I'm carless and I have to break it to every woman I date in L.A | Hacker News Reader

I'm carless and I have to break it to every woman I date in L.A

latimes.com

45 pointsblondie9x53 comments

> Later, after a couple beers at Little Bear, she handed me her phone and disappeared to the restroom. I sat at the bar and debated how much my revelation had contributed to the current awkwardness when her phone flashed and the following message appeared on the screen: “He doesn't drive? Dealbreaker?????????”

My only question is - why was she texting during a date? That's the real dealbreaker.

This is standard operating procedure for many people, especially ladies.

Standard doesn't mean acceptable.

As much as we like to criticize millenials, luckily it's not something you see as often as you'd think these days, at least not on the first few dates. I think it's totally reasonable to agree as a couple to focus on present company first once you've been going out for a while and the texting during dates situation inevitably comes up.

On another forum, someone was mentioning how they were chatting on their phone during sex.

I like to think I'm pretty good at not telling others how to live their life but I failed in my objective and told them they were doing it wrong.

They weren't a millennial, however.

I'm sure that happens sometime somewhere, like most things, don't think it's quite an epidemic yet.

I'm not sure I'd respond well to that, honestly. If I am honestly introspective, I suspect my ego would be crushed.

Ah well... It was pretty strange to read. If it works for them, I guess? It's not really my business what they do in there and I have heard of stranger things.

> “But don’t you want to? Doesn’t it feel like part of being a grown-up?”

Funny because driving age is 16 in most US states.

Not only it isn't part of being grown-up, it's not even required to be grown up to drive US.

This may simply be an LA thing. The entire basin is designed for cars, as a teenager having a car affords a freedom that is simply not possible otherwise. If you lived in the Valley, you can now go with your friends on the weekends to the beach, get something to eat in K-Town and watch the sunset in Griffith Park.

This is simply not possible if you tried to rely on Metro and I'm hard pressed to think of any mass transit system in the US that could allow one to get away with this.

>I'm hard pressed to think of any mass transit system in the US that could allow one to get away with this.

That is a combined failure of US city planners and US transit systems.

You should look at the current state of cities like a large legacy codebase written imperatively. But worse because you can't rewrite it, any change is slow and political, and you have to apply any change in code by patching the binary live.

The fundamental mistake was that cities were decomposed into an interconnected system of districts separated by purpose. This wasn't an assumption that people would think to question -- it doesn't seem opinionated, it doesn't prescribe a way to plan, and it's 'obvious'. So naturally this way of looking at cities lead people to plan cities that fit the model. So we have districts separated by use that require transportation systems to go between. I don't think it's right to shoulder the blame on the transit systems because their existence is a band-aid fix for a severed corroded. The fact that a person needs a transit system at all to satisfy their daily needs is the problem.

However, modern city planning has undergone a revolution that throws out this old model. A new model where everything is intermixed and in close proximity is the new hotness in the industry. It's sometimes called mixed use but that's a small part of what really is a larger set of changes.

Overall I wouldn't fault city planners for such a non-obvious mistake that was made a long time ago and only lived on through the industries cultural memory.

That assumes everybody wants to and does live in a highly compact urbanized environment. It is not the case, especially in the US. Outside of this environment, covering it with a transit system that allows freedom of movement and convenience comparable to having a personal car does not seem feasible. You need to cover pretty big distances, you need frequent stops to make it accessible and you also need it to move with reasonable speeds so you don't take whole day to go to a mall and back. I don't see how this can work with current model of mass transit. Maybe if we could magically build a subterranean tunnels everywhere and put fast trains there... But this seems to be super-costly. Taking one case - public transport in Silicon Valley, esp. southern parts, sucks. A lot. But I don't see how it can realistically be made better without super-massive investment of money which will never be recovered and will never be self-sustaining. And I don't see how it could have been "planned" upfront - should people have been banned from living in South SV with density they are? Should somebody somehow spent billions and billions of dollars, taken from who knows where, to somehow build magic transportation network that would have never paid for itself? I don't think there's a simple solution for this, or any solution beyond personal cars. Maybe automated on-demand taxis one day?

I am absolutely not denying that, but it's particularly acute in Los Angeles. I am optimistic given the aggressiveness that Metro has had in recent years about growing out the light rail, that it'll get better...as long as it doesn't turn into BART.

