I live in inner-city Melbourne, in what, I am under no delusion, is a relatively privileged position even in this city and where people (as people do everywhere

I live in inner-city Melbourne, in what, I am under no delusion, is a relatively privileged position even in this city and where people (as people do everywhere) complain about transport. The outer suburbs are dominated by car use. Myself and my partner currently preference, by free choice (we could easily afford one) not to have a car. We own a carspace in our building in case we ever needed one one, but we rent it out to others. We're dreading the day when we have to waste our money or time buying a car, say if children came along, but we're seriously asking ourselves whether we could maybe go without one even in that case because its unhealthy, an inconvenience and a frustration. We're members of a car share, but honestly...we've used it once so far. I have 3 tram lines within about 5 minutes walk from me. I don't really look at timetables, I walk to the stops or use the phone tram-tracking and just go. Why do we preference to not owning a car? Because its a pain in the arse to drive + a time + money + health sink. But let me just tackle another of your points. Namely: people who live off public transportation live in tiny bubbles. Guilty. I even jokingly refer to this place as the inner-city bubble, because once you're in you really have no reason to leave. And yes, my neighbourhood is walk friendly for a couple of kilometers in all directions. My bubble is made up of about 5 walkable 'burbs within a few square kilometers of my house, and that's where I spend 90%+ of my time. But you know what. Previously I've lived in a couple of places, one of which was Sydney. Traffic is awful there. And Canberra, a little country car town if ever there was one. And what I observed was that car-cultures live in bubbles too. But you know what? Their bubbles are orders of magnitude smaller. Oh sure, they commute and move 30kms to get from one little bubble to park in another little bubble, but their lives become miniscule little bubbles connected by road journeys. Its the IDEA of freedom that most car owners enjoy, but if you tacked on a GPS, I bet you'd find most car owners moving between and handful of miniscule bubbles via a system of road based arteries for 99% of their lives. Indeed in Sydney, it was pretty much an attitude of "screw it, its such a god damn hassle to get anywhere because of the traffic/roads, i'm going to bunker down in my own little bubble as much as possible". Now is there variation? Sure, but the idea that public transport is the shit option, or that users on it are living in bubbles compared to the freedom of car owners is demonstrably not universally true.