Getting Around in an Urban Survival Situation

When a disaster occurs in an urban environment, you may ask yourself how am I going to get around? You may think you are limited to very few ways to get around efficiently. But there are a couple of different ways you can use transportation to your advantage. For example, if you are walking or biking you can take in more of the scenes. You can also easily maneuver around abandon cars, piles of junk and bad terrain. If you need a quicker way or are traveling long distances a four wheeler or dirt bike is the convenience vehicle. You can't take them as many places as your feet or drag them around, but it's basically a bicycle with a motor.

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Once you start driving motorized vehicles fuel is going to be very important so you might want to have a couple of extra gas cans if you run out or come across a good source of gasoline. I would steer clear of cars because there are too many obstacles, and you would most likely have to abandon them very quickly. And if you are traveling very long distances and you are an unexperienced traveler you can acquire a boat because many rivers go through cities and connect to bigger channels that go through the states and so on. If you know how to fly that might be the best in this situation because you can just go to the airport closest to you and get a plane and pretty much go anywhere around the world. But then the problem is still always having fuel.

 

Petrol is good for much more than six months!
I have used petrol that has sat in a vehicle for more than a decade!
The petrol in a carby may evaporate leaving a gummy residue that's a pain!
Recently I helped start an old ford that had sat idle since 1998! a new battery and some aerostart and it fired right up and after a few minutes settled down to a reasonable idle on the old fuel. Gunk in the fuel lines stopped it after a few minutes so the tank and lines got a good clean out and fresh fuel but she fired up and ran on fuel that was at least 17yo!
There should be no problems for many years unless the fuel gets contaminated!

 

Two stroke can be a problem with the petrol evaporating leaving a tacky oil residue, but plain old petrol is useable for years!

 

I have been told six - twelve months by many also but
My experience has told me otherwise.
I once started and drove a short distance a 1965 ford falcon that had sat for over two decades in a barn!
With new tyres and battery, fluids topped up and snake removed it was cranked over after a few taps with a hammer to free the starter motor
It fired up and came to idle with ease, only drove it 100m or so to the car trailer but it run ok on its original fuel!
I moonlighted as an offsider for this old car collector and many time similar situations happened
Only ever had a few problems with diesel, none with original petrol if there was any!

Most trouble was had with long empty tanks as new fuel lifted old dried flakey grime and blocked the lines!
All sorted with a petrol IV line directly to carby!

 

And that, my friend, is why I own six Ford vehicles.

 

besides, Falcons are awesome in and of themselves

 

I've used gasoline that I had stored for well over a year. I suspect that the newer cars are less forgiving though. I will tell you for a fact that a 2 cycle engine is not very picky. I've run boats on old gas with no problems. All that said though without the just massive infrastructure that provides us with gasoline, oil, tires and such the useful life expectancy after thing go down will be short term only and as they and their fuel become increasingly rare they will make you a target.

Bicycles are good if you can find one that is tough and that you can put baskets on. Then you want to have a bunch of tires, repair kits, tubes and air pumps. A wheeled travois would be good and they are easy to make and pull. I might even go for a horse. There are lots of them around here.

 

I’ll stick with a mountain bike and open top kayak. Always have a truck for backup but when there isn’t any people to maintain roads they fall apart quickly. Naturally occurring things like landslides, floods and windstorms can make roads not passable.

 

It really depends on your engine. I once watched a demonstration where a Hillman car ran on old engine oil (it stank but it ran) but I have stihl saws that suffer badly from even slightly stale fuel, its made much worse if the oil mix has been added a while. Two stroke engines definitely suffer more in my experience. Since the fuel producers increased the percentage of vegetable derived bio-fuel mixed into mineral based fuel its shelf life has decreased dramatically. Stale gasoline will reduce the power output of a modern engine to the point where it misfires but with a great big V8 you have so much more power that you may not notice the drop in performance. It isn't that it creates varnish in your carbs as petrol/gasoline used to do...it's a problem with the RON rating of the fuel dropping once you see the little black grains form as the veg based additive breaks down in the fuel. (This is a major issue for boat owners with large capacity fuel tanks, it crops up in a lot of boat magazines and forums) It effects any fuel with a veg based bio-fuel additive, both diesel and petrol. There are fuel stabiliser additives available but they're a bit expensive.
If you want to make pure bio-diesel and use it while it's fresh it's very easy to do at home in a plastic barrel, it works just fine but your truck smells like fried food.
I like bikes, canoes, kayaks etc but I suspect that for urban environments I would want to maintain as much cover as possible and travel on foot. That's just me though, personal choice.

