Post-Car Adventuring

this blog has a few implicit aims, obvious from the posts and the title.

to be explicit: the goal is to provide those who, either by choice or by necessity, do not have a personal automobile, ideas and information for car-free trips to (mostly natural) areas commonly thought be to inaccessible without a personal vehicle. a blog for would-be weekend car campers, newbie bike tourists, experienced bike tourists, dayhikers, backpackers, etc. [an intended audience is the large group of urbanites who rarely need and use a personal automobile in the city but continue to own a car because they perceive it it as a necessity for rural and wilderness trips].

peak of mt. diablo.

we do not and will not be posting trips with laborious car-free itineraries, i.e. a trip that would take 2 hours with a car but 9 hours without one, but rather trips where using transit (and often a bicycle) mean either a faster in-transit time or roughly equal amount of time it would take to travel by car alone. (i.e. you know that irritating drive through freeway gridlock to yosemite that takes 4 to 5 hours? you can get there in five hours via Amtrak’s affordable and on-time train + bus route to the park and drink six beers while you’re at it).

the goal is not ideological environmental asceticism and/or anti-car militancy, but pleasure while engaged in environmentally and socially-responsible practices– in-line with what the environmental philosopher Kate Soper has called a ‘hedonistic environmentalism’ where human happiness and comfort is not ground under a radical-Jainist wheel of self-abnegation in the interest of decreasing personal carbon footprints.

why not just use zip-car, city-car share, or a good-old fashioned rental car?

1) it’s comparatively cheaper for most trips of 2 or 3 people to use transit instead of autos, 2) transit is generally less carbon intensive, 3) it’s safer, 4) you can drink on the train, 5) meeting new people (who at times have had a drink or two and open up more and tend to be more friendly than anonymous drivers on CA’s interstates), 6) because Shell slaughters Nigerians to help stock their gas stations, 7) because Chevron pollutes Richmond, 8 ) because it is simply more fun.