Moving at Human Speed - Max Mautner Moving at Human Speed<br>5 years ago I stopped driving.<br>I get around by walking, biking, taking the train & bus.<br>It’s been long enough that the change has stopped being a “transition”, and it’s now an opportunity to inventory what actually changed.

Health<br>Driving to work was literally killing me, in 2 ways.<br>The first was the absence of exercise. 2 hours a day in a seated, motionless box, eating into the same hours I might otherwise have spent moving. Walking and biking didn’t replace exercise as a separate hobby; they were the trip. The errand became the workout.<br>The second was more direct. I was a danger to myself and to other people. I drove on highways and arterial streets where most of the drivers around me were looking at addictive phones, and where I was doing the same in my worst moments. The American driver knows, somewhere underneath the radio and the climate control, that the situation in our roadways is not under control.<br>5 years out, my resting heart rate is lower. I sleep better. I wake up looking forward to the bike ride to a meeting rather than dreading the drive to it. My whole mental health floor moved up — not because anything specific got better, but because the low-grade dread was removed.<br>Wealth<br>I’ve written about the financial side before. The short version: it costs a lot to drive a car, and the savings get larger the more attention you’ve paid to the line items most drivers stop noticing.<br>The smaller thing I’ll add here: I haven’t paid for parking in 5 years.<br>Reconnecting with nature<br>I knew the seasons in an abstract way before — daylight savings, holidays, pumpkin spice latte on the menu.<br>Walking and biking gives seasons back to you. You have to know what clothing to wear. You know when the rain is about to start because I can read the sky again — a skill I had no idea I’d lost until I needed it.<br>I notice which trees in my neighborhood are flowering, which streets the deer come out on, where the coyotes literally prowl.

This is not nature in some grand wilderness sense. It is just the actual living world that was always around me that I had been driving past.<br>Reconnecting with community<br>When I drove, I knew my neighbors the way you know coworkers at another company: by face, by car, by the brief eye contact at the driveway.<br>“Hello” from a shouting distance and then both of us back into our respective domiciles or cars.<br>The car is a small acoustic and visual box. You can’t hear anyone outside it; they can’t really see you through the reflective glass; the vehicle does most of the social work of refusing interaction for you.<br>I had not understood how much “windshield bias” is a real thing — how much harder it is to think of the person you pass as a full human when you are physically sealed off from them and moving at 4x their speed.

The costs<br>I am not going to pretend the tradeoff is one-sided.<br>Moving as a family is much, much harder. Carrying my infant son on and off the bus or train comes with serious challenges–and we consume more space with a stroller. Visiting grandparents who live far away, or coordinating an outing with relatives who can’t bike — cars solve for this in a way that my political advocacy for better transit and bike lanes cannot (today).<br>The disability question is the one I think about most. My body walks and bikes well right now, but none of us are guaranteed that for life. Accident, illness, age will all take it away eventually.<br>A car-free life works for me because I am able to opt out of cars–for now.<br>A note on what isn’t “driving”<br>5 years without driving doesn’t mean 5 years without a motor.<br>I ride the bus and the train. These are fundamentally different from a car — not because of the engine, but because they are communal. You share the space with strangers, you negotiate it together, and you are not the one steering a 4,000-pound object through a crowd. This is also why I don’t put Uber, Lyft, or Waymo in the same category as transit. A private vehicle that happens to have a stranger driving it — or no one driving it — reproduces all the externalities of car ownership: traffic, road wear, the demand for parking, the spatial logic of car-first streets. Not being the one behind the wheel doesn’t change the system.

I also ride electrically-assisted bikes. My rough line for “humane” micromobility is: under 500 pounds, speed-limited near bicycle speeds, no enclosure.<br>Weight because the kinetic energy a vehicle delivers in a crash scales with its mass.<br>Speed because it scales with velocity squared, and because higher speeds shorten the time you and the people around you have to react.<br>No enclosure because the acoustic and visual seal of a windshield is most of what produces the bias I described above.<br>Once you’re inside one, you’re driving — whatever the motor.<br>Moving at human speed<br>The phrase I keep coming back to is human speed.<br>There is no sharp line between traveling at a humane and inhumane speed. Ivan Illich claims it’s 15...