4 ms·
I always liked the idea of - live in a town - keep car in a garage in the town - retrieve car only when you need to go somewhere outside the town
by b3morales 4y ago
I always liked the idea of
- live in a town
- keep car in a garage in the town
- retrieve car only when you need to go somewhere outside the town
- rayiner 4y agoThis is totally impractical at scale. In most small towns, you need to go outside town routinely, and possibly daily. Even if you live and work in town, your kid may go to a high school or your spouse may work one town over. And once everyone is already paying for a car, it doesn't make much sense to ask them to also pay extra taxes for public transport within town.
- rainsford 4y agoCars cost money to drive, so there is value in not making every trip a car trip even if you needed to buy a car anyways. And that's ignoring the costs of building your town exclusively around car travel. Even in places where you regularly need to use a car, there is value in balancing things so you don't have to use a car every single time you leave your house.
- rayiner 4y agoAnd public transit also costs money to operate and ride. The point is that your proposal doubles up on capital costs.
- rainsford 4y agoI don't think there is any free lunch here. The more trips that are made by car, and the longer those trips are, the more the community also needs to invest in capital costs like road and parking infrastructure (which also comes with a non-trivial opportunity cost in downtown areas). And the more you drive the sooner you'll have to replace your car, incurring more frequent capital costs. Of course alternatives aren't free either and sometimes they may not be worth it. But I disagree with the idea that it obviously doesn't make economic sense to invest in any alternatives once you've purchased a car.