I hear people make this argument all the time, but it makes no sense to me. How does a car "put you down in one place" or "prevent you from moving easily"? A h

I hear people make this argument all the time, but it makes no sense to me. How does a car "put you down in one place" or "prevent you from moving easily"? A house prevents you from moving, a car literally moves you to many places. Cars are inherently mobile, that's kind of the whole point. Similarly, a car is not a huge investment. A house is a huge investment. College is a huge investment. Any trip to a hospital in the US is a huge investment. Cars are cheap, all things considered. It's a climate-controlled, roll-cage-protected closet, with a built in luxury couch + radio + satnav system + emergency cellular connection, that can also propel itself quickly and reliably for hours at a time. And the total cost of ownership for most people is somewhere less than $300/month or so (even when including a loan payment for the upfront price). That's pretty darn cheap. I could own 5 extra cars, for less than the cost of a single tiny 1bed apartment. I could own 3 extra cars, for less than the cost of daycare for one child. I could own 3.5 extra cars, for less than the cost of health insurance. Cars are pretty cheap, all things considered. And unfortunately, there's literally nothing that can match that on comfort/speed/reliability/coverage right now. Just to get those same trips out of a train or airplane would easily cost 5x to 10x higher price. Busing can occasionally be cheaper (because a bus is literally just a shared car), but it only does that by making huge sacrifices on comfort/speed/reliability/coverage. > I personally enjoy taking a train to where I’m going much more I mean, I totally get that. I love trains too. (I ride Seattle Light Rail, just for fun, and we take Amtrak to Chicago semi-regularly). Trains are fun. Trains are cool. But trains aren't really good at transportation of people. Trains go almost nowhere, almost no one has access to trains in the first place, and the cost of trains is significantly higher than cars (both on what a single person has to pay to ride either, and on what the total infrastructure costs are for the entire system). It's pretty understandable how a car would give people a lot of real-world freedom, in a way that a train never could.