If you don’t drive your world is much smaller

[Imreallyokayipromise]

I have a friend who doesn’t drive, for many reasons (anxiety, dyslexia) she also doesn’t use public transport so her world seems very small to me. She has a small child who doesn’t leave the house unless they are going to nursery school. Her partner drives but never seems to want to go anywhere either and she has to make all her plans around him and get permission and everytime we discuss it I just feel like she has no independence and her world is so small. It really got me thinking that if you can drive so many possibilities open up and your world becomes much bigger. Even if it’s just doing your own food shop or visiting a friend.

That's good for you of course

I suspect we are living in different places and different circumstances. It would be very useful for me to be able to get to the tip due to my own circumstances and the arrangements for house and garden waste where I live.

Ahh my council collects both garden and DIY waste (the latter for a small fee).

Depends where you live - in a large city probably not. In my area definitely life would be much more limited

TBH I would use that service even if I had a car, who the fuck wants to be wasting spare time driving to the tip?

Yep here in Devon I would find it very limiting on my job opportunities and social mobility to not drive. I find it insane that they are building these car-free homes here in Devon when the public transport system is just not good enough to replace having a car.

This. I hope she has an actual friend who can help her.

Mine neither (some summer collections for garden waste but only if you keep it rotting in flimsy recycling bags until then - and where?). Sadly, I don't have a nice tame garden! Maybe with another few years' work ....

I would love to have that service

I'm not allowed to drive because of the medication I take, but it doesn't limit me or my opportunities it just means a bit of extra planning.
You can have independence without driving if you're willing to put the effort in

YABU.

Yes, driving (actually car ownership) gives you independence and opportunities but I also see people dependent on cars where it shrinks their lives.

I see it on MN too. People who will only go places they can park or have been to before. So used to driving they won’t use public transport. Lives are suburban home to supermarket, school runs, all cooped up in little car bubble.

Even if you own a car some of the best adventures happen on public transport. People who travel everywhere on pt are often more open minded and adventurous.

It is your friends mental health and relationship shrinks her world.

Yeah, I drive but agree with your sentiment. I find it really insensitive (at best) when people shit on other people’s lives because it’s not as good as their’s (in their opinion).

Without a car, you can still travel to any city in the country by train, and lots of rural areas. You can cycle and breathe fresh air. You can get a bus to the airport and explore anywhere you want. And you see more of the world as you go, as you travel alongside other people. Your world is less convenient at times, but not small.

Did you read your own title? It's very general.

If you don’t drive your world is much smaller

Posters are disagreeing that their worlds are smaller and that it's the circumsrances of your friend'slife that make it small - you invited the debate!

I agree with you, OP. I avoided driving for a long time because I was really seriously anxious about it to the point it made me quite miserable when I had to do it so I relied on public transport which was OK but fairly limiting.

Since pushing through that and becoming confident driving short and medium distances (and comfortable enough with long distances, even if not my favourite) my world and that of my young children has opened up massively.

I'd like to think they weren't really affected as they were still so young at the time but they certainly would be affected if I didn't drive now.

I knew in theory that it would be better if I was a confident driver but I don't think I fully grasped how joyfully liberated it would make me until I did it. I actively enjoy a certain amount of driving now.

It was very hard to push through the fear, though.

So in short I think you're right but I also massively empathise with your friend.

Do you never have anything that can’t be disposed of via household waste such as obsolete computer equipment, TVs, irons, toasters etc that no longer work? Old garden furniture?

I don't know why people think it's their place to judge whether someone else's world is small or not.

When you do a lot of your own maintenance and renovations on an old house, it is useful to be able to get to a tip. Same when you are trying to clear an overgrown garden. I don't have the option of paying a workman to sort it out for me, like a prior poster, and my council does not collect waste from DIY, and very little garden waste.

I would be interested in practical solutions to these problems if anyone could suggest any.

Not everybody lives in the same circumstances, and the rest of your list is really not relevant to my circumstances either!

You can also hire a man with a van to take stuff to the tip a few times a year for considerably less than the cost of a car.

Of course. But it is a nuisance accumulating a van's worth of rubbish and then paying over the odds (that price has almost doubled in the last couple of years) for that service.

It's not impossible to get rubbish to the tip, with expense and inconvenience. But I did find it jarring to have people mocking the idea that this might be inconvenient.

YANBU. I can't drive and live semi-rurally and my world feels tiny. It's utterly shit not being able to drive, I hate it.

So limiting needing to rely on my husband for lifts (can't afford taxis, public transport isn't great).

This has nothing to do with driving and everything to do with her attitude to doing anything. If she drove, I doubt she’d be any different.

I don’t drive but do absolutely loads. I walk and use public transport everywhere.

I am sure I would feel the same if I didn't live near good public transport links. That sounds really tough.

But car ownership is inconvenient and expensive too. You have to keep buying petrol and getting it maintained and fixing it when it breaks down, and people with cars often make choices about where they live and work that means they are massively inconvenienced by not having access to a working car.

I accept that and acknowledged it in my initial post. Then I said that the one thing I missed, not being allowed to drive, was being able to do tip runs. And I found the resultant sneering uncalled for, and based on what seemed to be very narrow assumptions about the options available to people.

(I don't mean that you were part of that sneering. But I'd suggest that people who can't imagine that other people might be inconvenienced by something that is not a problem for them are the ones living in an unnecessarily small world)

It's not a judgement, a criticism or meant to offend it's just a simple statement of fact that not having access to a car makes travel more difficult.

It's limiting even if you live in a small town.

We only have a bus service into town from 9-5, Mon-Sat, and there's a 90 minute gap in service in the afternoon, where the bus is used as a school bus.

To get to a hospital appointment by public transport involves 3 buses or 2 buses and a train and you'd be very lucky to do the 10 mile journey (20 minutes by car) in under an hour, it's 2 buses or train and bus to any of the 3 nearest big towns. We only have 2 small supermarkets, and nowhere sells hardware/DIY stuff or children's clothes, the only shoe shop is a very high end indpendent and you can't get underwear here at all. The last stationers (which also sells toys) in town is closing later this month. It's fucking frustrating to have to do a 20 mile round trip to get something basic like a bra or a pair of pliers.

It's not a tiny town, either: population was 17k, and as there's lots of new building going on it will soon be a lot more; one development has PP for 400 new homes. And it's in the SE, barely 50 miles from London, it must be far more challenging for people in more rural, sparsely populated regions.