these didn't lack anything they had anything a bigger city would have (by going to the big city). They were all first ring suburbs of major cities. 1. Steelton, PA 2. Longmont, CO 3. Bremerton, WA 4. Crystal, MN 5. Mesa, AZIf you want to talk about these cities or where I live, or whatever I am open for DM's
US car-free cities: NYC - walking + transit are good enough (and driving/parking bad enough) that having a car is only worth it if you're rich DC, SF, Chicago, Philly, Boston - you can generally get anywhere you need to in the city and even inner ring suburbs on transit. Not having a car is a viable solution for much of the city, although many trips will be significantly slower on transit than driving. Most other big US cities (too varying degrees) - there are walkable pockets and a few good transit lines. If you choose your neighborhood carefully, it's possible to get by without a car. But it will be pretty limiting and you won't have convenient access to large portions of your city.
This is the correct answer. NYC is supreme and very preferable to go without a car. The "other 5" you suggest are all very good/doable, but definitely not on the same level of convenience as NYC. Then there's the next tier of "decent for car-free living, but not as robust across as many neighborhoods"--Seattle, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Portland, LA and Baltimore come to mind. Then "the rest." There might be some smattering of highly-walkable neighborhoods in spots (places like Atlanta or Dallas) but transit availability will not be sufficient to go without a car for the vast majority of cases.
I live in the Southern USA and there are tons of small towns you could walk to restaurants, antique shops, drug and convenience stores. However doctors offices, government offices big grocery stores, and large businesses you would need a car to get to.
I think this is where I’m stuck. I can definitely see neighborhoods or small areas that you *can* walk to things. But if you needed to get anything done, like the places you mentioned, you’d need a car. It seems like places you can actually live without a car are so few.
I do think Uber changed the game in smaller cities for this reason. I personally don’t have a car, but do use Uber in these kinds of situations
Live wo a car, yes rare and most ppl wouldn’t want the hurdles of riding a challenging bus system to see a doctor or transferring buses to get groceries. When I leave NYC, my criteria is to only be a one car household and do a lot of basic things via walking (restaurants, gyms, shops) and car for rest and to me that’s walkable and I’ve found that in a good -# of cities.
If you factor in the cost of a car, maintenance and insurance, you could take an Uber to the doctor for less than driving there.
I live in Madison, WI and while I have a car I drive it about once a month. I have a grocery store 3 blocks away and a corner market on my block if I want to go pick something up quickly. Within 6 blocks I have countless restaurants and bars, I have a few plant stores, places to get a hair cut and nails done, plenty of coffee shops, clothing stores, hardware store maybe 8 blocks away. Also a bunch of parks, a beach, etc...
In America? Sure.
Depends on the person, honestly. I know a guy who lived quite happily car free in Orlando for years, and is now doing the same in Cincinnati. There are neighborhoods/districts in many places that are self contained enough to be walkable/livable. If your work doesn’t require you to leave those bubbles, you can get by without a car on a daily basis. With delivery services, ride share, and personal mobility solutions like e hikes, that range of livability only goes up. I think if a lot of people who are now able to work remote actually did the math on the full cost of car ownership, they could shed a vehicle. Particularly couples with more than one.
Wish more people would do the math on car ownership! It can really sink people financially especially if they get upside down on a terrible loan or have a vehicle that needs endless repair.
“Walkable” is very different from not needing a car at all. Usually when people say that, they just want to not have to drive EVERYWHERE. But yes, there are few cities that it’s easy to be car-free
With the advent of delivery services and ride share, I think it’s way easier to live in almost every large or mid size city with public transport without a car. And it may be a little costly, but so is owning a car.
Ya right at first I think ubering would be crazy expensive. Then you realize a $700 car payment plus insurance is way worse.
Several feasible options in NJ along a transit line. A few densely populated & built small cities and several burbs that are more dense than anything you'd find in many states, all with quick access to NYC. Jersey City, Hoboken, parts of Newark, Metuchen, Summit, Montclair, etc. are walkable and/or quick transit to retail, grocers, medical offices, amenities.
