Posted on 12/11/2006 6:50:33 AM PST by LurkedLongEnough
For all the nonsense about the love affair between Americans and their cars, people seem to spend a whole lot of time and effort to avoid climbing into a car.
Super Stop & Shop's Peapod provides home delivery of groceries. That eliminates one's weekly trip to the grocery store. Get the grocery list online, pick the items, and the food appears in the insulated box outside your house.
People can go to Match, Jdate, EHarmony and Match.com to start dating without even heading to a bar. What happened to joining the ski club? What happened to taking night classes? Tennis, anyone? Too much car involved with all that.
How about Greensingles. com? That's for Naturenuts who want to get together with other natural types.
Actually, Naturenuts may be a strong way to describe them. The Web site says it is for vegetarians, animal rights activists, and environmentalists to meet each other. Talk about a good time.
Back in the day, a person would head to the bar and meet a few people. Buy someone a drink. Talk and decide if the person was OK or not. Get her number, and agree to meet later or another day.
I'm willing to bet even money it still works that way on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
In some cities, grocery stores are famous people pickup places. On the waterfront in San Francisco's Marina district was a famous grocery store where singles went to meet people they might like to date. To find a match, they would look in each other's grocery cart.
A Naturenut, for example, might check out the items in a person's cart to see if they're compatible. No ground beef. No steaks. No fur coat. O.K. It's veggies, pita and a match. Go back to the apartment and make dinner together.
A similar spot in San Francisco is the Buena Vista, a restaurant near Fisherman's Wharf. One famous story I know about the Buena Vista involves two people who went there by cable car, separately, and met and later married. They never owned a car.
John came from Sydney, Australia, and he'd heard stories about the Buena Vista in Australia to the point where he took a taxi (yes, that's a car) from the airport to the cable car to get there.
He got off at Fisherman's Wharf, found the bar and started drinking Irish coffees. He stayed for two days and met the woman who became his wife. Neither one of them owned a car. John literally traveled 4,000 miles -- without a car -- to meet a woman and settle down -- without a car.
People do so many things to avoid driving. How about the Domino pizza chain? The whole entire concept is you don't have to go out for Domino's. It's all about home delivery.
Animal groomers are willing to drive their grooming van to your house, and some vets will make house calls.
Maybe the love affair with the automobile is a thing of the past.
The entire concept of owning a car is personal freedom. Now, whether or not you want to exercise it is another thing, but if Dominos is backed up, and it'll be an hour and a half to deliver, you can still *choose* to go pick it up yourself, drive somewhere else for food, or whatever you want.
A car means you have the ability to change your mind and do something else.
exactly. heck, I neeed five!
a summer car, a winter jeep, a motorhome, a toy car(jaguar) and, of course the harley!
this is just another juvenile writeup by some lunatic who thinks that the future is going to be perfect and that technology will save us all.
Yup.... Printers sure have gotten fast and capable since then. LOL!
Try telling this to the people of L.A.
You must understand, the writer is of the belief that civilization stops West of the Hudson. He personally knows of a 4th cousin's friend's uncle whose guide was scalped on a trip to one of those states that ends in a vowel...
 |
| Get the grocery list online... This is an aversion to grocery stores, not cars. People can go to Match, Jdate, EHarmony and Match.com to start dating without even heading to a bar. This is most likely an admission to being ugly, or not wanting to risk a DUI, but most certainly nothing against vehicles. |
I'm in the type of job where I must go out to visit customers. Many of them live in small towns or rural areas. Without a car, I make no money. These urbanites can kiss my All-American a$$.
gaydar alert.
Spent the better part of a decade in a dense urban area where I walked to work. The first few years I had a car and it wasn't worth the expense (even though I got a very good deal of $160/mo on parking) as I barely used it. It was easier to walk or take public transport everywhere as I didn't have to spend time looking for parking at my destinations. If I went out for the evening I didn't need to think about how much I drank. The times I needed a car for an out of town roadtrip I could walk down to my local car rental office and it was still cheaper than car ownership.
teh word 'crackpot' comes to mind. I have littel patience with utopian pie-in-the-sky drivel.
I live in Houston. My office is seven miles from home, and it takes me 44 minutes to drive it.
My car is a calming influence. I get in, start it up, find a nice highway and break the law while being careful. Gravity is both humbling and caressing. When I get out of the car, I am human again.
.....I do not know a single person as described by the author in this article........
Gretchen Carlson very recently declined to participate in a Fox and Friends event because she can't drive. She advised she had not driven a car in ten years.
(That's the only person I know of that fits the bill. I once had a colleague who grew up in Philadelphis and after college got a job in Washington. He was having a terrible time adapting to a new job, a new city, and leaninig how to drive)
Love that calming influence:) Hate commuting on the same repetitive route everyday through traffic, but love the long roadtrip especially through remote areas.
84 through Hartford used to be a nightmare, and I thought that whoever under-engineered the design needed to be horsewhipped. It's been a few years since I've travelled it, though, hopefully it's been improved.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.