Essentially there's folks who think entire earth is a hipster downtown, and anybody else should just move, while collapsing economy, sending housing prices into stratosphere, impacting everybody's quality of life, and so on.
Yes cars are still a topic. Get out of your own head, travel a bit, talk to people, learn to empathize.
I'm sorry if this sounds rude, but that's just an unbelievable amount of ignorance and lack of awareness and sympathy for other people.
Also i don't recall my comment to have any kind of imperative tone: i'm stating what works for me, and for a lot of people i see, explicitly requesting comments about whether or not this applies to others. Some made up numbers from what i feel about my surroundings: young adults (<30yo), i'd say maybe 1 in 3-4 have a car around here. Families from friends that live in or near a city center (inside the subway zone), i'd say 1 out of 3-4 have no car, that's already significant: they rely on their children, friends or rental when they need one. Parking lots aren't cheap. Of course there are some difficulties, when you need to move some couch through the city you grab a couple friends, a skateboard and start pushing. Every couple weeks when you do some large food shopping you have to carry heavy bags. Maybe you get a trolley of your own like the grandmas at the saturday market, it's actually convenient.
In the country side where i grew up, i'd say half the people have only 1 car per household. There's a train station 30min from there, a small line but is used quite a lot, with a train every 1h or so. Almost all of my friends had a driver's license by the time they turned 18 etc. Yet i slipped through, always making my way using quite a lot of cycling, making my schedule around the one of the buses, sometimes hitchhiking when the time was bad. Most people i know use either some carpooling app or train when they travel across the country and don't transport anything they can't carry in a couple bags. People do have cars there, but it's because of necessity, not choice. And you see far less new cars, lots of people buy them refurbished, cars switch hands in the family, some are real utility vehicles which are adopting interface bloat at a slower pace, etc.
So i ask again: don't we have to change our ideas about (1) car ownership and (2) car manufacturing/reparation/life-cycle? From what i can see, things are already far from the "every adult owns a car which they change every ~5 years" model from post-war until the oil shocks. My point is the usual dependency vs convenience thing [#]: the more a particular infrastructure becomes widespread or reliable (may be cars, electricity, network), the more you start depending on it; yet giving up some of it may not make your life worse, it just implies different life constraints and capabilities to work around it.
[#] I'm getting out of topic here, but to read this argument developed in the field of energy, see: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/12/keeping-some-of-th...
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That was for the places i know well; now you implied i didn't travel or talk. I do. There are lots of other environments where car can and are avoided.
Would you consider the whole north/west european cities (in nl, dk, de, ch, ..) to be just a big "hipster neighborhood"? Believe it or not, but not everyone on a bike or in the bus has a beard, fancy sticker on their macbook air or is some kind of alter-globalism&ecology activist. There, and to some extend in a lot of other places, personal cars are neither a big necessity nor very practical in most slightly urbanized areas. People there own and use less cars. Of course it doesn't come out of nowhere: there is less specialization of urban areas for living, shopping, eating/drinking, working. More smaller and distributed structures, roads organized differently giving a lot of space for pedestrians, bikes, some green spaces, playgrounds etc. I'm not saying it can be done everywhere and now, i'm saying it's being done in various places and probably could be expanded.
Even at those levels, cars are still relevant to a large portion of people, and it isn't wise to simply dismiss car ownership ("Are cars still a topic? Who owns a car here?"), due to their functionality and uses.
Must not be from the US...
> ... here in europe (france) at least
Yeah, saw that one coming. I wish we had good public transport here in the US, but realistically most people need to have access to a car. Even people living in large cities.
My current commute is from the middle of the city to the edge along a major freeway. It is 10 miles by car and takes 20 min on average to work, ~30 min. back home because of traffic. Public transport would take 80 min each way not counting traffic. Riding my bicycle would take about the same amount of time, but I would arrive quite sweaty. I drive because saving those 2 hours per day is 100% worth it.
Well there is partly your answer.
Folks own cars for different reasons: family, location outside of place with public transport etc
I do (Uk). I don't know of a single friend, family member, work colleague or as part of a couple, which doesn't have a car.
> Are cars still a topic? Who owns a car here?
I think that's very self-centered to imply cars aren't worth talking about just because you don't have one.