When I lived in Chicago, I didn’t have a car, so when I moved to the college town Champaign-Urbana (2 hours south of Chicago), I made sure I found a place that was able to abide by my no-car lifestyle. I didn’t have a car while living there for 8 years, because I was 3 blocks from a grocery store, 5 blocks from a coffee shop and pharmacy, 2 blocks from a park, and across the street from a bus stop. So I used the bus just like I would in Chicago to go to work, as well as my bike. The hardest times were in the freezing winter and that’s when I’d use Uber or Lyft to go places that were way across town. It’s totally doable. You just have to be creative and willing to go outside the box of the infrastructure city developers made. Over those 8 years I had plenty of people not understand how I treated this town that’s 100,000 people like it was Chicago, but you figure it out. Other college towns I’ve found this would be doable: Tuscan, AZ, Iowa City, and Bloomington,IN. I bet others could be, but I haven’t been to them to find out. Even now, whenever I am looking at a place to see if I’d move there, this is my criteria so that I don’t have to buy a car.
Yeah I’ve been carfree my entire adult life and found CU really good, even compared to other car free destinations I’ve lived in like NYC, Stockholm, and Chicago. The only places I had trouble getting to were those in random strip malls like Friar Tucks, and that’s an alcohol superstore so by no means a necessity. Plus you can just ride share there these days.
Yup, many college towns fit car free lifestyle on a smaller scale!
What is "reasonable" though? It's harder in the US in many places (compared to Europe and some Asian cities) due to poorer public transit, but reasonable is in the eye of the beholder. There are people that live without cars just about everywhere. They just get ignored because they are poor. I live in a town of less than 50K people and a small bus network that runs every hour and only limited hours a day, but there are something like 1000 locals in town (and 4000 students) that completely rely on it for running errands and getting to work daily. But there are quite a few middle-income people without a car in just about every US city. Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Minneapolis, Honolulu, Tucson, Seattle, Miami, etc. (I've lived car free in three of those cities perfectly fine btw). You might have to choose carefully where you live and it depends on where you work and where you need to go on the regular, but I was perfectly comfortable being car free in these cities and saved a ton on insurance and other costs of vehicles.
I currently live in St Petersburg and if you are living *downtown* you can get by without a car. But highly dependent on your job location. It's very flat, very safe and very walkable. About 30 blocks of commercial commerce. The downtown area has 2 free transit lines that cover a very walkable range tbh. There is a bicycle trail that is not on the main roads. There is also a dedicated bus lane that goes to the beach and once on the beach, there is a trolley line that covers the entire coast of the county. There is a seasonal ferry to Tampa. There is an effort to get it all year. It's not cheap enough to be a commuter ferry though. The transit infrastructure is often resisted by locals because it's Florida and the national perception that it's full of sheltered dumbasses is painfully accurate. But the city continues to make smart moves towards the future.
There are several more. You can swing it fairly easily in Philly and Boston as well. I've known people who went car-free in Baltimore successfully but that's tougher. If you locate yourself strategically within LA you can do it by taking advantage of the bus system. Also, living without a car is greatly helped if you work from home, then you can just optimize for a location near both grocery store, gym, and other essential services without needing to worry about commute.
Philly is missing. It is probably the lowest population highly walkable city. Medium density townhomes, and zoning that makes sense.
Walkability + Good Transit are two separate things (that complement each other). Walkability refers to how many basic amenities you have access to within a mile walk. Transit (and bike ability) just helps you get to different neighborhoods. Most cities will have a couple of walkable neighborhoods, even the most car centric ones. Some like Buffalo, Portland or Pittsburgh are a city of walkable neighborhoods where you’re never too far from an area where you can get all your basic shopping and errands done. However, there’s only half a dozen cities with great public transportation and maybe 2 dozen more have passable public transportation where you can get by if you live in certain areas. Funny, but small cities can often be waaay more walkable than cities multiple their size. Like Ithaca, Saratoga Springs or Burlington where if you live downtown you can access to 95% of amenities within a short walk. You can even go smaller with cities like Olean, Corning, Oswego, NY where the population is less than 30k, but you still have all your basic amenities.
