> You cannot just put your washing machine on the street because you have nowhere else to put it! You actually can in the US, that's legal in many places as lo

> You cannot just put your washing machine on the street because you have nowhere else to put it! You actually can in the US, that's legal in many places as long as it isn't kept there permanently. (I.e, you leave it on a trailer). We even put our trash bins onto the street almost every week. But that's beside the point. > how it is socially acceptable to put huge pieces of your private property on the public streets. Because that's what public transporation is, and the value it imparts. We dedicated public streets to the public, because the value of public transportation is much higher than the small temporary cost of having any one person occupy it. Cars and roads are the most efficient form of public transportation ever invented so far (in terms of travel time, distance traveled, safety, and equability). That's not to imply they are perfect on any/all of these things, just better than the alternatives available today. Yes, in a perfect world, everyone would have a beautiful light rail train at their front door, that takes them everywhere and anywhere they ever need to go. But that level of infrastructure is insanely expensive, and the cost of that expense is pushed into the housing nearby that infrastructure. Paradoxically, the act of building alternative public transportation like this prices out most of the public you tried to transport, because the value of that infrastructure gets captured in rent, which gets passed onto residents. If you look at light rail, and say, "how can we get most of the benefits of light rail, but in a package cheap enough that most people could afford" or "what would a light rail train look like, if it could arrive at everyone's door, take them directly where they need to go, have the lowest construction cost to every possible location so as to have the lowest impact on land value and have the lowest possible detriment to housing prices" -- if you follow that line of thinking, you reinvent zero-emission EV cars and public freeways, which is why they are everywhere in the first place.