Comment on Hyundai car requires $2000, app & internet access to fix your brakes - what the actual f
confuser@lemmy.zip 2 weeks agoHmm that’s interesting, its like, we have all those things too but they just aren’t for consumers, like the vehicle delivery stuff here is a thing but its not widely used and is typically for special occasions.
Some places are compact enough to be walkable for most things, usually in big cities but sometimes in suburbs we will have a shopping center of some sort that has all the basic needs really close but very rare for it to be in a suburb and reasonably walkable but still technically walkable. Kinds funny because I’m thinking about how perspective change a lot here, I know Columbia isn’t in the us but I’ve seen some people migrate to Columbia and basically you just walk miles to get toyour things and occasionally order online but more often people have a address somewhere else and you just pick up your things yearly in some way and cars and bikes exist over there but basically only for traveling for vacation or something of the sort far away.
I’ve literally never seen something like that wheely car box before lol, that does seem pretty fun.
Just today actually I got in our truck to bring home a washer since ours broke yesterday, its actually kinda hit or miss if someone has access to a truck or van I think here people just mostly don’t do things themselves and they just have companies fix stuff for them so a lot of us lazy Americans don’t even really need big cars and if they also worked from home they may not even need a car at all if biking and ubering can get a few things, for the longest time we would borrow my grandpas truck occasionally but now my brother and my dad have trucks.
My brother has a super beefy truck meant for hauling things and we definitely HAUL lol we use his dump trailer so often for things now its hard to image not having it, just today I helped load it up with leaves and he dumped it at the dump, we used it to move furniture from my grandmas house across states because it would have cost stupid amounts of money to pay for this service, we use it to dump our own messes and other peoples messes too and if we didn’t we would just not really have a clear avenue for getting rid of them because its big stuff that can’t be put in trash and paying for a service to do it costs money which feels like it shouldn’t but does, we can also load up the dump trailer with things to build our deck and we happen to live unusually close to a store that basically has all the things for anything basically so we just drive like 10 minutes and get all the things for projects and usually have to make multiple of these trips per project because nothing ever goes smoothly.
xxce2AAb@feddit.dk 2 weeks ago
Those bicycles (called ‘ladcycler’) are remarkably useful. People use them for all sorts of things, including transporting their kids to and from kindergarten etc. I’ve never tried it myself, but the kids always look like they’re having a blast.
The thing is, everything - including supermarkets - tends to be smaller here, but also dotted everywhere. I’ve got like three different places for daily grocery shopping within easy walking distance (ten minutes each way), and I’m sort of in the suburbs.
When it comes to trash, public sanitation services are rather effective here. Trash is sorted into paper/cardboard, glass, plastic, organic waste and other. All of them are routinely picked up on different schedules. The first three are recycled, organic waste is either composted or fermented for biogas production with is then used to heat homes or fuel local public transportation (busses). The last category is burned at high temperatures, with the exhaust heavily filtered and the resulting energy used to provided house heating and / or hot water. There are three more infrequent trash collection cycles: Potentially dangerous materials (chemicals, paint, batteries, e-waste), gardening waste (again, composting or biogas - lots of people with gardens do their own composting too - the containers and worm cultures are provided by the municipality for free) and lastly ‘large trash’. This is stuff like furniture, fridges, washing machines etc. That’s picked up once every month on a specific date. A lot of people recycle or upcycle locally by napping stuff before it’s hauled off (which is legal and encouraged).
All in all, a lot of these things are taken care of by people specializing in it and funded by taxes. We pay more in taxes here, but we also get a lot more services in return.
If people know they’re going to be creating lots of waste of a given type - home improvement or construction - you can have a container delivered and picked back up for a fairly modest fee. Similarly, moving homes is generally handled by dedicated companies in standardized moving crates provided by them. It’s not particularly expensive.