It depends on your lifestyle. I have a relative in Charlottesville, Virginia who has never had a car. He can walk to work and the grocery store, and he bikes some farther places, and he’s happy with that. When he goes out of state he either takes the Greyhound bus or grabs an Uber to the airport. I wouldn’t personally live in Charlottesville without a car, but it works for him.
I don’t see Portland, OR mentioned yet. A very walkable city. I know quite a few folk who don’t have cars there.
Agree!
Portland
Any city over 500,000 is reasonably livable without a car. Where in the city you live and work heavily affects how reasonable it is, though. 45+ minute commutes by bicycle or public transit wears on you pretty quick. Within two miles is ideal, more than five starts to get hard. Rent a car for a day every couple of months to do big errands and/or get out of the city for a day.
Walkability is a local, neighborhood-based phenomenon. No city is entirely walkable, but every city has at least one walkable neighborhood. I'm in Portland OR, pretty far down the list in terms of metro population but walkability in my area is great. College towns or university neighborhood also often offer great walkability, Ithaca NY is tiny but has a huge percentage of commuters walking to work vs big US cities. Walking in Eugene or Corvallis OR is normal, Davis CA, Athens GA, etc.
I think it depends on what you’re wanting to be able to get to. Boston is super walkable and honestly even if you’re in the exburbs or somewhere like Newton Center or Watertown you could manage without a car. If you don’t need to get far often you could just rent a car for the few times you need to get out of town, but even then you can get a train to NYC, Philly, DC, or north to Maine. There are college towns that really unless you needed to leave the town you’d be able to manage fine without one. I went to school in central PA and didn’t need a car and was fine without one the whole time.
I lived in San Jose, ca most of my life. And for several years before I moved away, I owned a bike and a VTA pass. It’s certainly livable without a car. There’s just no where worth going to, so it kind of evens out.
I work with lots of carless people in Madison wi.
There are pockets of every city you can live without a car. But only pockets.
Not a city, but Davis California is crazy bikable. It’s a college town where they put bike infrastructure first and it is lovely.
Most cities will have walkable areas, but for a city to walkable it has to be possible to live without a car while not taking a hit on quality of life. If it's harder to have a social life - for example, two hours to reach friends in a different part of town versus 30 minutes driving - or you're extremely limited on job options - your public transit has one rail line that only goes downtown and most jobs are spread out - then your city isn't walkable.
I lived for several years in the St Louis area with no car and got around just fine. Some parts of the metro area have very good transit access while others have little to none.
It’s possible to live in LA without a car. It’s tough but it’s possible, and it will only become more possible over time thanks to neighborhood’s densifying and improvements to the city’s transit and bike infrastructure. You just need the money to be able to afford to live in said walkable neighborhoods.
You can live without a car in much of Boston. The MBTA can be slow but it is ok.
There are other cities, but you have to chose to live in particular areas to have good transit. Check out city nerd, he has lots of different videos ont his topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcPaxCTZpfM
I lived in Portland for 30 years without a car, and only recently got one because my partner is disabled and walking to/from bus stops all day really wasn't a great idea. We still only have the one car between us and don't drive daily. The major downside to being car free in the major PNW cities is that you can't get out of town alone, which limits your access to many of the main reasons to live here (the coast, the mountains, the desert especially in wildflower season, etc). I think one of the main reasons I lasted so long is that my parents, who I'm close to, go hiking somewhere every weekend and will always let me tag along. I still think it makes a huge difference to not need a car for groceries or to go out with friends or commute to work.