 

I only own 4 right now but have to admit my preference. I love to find a nice ford with around a hundred thousand miles on it that has been well maintained. They are cheap and usually good for another hundred thousand miles. Texas is a big state and we put a lot of highway miles on our cars and trucks. Those miles are easy on the drive train. My Ranger has 236,000 miles. I put a new motor in it at 215,000 so it will probably last me the rest of my life. My Escape is much the same with near two hundred thousand miles but with a fairly new motor and transmission. The F-150 that is more or less permanently hooked to my boat has 117,000 and my little ford Focus has 192,000 original miles and is our emergency spare car.

I built a thing to carry stuff for fishing on piers and bridges that would be handy in a post apocalyptic urban environment. When my Mama passed one of the things that I kept was her lightweight folding wheelchair. I did some work on it and basically turned it into a rickshaw. I can easily carry my tackle, ice chest, folding chairs, umbrella and such on it. It is about 6'/2 meters long with light metal poles out front for me to hold while I pull it. I put the heavy stuff either right over the axles or on the back so the weight on the lift is minimal. It has legs in the front so it sits level when I set it down. In a bind it could be used easily as a rickshaw to move an injured person. After all it was a wheelchair.

 

So true with any roads, in all honesty. Without a government, no one will be repairing anything when it comes to cities, governments, or towns.

 

The infrastructure all over the USA is getting old and beginning to be a problem. Without nearly constant work on them they will rapidly become impassable at anything near the kind of speeds we are used to. I spent almost twenty years living on a dirt road and was a long way off the highway. Pretty quickly after moving there I went to all trucks because the ruts in the winter were too deep for a car to clear. If you had not had road crews coming in and regrading the road when it dried out it would have eventually become impassable even by regular truck. I've seen wreckers stuck trying to get cars out of the ditches on these roads. I sort of miss those old dirt roads. They kept the riff raff out and the city folks wouldn't even consider living out there. I used to be able to stargaze in my front yard but the city people are afraid of the dark and put flood lights up all over the place and ruin the dark. I honestly won't miss much of what our modern civilization offers. I guess the medical is about the only thing that I can think of.

 

Review of oil and fuel stabilizers:

https://www.bestreviews.guide/gas-stabilizers

 

Before I put up equipment for winter, I run my last tank with a stabilizer. I've done this with rototillers, chainsaws, lawn mowers, ... whatever. Using oil and fuel stabilizers has spoiled me for decades now. I've left a chainsaw sit for months, come back to it, and fire it right back up. Any yes I do use engine starting spray.

Add generators. Always stabilize the fuel in your generator.

 

In a SHTF situation, you gotta have iron or layered (tile & fiberglass) shielding around key components of your truck -- to include you and your cohort. Gotta have someone riding shotgun and good to have a rifleman in the back. All personnel must have shielding, helmet, and goggles. Flack jackets are good and body armor better. At least weld some boiler plate around the bed of the survival truck. Buy some run-flat tires.

This also PREVENTS attacks -- this, in that it is easier for the aggressors to pick softer targets. I mean, why receive return fire when you can wait on stupid sheeple to rob. Looters & thieves are usually anything but brave and all of them have a wide lazy streak in them. The inner city types are chicken-sh## of being opened up on. If you want to risk it, throw Molotov cocktails loaded with homemade napalm into looters or thieves. Watching someone burned bad or burned to death has an effect on people, even "bad boys".

.Forgot something else. Good if you got some iron or steel plating to cover truck hood, cab, and bed (elevate the bed roof so that rifleman back there can return fire against aggressors. Thieves could have shooters on roofs and/or bridges.

Affix tiles to armor plate or create layers of metal-tile-metal-tile ... . The tile yaws bullets, taking out energy and yawing the bullet before it hits the metal plate.

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=i...4.0....0...1.1.64.img..1.0.0....0.MiH3drMdqBo

 

Thank God that you are in a rural area. Me, I'm in a small town, outdoor shops, agricultural supplies, people keep gardens, county fairs, car parts truck parts stores, ... . There is a rather large hospital for this county/area -- I'm surprised about how much they can handle there; super professional.

Urban areas are gonna go Mad Max. If one leaves their hardened dwelling, they'll have to be covering their hind-ends. Me, I'm not ever again living in or near any metropolis. Quite frankly, I don't see how there could be anything but horrific casualties in all urban areas during a SHTF situation.

I see many megalopolises simply going away, going up in smoke, gone.