Probably possible in New York City and San Francisco (proper), but nowhere else.

I think New York and Chicago are both very good in this regard. San Francisco and Boston are not great, but doable.

I also don't ever plan on driving, and the biggest contributor to that is probably because I simply can't bring myself to entrust my own life or the lives of others to my own poor motor skills and spotty attention span, when any tiny mistake at any moment while driving has the potential to destroy lives.

If you do decide to drive, there are many driving schools that will teach a variety of skills. They range in cost, location, and specialty.

You can take everything from defensive driving to rally driving. You can take track lessons and closed course lessons.

I find driving exhilarating, even when I'm obeying the law. Your mileage may vary, but options exist, if you wish to try.

The effect of refusing to drive varies where you live, such as in London. However, if you can pass the driving test then that's the standard of the community. Driving doesn't require fine motor control.

I bet this wouldn't be such a big deal for a woman wrt their dating life.

Sexism is alive and well in myriad ways

I think you're right. Not driving is a problem for women too, but to a much smaller degree. There are other examples where the contrast is much clearer.

Making less than $100k is nearly not an issue at all for women's dating opportunities where it's a significant issue for men.

Crying is another example.

>Making less than $100k is nearly not an issue at all for women's dating opportunities where it's a significant issue for men.

That might be a huge issue in a very few places. It's not a huge issue anywhere else. $100k is 3 times the median income for a 30 year old.

You can pick a number that makes more sense to you and the same argument applies.

You can even choose different thresholds. A man who earns below the male median wage will have more difficulty dating than a woman who earns below the female median wage.

I am a woman. I gave up my car some years back. At one point, I was asked for a date by a guy who sometimes gave me a lift home from work when I had a corporate job. He was a senior programmer who likely made several times as much money as I did.

So, my firsthand experience suggests I'm right. ;-)

Is making less than $100k really an issue? The median household income from 2016 is just almost $60k. I mean, I guess it would depend on your area and "social class" or something?

Ah reminiscing, it wasn't always this way in LA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Electric but car companies sort of trapped us. Now we are inundated with automobiles and all that comes with them. Greenhouse gases, debt, accidents, waste, traffic. Millions of people sitting mostly alone in metal boxes that can seat 5 or 6 unable to reach out and contact the people merge inches or feet away.

The GM thing is more myth than anything else, unfortunately. Pacific Electric was, at its core, a way to get people to buy real estate; much of the interurban systems in the United States can be traced back to basically being vehicles for real estate speculation.

That doesn't diminish how extensive the system was.

There's a pretty good 99% invisible episode on this: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-70-the-great-...

You need to move to London. Most sane people live without a car there. When I lived there I'd justhire from a car sharing service on the occasion I needed one after I sold my car.

This “L.A. Affairs” series that the latimes is doing is great. I’ve read a few of them despite it not even being in the ballpark of my normal content consumption.

Most are well written, engaging, and are a nice change of pace.

Deliberately disclosing your "shortcomings" is demonstrably a poor dating strategy, you lower your chances by doing it.

You don't see supermarkets advertise by saying that their product line is short, or their warehouses small.

EDIT: Checked the author's twitter (there's a link in the article) and he seems to have low self-esteem, judging by both the article and his "about" on twitter.

Low self-esteem creates a vicious circle of self-deprecation which is not going to help you succeed in whatever endeavor you embark on in life.

Next thing you know you come up with all sorts of rationalizations and excuses about why you will fail. The "I've got no car" is an ego defense mechanism to protect yourself when the date goes nowhere. "Yeah, it must have been because I had no car", when in truth, it was a combination of a number of factors, low confidence and self-doubt stemming from it is particularly repulsive to women.

Dunning-Krueger is king, while Impostor syndrome leads to ruin.

Actually what he's doing is filtering all the women who consider it a shortcoming. I think it's a good way to find someone you can be honest with. If what I drive matters to my date that's a pretty good sign we're not going to get along, and frankly I would appreciate the honesty.

After dropping the "Listen, there's something I didn’t tell you." line you are going to have a very hard time framing it as anything else but shortcoming.

