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I have used public transport since I was 14. I'm twice that age now. I never needed a car to get anywhere.
by bsza 5y ago
I have used public transport since I was 14. I'm twice that age now. I never needed a car to get anywhere.
- em-bee 5y agoi grew up in europe without a car. when i moved to san diego i thought, that's it, i'll finally have to learn how to drive. but i didn't. i made sure that i lived somewhere with a direct bus to work and it turned out to be fine. same in los angeles later. also auckland, nz. with that experience i concluded that i won't need a car, ever. it is all about arranging how you live.
- ulimn 5y agoLet's inform the other few billions of humans on Earth to move closer to bus stops. Some people act so entitled... Not everyone has the same circumstances and infrastructure around them. Go to a poor part of eastern Europe. My mother has 2 buses to the nearest city in an entire day... (Not mentioning it takes like 5-6x more time.)
- avianlyric 5y agoCars aren’t exactly cheap either. Why should we force every human to own a $1000 asset, and feed it with oil every week, just to participate is basic society? Why is building more bus stops, more metro stops, more train stops, more bike lanes, so terrible? And how is forcing car ownership better?
- ulimn 5y agoOf course improving infrastructure to support better public transport would be a good thing. But I also think urbanization in itself is a big part of the problem. Most of the hate on cars comes from people living in big cities (my own observation).
- aronpye 5y agoAn annual London travel card is £2,568, and that only lets you travel around London. So why should be instead force people to buy something more expensive and less useful than a car?
- adrianN 5y agoAn annual Berlin travel card is about 720€, I believe it's about the same in Paris. An annual Vienna travel card is 365€. At least in Berlin car ownership correlates very strongly with household income. The majority of poor households don't have access to a car, whereas rich households have multiple cars.
- ratww 5y ago> An annual Berlin travel card is about 720€ Or 480€ if you get it trough your employer, which amounts to 40€ a month.
- iso1631 5y agoAverage cost of owning a car in the UK is more than that, especially in London where there is limited land And very few people have a travelcard for the entire city, just you payg on your phone/watch/card for what you use. Unless you literally are crossing London 10 times a week an annual travel card is meaningless.
- multjoy 5y agoAckshually, an annual Z1-3 travel card (other zones are available) costs the same as 40 weeks at the weekly cap (£43.50 vs £1740). If your weekly travel sees you routinely hitting the cap then a travel card may represent better value.
- iso1631 5y agoVery few people travel zone 1-3 enough to hit a weekly cap, even before covid, hence very few annual travelcards were sold in London.
- watwut 5y agoAlternative option is to build more frequent bus stops. Also, poor Eastern Europe people use more public transport, vause cars are more expensive.
- adrianN 5y agoYou're commenting in a discussion about changing the infrastructure to be less car centric so that more people can live without having a car.
- ulimn 5y agoI was directly replying to a specific comment. My comment is not really about the article.
- iso1631 5y agoThere's only 1.4 billion cars in the world, with 300 million of them in the US, so "billions" is a somewhat odd statement.
- em-bee 5y agoi have travelled eastern europe extensively and lived there too. public transport in most places is better than the US. a similar location in the US would have no busses at all. remote places exist. if you live there you may need a car. but that doesn't translate to needing a car everywhere.
- Aldqueath 5y agoi live in a rural area with zero public transportation and would have a very hard time doing anything in nearby town if there was nowhere to park my car.
- avianlyric 5y agoBut you don’t need to park your car right next to the shop you’re visiting. You could park your car near a metro stop, or train station on the edge of the city and use public transport to complete your journey. That way city dwellers don’t need to sacrifice huge amounts of space for cars they don’t use, along with dealing with the consequences of urban heat islands. And you don’t need to spend you life sat in traffic because there will never be enough roads in major cities for everyone to travel by car.
- iso1631 5y agoParking lot 2 miles out of town, with plenty of electric bikes you can take into town (And the other way have bikes with trailers to get back to the car) Get rid of cars in town, leave a few single-lane roads with a 10mph limit for deliveries etc at specific times.
- chongli 5y agoWhat about all your groceries? Your wife at the fertility clinic? Little Sally at the community pool? Grandpa at the doctor’s office? Bikes for everyone and a little cart for the groceries? What if grandpa walks with a cane and your wife is 9 months pregnant? What if it’s below freezing and there’s 8 inches of snow on the ground? All of this to cut out a handful of parking spaces for a town of 500 in the middle of the Great Plains?
- avianlyric 5y agoElectric bikes and electric tricycles solve your accessibility problem. As for snow, do the same think you do for cars, plough your bike paths and grit them. It’ll be quicker and cheaper than ploughing and gritting roads because bike paths are physically much smaller to serve the same number of people. Or you take a half way approach, only have accessibility spaces in town, so those unable to use a bike, or similar small personal transport device, can drive and park. As for groceries, we solved that a long time ago. They’re called cargo bikes, you can even get electric versions. Great for filling up with groceries and children. Also we’re not talking about towns of 500 in the great planes. We’re talking about towns and cities of thousands to millions of people. You would have be an either an idiot or trying to be deliberately obtuse to assume this discussion is talking about villages in arse end of nowhere.
- FpUser 5y agoAnd because of that everybody else has to do the same. Seems to be very understanding and tolerant approach.
- bsza 5y ago1. The average car occupancy is 1.5 persons per vehicle. 2. The total parking area in NYC adds up to TWELVE Central Parks. 3. Cars are a leading cause of death by accident in the world. 4. Driving a car for 1 hour reduces your life expectancy by 20 minutes. 5. They emit toxic fumes and greenhouse gases. 6. Car tires shed microplastics, which might be even more harmful than the toxic fumes they emit. 7. This article. Now please tell me, what tolerance do these glorified killing machines deserve?
- FpUser 5y agoNot gonna tell you anything. You obviously have you mind made up and I do not really care. I have car and use it for my benefit. That's all that matters to me.
- bsza 5y agoTragedy of the commons.
- kqr 5y ago> 4. Driving a car for 1 hour reduces your life expectancy by 20 minutes. Surely driving a car for 60 minutes ought to reduce your life expectancy by something like 59 minutes, at least -- much like anything you do for 60 minutes. I'm not just trying to be funny, there's a point here: you'll say "yeah, but it's 20 minutes more than otherwise" and I'll ask "so what is this otherwise?" Obviously, if you compare to riding an ultralight airplane for 60 minutes, I think the car is going to be better – especially in bad weather. So what's the comparison for this number? If you're just comparing demographics, I'm forced to point out that correlation is not, in general, direct causation. We might just be observing something else that happens to affect both car usage and life expectancy. (To be clear, I'm doing this to find the steel man of your argument. I dislike car-centric infrastructure as much as anyone, but I wouldn't want to use weak arguments.)