 

In the event of a disastrous violent apocalypse I will at the very least put a couple of 55 gallon drums full of water in the bed strapped to the front of the bed behind the driver and passenger. Water stops bullets amazingly well. They did a myth busters show on that and they never found any bullet that would even break a piece of glass after 3ft/1m of water. That is also why they use water barrels in front of bridge abutments now. Besides that hauling water will be a good thing for a lot of reasons.

I would like to armor it with plate steel but I don't want to do that now and after things blow up I won't have the things that I would need to get and armor the truck. One of the many things that I have done for a living over the years is load truck with fork lifts. Hours of doing this has made ot so I can drive as well in reverse as in forward. In a bind I would rather back into trouble with my protection in the back. That way if things get ugly I can really leave in a hurry with my back protected. Just a thought. I bet if I dropped a piece of steel in the back between the barrels and the cab nothing could get through short of an RPG.

I'm still thinking about tires as far as things I could do after things go down and am wide open for suggestions.

 

More weight added more weight to get unstuck. I would put the extra weight towards big bush bumper and winch to push or pull abandoned cars out of the way. Skid plates to protect underneath. All it takes is a good barricade on the road set up and being forced to take it off the paved road and risking destroying a oil pan or diff. Need the run flats with all the debris left everywhere.

 

There will be roadblocks all over the place if things go as I expect them to. There were roadblocks diverting people that were evacuating when Rita hit Texas. Small towns get overwhelmed fast and roadblocks are all they can do to survive. They blocked off the bridge where I live and would only allow people to go through in small groups. This was done by the local and state police that lived and worked in that next little town. You could block or blow a couple of bridges and basically stop the problem of masses swarming into and over your small town. Things like this will happen pretty soon when the mrga cities start POURING their masses out into the countryside like a swarm of locust.

There will be lots of opportunities for walking people that won't be there for people in cars and trucks.

A person, once they are in shape can cover a lot of ground walking and carry more then you would imagine if they are creative. I remember a man that I used to see every year or two. During lint this guy dragged a cross across Texas. He made the cross out of a 12' or 16' 4x4 with a 4' cross beam. He put a solid rubber wheel on the foot of that cross and then piled his gear on the beam back near the wheel. He then would shoulder the cross and walk about 20 miles a day. This was NOT a young man. Any time I saw him I would go get some cold water for him an food if he wanted or needed it. I admire anyone of any faith that is honestly committed to it and lives their faith.

I have often thought that he had a great idea as far as a walking man carrying a load. He said that the cross was easy to carry and that the weight of his gear was purely pull weight and not weight on his back. I think that a travois made with a pair of bicycle wheels might be a real tool for hauling long distance. Somewhere here I mentioned making a rickshaw out of a wheelchair. A travois would be longer and even better able to allow a man to carry a load.

 

After the things that I've seen in hurricanes they will have to be real fast or the highways around the big cities will be useless bumper to bumper parking lots. The problem is that people leave their homes evacuating with very little gasoline, no food, no water and NO SENSE. When traffic starts to back up they will just sit there with their motors running until they run out of fuel or their cars over heat and die. As this happens the highways back up even more and in a very short time you have no more movement at all. I saw an interstate freeway that had both sides going the same way lock up into a 4 to 6 lane 114 mile long parking lot that just sat there for several days. What an amazing mess!!

At this point the second level of stupidity came into effect. Not only had they left home with very little fuel, now their one bottle or can of soda pop and bag of chips for each person has to last them for two or three days. Hurricanes don't happen in the winter so it is usually going to be hot as the pits of hell on those roads.

The sad thing is that when people do this they block off most possible help. The gas stations were packed with people that sat there and ran out of gas but even when things started to settle they couldn't get any fuel because the truck couldn't get to the stations to deliver any. The same thing was happening to the grocery stores. Before anything could get done the roads had to be cleared of hundreds and hundreds of cars that were not running because they sat there running their air conditioners until they were out of gas.

If you are in one of the bigger cities and plan to bug out you will either need to do it real fast before the masses head out or plan on not being able to do bug out in a car or truck. Bikes and motorcycles will work to some extent but fuel for the motorcycle will be hard to get. Make sure that you carry a siphon hose. Walking may in the end be the only way out. Carry a pair of wire cutters and walk cross country avoiding any main highways. As people start to suffer from dehydration they are going to be something that you want to avoid. If they even THINK that you might have water they will kill you for it!

 

If you can keep it charged an electric pushbike is very stealthy
Silent and sneaky suckers they are