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Comment by cloudwalking | Hacker News Reader

If you have to rent a car to go hiking, you aren't going to hike very often.

Depends how painful you make it to rent a car. If you're talking about a traditional auto rental where there is a half hour of filling out paperwork and doing checks with obtuse and baffling fees and gas options and everything then yes, that's an impediment.

A future where you have an Uber-like app where you summon an autonomous car that takes you to your destination for a nominal fee then who needs to own a car?

> A future where you have an Uber-like app where you summon an autonomous car that takes you to your destination for a nominal fee then who needs to own a car?

People which have items in their car that cannot be taken into the places they have to go, such as workplaces. Many people might not have that problem, but it is a problem.

Car rental doesn't mean going to your local car rental shop. It more often means using a car share service like ZipCar, Modo, or others, and it's so convenient that I often use it despite owning a vehicle.

This isn't true, talk to folks in downtown Seattle. Anecdotally, I have a group of 5 that rents a car to go hiking about every other weekend. Splitting $70 between 5 people twice a month beats buying a car by... a lot. Know tons of others that do this.

On the subject of Seattle, there are county transit busses which go to some trailheads: https://trailheaddirect.org/

And why is that?

Dont pretend like its normal to go through the hassle and expense of car rental just to do a routine activity

Are you thinking of full on rental like Enterprise or car sharing like Zipcar? Zipcar is pretty dang easy and it's what car-free people think when you absolutely need a car for a trip.

Thats more or less prohibitively expensive, because your hiking location would be outside of parking zone most likely, thus you're on the clock the whole time. Not my idea of a relaxing experience. Looks like zipcar is even station bound which makes it worse. You have to get yourself and all the stuff to the station somehow and then take it back from there again when you are done.

> Thats more or less prohibitively expensive, because your hiking location would be outside of parking zone most likely, thus you're on the clock the whole time. Not my idea of a relaxing experience.

An extra hour or two doesn't make a lot of difference when you're already booking for a weekend. Of course if you get stuck on a mountain overnight or something then you'd have a penalty charge, but frankly that would be the least of your worries in that case (and it would still be a problem if you had your own car but were worried about e.g. missing a day of work).

Of course hiring a car for a weekend costs a couple of hundred quid, but realistically you're going to do that what, ten times a year at most? You'd end up paying more in fuel, insurance and deprecation on a private car.

> Looks like zipcar is even station bound which makes it worse. You have to get yourself and all the stuff to the station somehow and then take it back from there again when you are done.

The "station" is around the corner at most. Walk 5-10 minutes, collect the zipcar, drive it to your building and load up, and then the same in reverse when you get back.

> Of course hiring a car for a weekend costs a couple of hundred quid, but realistically you're going to do that what, ten times a year at most?

Nice. The “at most” is an interesting rhetorical (and grossly dishonest) trick you used there.

Go on then: how many times did you actually go hiking over the weekend in the last 365 days? In my experience people greatly overestimate how much time they're actually going to be able to spend on their hobby; they plan things out with the idea that they're going to spend every weekend doing xyz, but life gets in the way.

Hiking? Once or twice. Then again I’m more of a watercraft and skiing person as the season dictates.

Anecdotal experience from NYC here:

Owning a cheap car is way less expensive than renting a ZipCar. My car's only cost beyond gas was insurance. And my insurance was cheaper than renting a ZipCar for one weekend.

Obviously it depends on the car you own, but ZipCar's here can certainly be more expensive and more inconvenient than owning.

When I looked at it in London, the monthly charge for a parking space in my building alone would've cost about 6 weekends' ZipCar rental. I could've rented a cheap garage further out and bought a cheap beater, but at the point where I'm walking further and driving a less reliable car (and likely less safe in a collision) the ZipCar ends up more convenient.

Do you park for free on the street?

When we visit Brooklyn we usually get free street parking.

> Of course if you get stuck on a mountain overnight

This is often my end goal when I go hiking

Yeah I was thinking of enterprise. Its just weird some people think you can survive the suburbs without a car.

You can. Just not American suburbs, apparently.

Depends on the density and transit available. There are some American suburbs of big cities where you can live with no car, but not many.

Also depends on the availability of sidewalks. Some suburbs are designed without them.

The parent of this thread explicitly states:

>Note that I'm only asking about city travel, not intercity transportation.

I don't know why these conversations always seem to descend into talking about the suburbs. Urban environments can (and should) reduce car traffic inside them. Talk about leaving the city to go hiking and suburban living (designed specifically around personal car ownership) are not what we're talking about here.

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