A much better way to say it (if you have to say it) would be to talk about traveling and casually mention it.

I suspect this being less of an issue in densely populated metropolitan areas like New York. But being from Europe, that is just a hunch... Can any New Yorkers share their experiences on this?

I lived in Manhattan for a couple of years and went on plenty of dates -- the subject of a car never really came up. The subway works just fine for most everybody.

In fact, I don't think a single person I went out with actually had a car of their own. People on this forum can probably afford to keep a car while in NYC, but consider the minimum-wage workers living there. No way the average person could make that work.

(Now, I did have my car parked off the island, but used it maybe a few times a year for longer trips.)

I grew up in Boston and lived in NYC for 4 years. Never learned how to drive until 2 weeks ago (age 29) when I moved to... Los Angeles.

Many of us don't even have licenses to drive. It is a complete non-issue.

I grew up in New York and work here and this article and the comments here just seem so alien to me. Maintaining a car just seems like taking your money and making a trash fire with it in a dumpster. Sitting in traffic every day also seems like hell on earth.

Guess I'll just have to stay in NYC...though I could probably manage in Chicago or, to a lesser extent, Boston. Or Berlin.

Not a New Yorker but in Toronto not having a car is a big red flag for a man.

I have 2 Porsche’s and I love them. But....(my wife and I) live a few miles down the 17. Getting a Lyft or Uber become an issue. We love our cars, but when I hand to get a lift to my office on Menlo, it is simpler to schedule it around my wife to heading down to downtown. When I can press a button for a driverless car...I will sell our cars.

Then... who will buy them??

There will always be people who want drive those Porsches way too fast along skyline blvd.

Why aren't there more motorcycles in LA? If I lived there I wouldn't even own a car, just a bike. No winter!

Plus you can help SoCal’s hospitals with their chronic organ shortage.

Completely agreed XD

There are two types of organ-donating motorcyclers, though:

1) speedsters / daredevils

2) law abiding riders hit from behind/side

There are people who can get away with being bad drivers for decades who would have been dead a long time if they drove a bike. Especially in L.A. where it requires a good degree of both aggression and defensiveness to not become roadkill. I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say that motorcycling is a sport, and not just a different mode of transit.

Unfortunate though that L.A. doesn't have world-class bicycle infrastructure.

Not only that, but lane splitting is legal in California. That helps a lot in getting through standstill traffic.

Why would anyone care if your date has a car or not?

This is an LA peculiarity. Transit has been bad for a while, and everything and everyone is very spread out, so a car is needed for most things. If you don't have one, then you're likely going to be "that guy" who always needs a ride.

edit: also it's a signal that you don't have the means to solve this problem.

This comment reminded me of a perfect quote from the 'documentary'/video essay about Los Angeles -- Los Angeles Plays Itself (an analysis of LA composed of analyses of movies shot in LA):

" ...The loss of a car is a form of symbolic castration, in the movies and in life. The best films about Los Angeles are, at least partly, about modes of transportation. Getting from place to place isn’t a given. Cars break down, they get flat tires, they get towed. [Midnight Madness: as a tow truck dirver is hoisting a compact sedan onto the rear of his tow truck, four young women in identical red sweaters run up. One of them asks, „Hey, what’s going on here?“] Or you don’t have a car. You have to catch a bus or you have to walk..."

https://filmkritik.antville.org/stories/1071484/

trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifii8LvR-ss

it might seem deadpan, but the movie really was a fantastic experience for me

Depending on place of residence, public transit methods can be limited. Another reason (in the same limited public transit / biker areas) is indication of DUI or other problem that excludes that person from getting and keeping a car. Having a potential spouse with that kind of situation generally requires extra thought.

When I was in my late teens, it was easier to ride a bike than mess around with learning to drive and getting a car. Two decades later, I'm starting to think that maybe you need to learn when you're young and reckless enough to think that driving two tons of metal at 60+MPH sounds fun instead of terrifying.

Not sure why the downvote.

I never learned to drive (combination of lack of desire and circumstance) and at 38, I have a much more... shall we say realistic understanding of the responsibility someone takes on by getting behind the wheel, as compared to myself at 16 or 18.

Terrifying mostly for whoever you hit, or whoever hits you.

Sad reality :(

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