We just moved from a very rural area to a large city and am surprised at all the food delivery/rent-a-bike-or-scooter/ride-share/car-share/random delivery/etc. apps and services that are available. What do you find you get the most use of and most value for money?
Public transit. I live near where a rapid bus and train intersect so I can get to most non suburb spots super easily and cheaply.
Yep, moved to a transit hub in the city. No longer have a car. I just use public transit, bike, and on the rare occasion, ride share.
I started using an app called Transit instead of just google maps. While searching for businesses is worse, the information and details about public transit is better. You can even buy tickets directly through it, very useful compared to downloading a new app every time I’m in a new city.
A bit of a brag, but my city provides gigabit fiber internet service for around $50/month. Due to cable-sponsored state laws, they are not able to provide service outside of the city limits despite many areas not serviced at all by cable or dsl. We had actually voted to use city tax money to start expanding fiber service into those areas and were shut down, resulting in quite a lot of upset rural residents.
What city is this? This sucks for rural residents but also good to promote denser city living
Longmont Colorado, US. There was a time not long ago when we had the second fastest residential internet in the world, and we really inspired a lot of other places to get moving on their own similar services. What’s really crazy is that we spent a decade fighting the State (aka the politicians who were getting kickbacks to block this). We actually paid to get the trunk line here in the late 90’s but were blocked from using it.
We finally got the laws changed so we could move forward and the cable company convinced a majority of voters “don’t you know how expensive it will be to get a trunk line run to your city? You really don’t want to have to pay for THAT!” Yes, the same trunk line we already had available for the previous decade. You can bet everyone got to buzzing about how voters were directly lied to, but it took another two years before we could put it up for a vote again.
And just to show how desperate Comcast (our local cable company) was to make our project a failure that they could promote, they literally had reps standing in our local Walmart, telling everyone how terrible an idea this was going to be, it couldn’t possibly be more reliable than their service, and people should sign up for a three-year contract with Comcast to make sure they would miss out on the initial sign-up bonus rates for our fiber service. For comparison, after the city finished running the fiber to everyone’s homes there was a huge storm that took out services in a bunch of neighborhoods. The reddit discussion was talking about how people with our city fiber were back online in a few hours. Cable and DSL customers were waiting over two WEEKS for repairs.
Yes, I do like to brag about how great our service is, and how badly Comcast sucks.
Thanks for sharing. That is grim. In Australia we had a good plan to connect the country with fibre optics. Then the right wing government stepped in and crippled it every step of the way. So now we ended up with a half assed setup that’s not nearly what we set out to achieve after billions of dollars spent anyway.
They’re now going back and upgrading it at a cost of even more dollars to get it to where it should’ve been ten years ago.
Honestly I always just preferred to grab fresh stuff every day on the way home, since I mostly used busses and frequently walked by a grocery store. I did use the restaurant delivery apps, but it was back when they were trying to lure people in with amazing deals. Probably not so good anymore, I stopped using them mostly. Still though, getting stuff in the middle of the night can be nice.
My most used might’ve just been lyft, because it’s a little necessary sometimes after going out.
My two feet. I am simply amazed by how fucking convenient it is to be able to walk to 15 different restaurants in a 7 minute walk radius. I used to also live in an area where McDonald’s was twenty minutes via car and I can’t go back.
Avoid the food delivery apps if you can. Do pickup or find restaurants that do their own delivery. Those apps add a ton of extra fees and the food is often times marked up more than direct from the restaurant in addition to the fees.
Not using my car is probably the best thing. I’m not stressed before, during, and after an errand run now that I can use my bike or feet to do a majority of them. I still drive to one-off errands, but that’s few and far in-between
Like, if my city was even more walkable, it would be cheaper to do ride-share/micro mobility rentals than to own a car. Turns out having a car payment, insurance, gas, maintenance, and random one-off car expenses is expensive
To give more context around why cars are inefficient is that most trips Americans make is less than like 5ish miles, and any e-bike worth their money can easily do that. The gap between a nice (the nicest is like $10k, but a really nice one is 1-3k) e-bike and the shittiest functioning car is pretty big too
Too Good to Go - buy restaurant surplus food for cheap
Ride share availability of any kind is light-years better in urban areas, as is public transit.
Any secondhand shopping like craigslist or Facebook marketplace will also have much better stuff.
Grocery delivery. I can’t drive, and it costs me £4 to get to the nearest supermarket and back, with whatever I can carry in my hands, on the bus. I can order 4 times that volume or more for home delivery, for £3 or less. The only catch is a £40 minimum purchase price but I can easily manage that if I order once a week or less (and any time my order falls short, I just add in one or two bottles of wine).