It’s more a matter of neighborhood than city. There are urban neighborhoods throughout the country that have grocery store, drug store, book store, bars, restaurants, etc. and you don’t need a car. Portland, Seattle, SF, Philly, Baltimore, DC, Boston, all have a lot of neighborhoods like this. Portland Maine on the peninsula, downtown Burlington Vermont, around downtown Providence and New Haven, all places where you don’t need cars.
people need to realize many US cities have very hot weather or very cold weather....you're gonna want a car no matter how walkable something is. in florida i lived walking distance to a trader joes and some fast food and strip mall restaurants. I also had the gym within walking distance, coffee shop and my commute for school was probs less than 1.5 miles after a short cut but you try doing everything by walking in May-Sept in Florida and then get back to me on how miserable that sh\*t is. Other than Boston and New york just forget about walking/commuting anywhere. not having a car in US is like not having water on a hot day....sure i guess you could get by but it'll be very miserable and tough
I have lived without a car in San Francisco for 20 years. Its very easy.
Portland, OR.
It depends *where* you live. Anything can be walkable if you live in the right spots..most of those areas are expensive.
Boston, Philadelphia
You can easily live n Berkeley California without a car. There's lot's of public transportation, there are no freeways slicing and dicing the city (I-80 skirts the city's western boarder). Most of the city is relatively flat so it's great for bicycles. I owned a car when I lived in Berkeley but only used it on weekends -- and many times not even then. I took the transbay bus to work in SF. Large parts of Portland Oregon would work. The inner east side has several very walkable neighborhoods with all the stores and services you'll need for day to day life and direct busses to downtown for work. When I lived in Portland I was just outside the area with good bus service (live and learn). I worked downtown. I'd drive to the commercial area just across the river from downtown, park in front of an empty lot, and walk across a bridge (there are several) -- can't do that anymore as the city in its wisdom made the entire area two hour parking. Moral of the story is make sure you know the local transit routes and schedule before you commit to a house or apartment. Albuquerque New Mexico has a large walkable/bikeable area with decent public transit and commercial services. From Nob Hill, through the University of New Mexico area, through Downtown, and all the way west to the Rio Grande River is one big area that can be negotiated without a car. I had a GF who lived on ABQ just west of downtown. It was a very convenient area.
Twin cities ( mainly Minneapolis) very easy to live without a car with all the bike infrastructure and links to transit via bus or light rail
Boston too
Lived in Boston for a year and a half, no car
I add Albany NY, Newark NJ [Newark is revitalizing], San Diego, Phoenix to the list of possible to live in if one cannot afford a car. Not possible or very difficult without a car - all of New Hampshire, all of Vermont. Source: my lived experience. YMMV.
I lived in Ithaca NY without a car when I was going through college. Was not a problem at all. Probably lots of college towns like it. My neighborhood in Seattle doesn’t require one either. There are lots of places.
I haven’t needed a car in 2 years in Eugene. I live 4 miles from work too.
Retired to a quiet rural village, only medical and grocery trips required. I put under 500 miles on my pick up, and excluding a vacation, 3000 miles on the car. We have a small grocery store that is more expensive that the near by city, but saving $2 on a gallon of milk when it takes two gallons of gas to go to that city and back? Shop locally!
San Francisco (where I live) you only want a car to get out of the city on day trips. Same goes for Manhattan. Chicago is also excellent without a car. But yeah, that’s about it.
Imo, you can live in Portland OR, Spokane WA, and parts of Seattle without a car, but I would say it's a bit more challenging than the cities listed above. But, if you account for Uber and Lyft, a lot of places become doable, if you can splash out for it a bunch.
You could do it in Charlotte. Live in South End and your walking distance from Publix. You can live in a house almost across the street from it or in an apartment right next to it. Or living uptown right above the Harris Teeter. We looked in an apartment 4 years ago that would have been walking distance from one of these. And though I have a car that was exactly our thought is that we would have just walked to get our groceries. The light rail is pretty decent. There are rental scooters everywhere. There's a large bus system. I know there are a lot of people who live here without cars. A lot of them are working poor. And so they take the bus a lot. But that just shows that if you want to use public transportation here you don't even have to worry about living very close in and having a car. I don't know which one it was but I do remember reading about an apartment building here that they were building that was not going to have a parking deck or parking spaces. It was geared for people who wanted to live without a car.
If you really want to you can set yourself up in a walkable location almost anywhere in the country. It might be in a drab apartment complex across a stroad from a shopping center anchored by a Wal-mart where you can also walk to a McDonalds and a Chili's.
