> You can't really do much better than a private car. I once read an analysis linked on HN, claiming that cars are only a personal net benefit if you're rich e

> You can't really do much better than a private car. I once read an analysis linked on HN, claiming that cars are only a personal net benefit if you're rich enough to pay for someone to drive you around, or live in a city that's not yet developed in a car-accommodating way and has low car ownership rates, and that the last personal transportation development that was actually a strong net benefit was the bicycle. This is because car-centric city design pushes everything much farther apart (big front lawns so your house isn't too close to the nasty street; huge setbacks next to highways [look how damn wide those are next time you're on one!], the highways themselves, enormous interchanges, "green spaces" that aren't intended for people to be in but just to provide a buffer between people and roads, gigantic parking lots, et c), plus cars are expensive, so by the time you factor in the extra travel distance due to cars being widespread and the amount of time you spend working just to pay for your car (and gas, and maintenance, and a place to keep it) most people are losing time, when the whole point was to travel faster. I thought that had to be overstating it. So I ran the numbers for myself. With conservative estimates for how much closer my house would be to the city if you took out all the car-created distance, with my own spending on cars being rather low, with my commute to the city center not being that long (20-25 minutes each way), and with my income being nearly double the household median income in my city (so I need fewer hours working to pay for my car)—well, I'll be damned, I would save a little time in a hypothetical city that wasn't designed around cars, but instead around bicycles and walking. Which means cars are a slam-dunk loss for most people, if my numbers came out that way—they only seem like they're saving you time if your city has already been messed up by car-centric design.