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(Editor's note: See two other posts in series, "Carless in Seattle," and "A Mile From Home.")
Transit and walking are time consuming. Most people are just too busy. That’s obvious, right?
Well, as my family begins the ninth week of its experiment in car-less living, I’m finding a few flaws in that logic. Here are two.
1. Time spent on transit is different from time spent driving. People vary, of course, but for me, transit time is a pure gain over driving. I don’t enjoy driving. I’d rather read than listen to music or talk radio. And I can read without queasiness on all forms of transit. For me, then, car time is a waste of life, but transit time is living, and I’ll happily choose a 30 minute transit trip over a 15 minute car trip. For me, driving is time consuming.
2. Just so, walking doesn’t consume time, for different reasons. In fact, walking creates time. For one thing, if you walk for transportation, you don’t have to go to the gym as often.
About yesterday's post on glass recycling -- some astute readers noticed that by focusing on recycling, I'd ignored more important priorities: reducing the use of packaging, and reusing glass bottles where practical. That's a fair enough critique. But it did make me wonder: what happened, exactly, to the practice of reusing glass bottles? I can still remember drinking Coke from reusable bottles as a kid, but I rarely see that anymore. How come? And, more to the point, how would a system of reusable glass bottles stack up against recyclable glass and plastic containers?
On the first question -- what happened to reusable bottles? -- there's this recent article that sums up the situation nicely. In a nutshell:
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