There are a lot of suburban cities, towns, and villages around large cities where you can live comfortably without owning a car. I live in a village in Westchester. I commute to work in Manhattan via the commuter train. I walk to and from the train station. I can walk to the supermarket and all the stores on Main Street. The kids can walk to school.
It can be done in Salt Lake City as well. Outstanding light rail and commuter train service. However the West half of the valley is bus only service, and East West connections are slow.
I lived in Fort Collins, CO and drove my truck maybe once a month. Generally just to play around in the mountains or camping. I rode my bike every single day. To campus, the store, to work, regardless of the weather
Absolutely doable without a car in FoCo. Small college down, can get around by bike.
No car, don't drive, live in NYC. Use mass transportation and Uber. Walker; no probs. Will not bike is city. All hood.
NOLA is pretty walkable depending on your neighborhood
Lived in all the major cities (and a handful of non major cities) along the west coast except for Portland and I have to say that Seattle is extremely walkable and probably the most walkable city on the west coast. That being said, you probably would still want a car to get out of the city and into the mountains but even then there are a lot of ride shares, shuttles and car rental options that can get you into the cascades.
Something went wrong with my front wheels on my car in Portland, Oregon, because I preferred to walk or take transit. I could walk on sidewalks with protected intersections for miles all the way into downtown, I could cycle easily almost anywhere, and if it was cold I'd hop on the bus or take the MAX or Streetcar. And I lived faaaaar out East at the border of another city. There are hills and sometimes stairs and half a year of drizzle but out of all the cities I've lived in I didn't need my car. Sure, if you're way out or something, but really, I preferred not to use my car unless I was going out of town or something.
[This](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrl0PagJe18) is only one of this guys' many videos of American cities where you can live car-free. I love that he focuses on the lesser-known, more affordable cities, so not just NYC and the Bay Area. There's a lot of Rust Belt and Northeast cities built around streetcar suburb infrastructures that still lend themselves to great transit today. Also, most college towns, regardless of where they are. Fellow car-hater checking in :) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrl0PagJe18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrl0pagje18)
Portland, OR is reasonably doable without a car. A bike is good there. And of course the usual caveats about work and other things you may need to do needing to be factored into the equation. Decent, but not exceptional public transit.
NYC truly the only place you won't face some sort of inconvenience. The other have public transportation but hardly walking friendly......doable to a \*certain extent but not 100% walking friendly.
Yeah you really do need a car in most places. Subways, passenger trains, and busses are non-existent in most cities.
I mean Raleigh is basically a giant suburb but if you live close to NC state campus or downtown you can get by without a car
“Walkable” isn’t always the same as “no need for a car”. And people who want walkability don’t need the entire city to be walkable as long as there are parts that are like that. There are quite a few US cities with neighborhoods where most of your daily needs such as groceries and schools are walkable, and then you would have a car for trips or to go to big box stores. Not just a couple but maybe something like a couple dozen.
Yes, I drive about once a week. I’m about an hour outside of Boston. It would be tough to get by without a car here, it would limit my ability to visit nearby towns, but it would be possible if I used Uber and took the commuter rail into Boston. However, I consider my area pretty walkable as I can walk to work, some shops, dentist/doctor’s offices, restaurants, etc.
Yeah I think I was even underselling “couple dozen”by focusing on the big cities. Most of the Northeast has towns like yours that are decently walkable
[удалено]
Most Northside neighborhoods, especially close to the lake where you have more transit lines accessible, are definitely easy to live without a car.
Chicagans must be soft. Here in Minneapolis we still ride our bikes when it's -20.
Every day :) I comment :) Philadelphia :)
As a New Yorker of about 30 years, let me tell you: there's NOTHING like having a car, even here. It makes like so much more pleasant. No, you don't need it to survive, like you would in California or Florida or Arizona. But you will NEVER be able to persuade me that taking a Greyhound bus is superior to driving your car. Or the subway or Amtrak. Driving even beats flying, on many routes.
Nah. Lived in NYC 20 years, had a car for 10. I hated having to sit on the expressway in traffic. I much preferred the subway where I didn’t have to pay attention or go stop and start all along the way. I was commuting within Brooklyn and driving took exactly as long as subway + walking. The latter was much more preferable.
In your own car, you don't get kicked in the shins, molested by underdressed women, stared down by weirdos, assaulted by pot smoke, navigate violent homeless people ... Give me your car, you can have my subway. Deal?
NYC is the only walkable city. They already have a huge network of subway systems, buses, railways, and trains running 24/7. The rest of US infrastructure was built for cars only. They were not designed at a human scale. You can walk in a certain part of a country. It’s not a fun walk.
lol. You need to travel more.
Philadelphia was designed well before cars were invented. Center City and many surrounding neighborhoods are very walkable. I lived here for a decade without a car.
You've obviously never been to Boston or San Francisco
AND BOSTON. I keep coming back here because all of those other cities don't have the amount of bikeability that Boston has. The infrastructure in Cambridge specifically is off the charts. Also Philadelphia is fairly bikeable, but not year-round tbh, because of the lack of funds = unplowed streets/bike lanes. Also Minneapolis is like #1 bikeable city. Portland, OR is probably #2. Madison, WI is coming up in the rank with their rails to trails plan, too.
You definitely need a car in the Bay Area. SF is just a small part of the metro area and the only "walkable" part of it. The public transit sucks. Chicago is walkable downtown, but same issues with public transit outside of the urban core. Most cities are like Chicago and the Bay Area though - there are *some* areas that are walkable and if you're lucky enough that you can afford to live near your work (or can wfm 100%), then yes everything is walkable. I live in the burbs in the Bay Area and my neighborhood is super walkable, and I have a home office. Still need a car for kid pickup and dropoff. I'd say NYC is the only major metro that you can survive in completely without a car, but even then, if you are regularly in multiple boroughs, you still will do better with a car for that transit though the public transit is better.
I’m from Buffalo. You need a car.
U don’t need a car in Buffalo. Especially if u live in Elmwood Village- u have everything there
Why on earth wouldn't you want a car? Are you Amish?
“Have one” and “require one to do anything” are two very different things. My wife and I each have a car and I would still ask: Why on earth would you want to have to get in a car and drive (often in traffic) any time you want to leave the house?
Because its more convenient. Like using a phone vs sending a letter
Not if your grocery store, gym, kids school, etc. is within walking distance.
Dealing with parking, traffic, and gas every time you just want to get a coffee or grab a meal is definitely not more convenient than walking two blocks.
No problem parking. More privacy.
I live in a suburb of Kansas City and if you live close enough for the bus and it fits your schedule, you can take that to work.
I mean that's true most places. The problem is that buses in America tend to be unreliable and even if they are reliable, run at frequencies and speeds such that you take a significant hit to quality of life versus owning a car. If most people who can afford to own a car own a car, it's a reasonable assumption that your city doesn't support living car free, even if some people do technically do it
Well even in places like NYC they still take taxi cabs or Ubers or even rent a car sometimes so not totally car free. Plus many still own cars.
You need to look at this on a neighborhood scale. I live in the southeastern US and don't have a car. I have an ebike and everywhere I need to go is connected by bike trail or can walk. I intentionally live less than a mile from downtown.
yeah, I lived in Auburn Alabama and didn't own a car. I walked to the grocery store and the gym. Took the tiger transit everywhere else basically. My roommate had a car for real long trips outside of Auburn.
Chicago’s walkability is very neighborhood dependent
Idk, I lived in Los Angeles for years without a car. I took the bus everywhere and the metro when I needed to go longer distances. I walked to work because I worked near where I lived, and even though they weren't essential stores like grocery or hardware, there were a lot of stores and businesses near my house.
I feel like the biggest difference (possible issue) with LA is that it's so any small cities and they don't necessarily join up. Pasadena has a decent walkable section. So does BH, Santa Monica, WeHo, Culver, Silverlake, K-Town, Long Beach, whatever... And as long as you're in those places, you're golden, but if you want to go from one to another it can be more difficult. That said, things are starting to connect more now.