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Comment by nitrogen | Hacker News Reader

The choice isn't cars or no cars, that's a completely false dichotomy.

Apologies for reading too much into your comment, then. Many in SF seemed to espouse just such a dichotomy.

People in the US are so car-addled that when I suggest something like this, they can't even imagine a life where they can buy groceries without using a car. It's quite shocking!

I lived in downtown SF, walked to the grocery store, etc. I do miss being able to take BART and not having to have a DD, but otherwise I prefer the unscheduled nature of car life for all the quotidian practical needs. Even in SF, transit wouldn't get me to the beach or to hiking, etc. unless maybe I wanted to wait for an hour and have to walk way too far at both ends.

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> I prefer the unscheduled nature of car life

See what he means. There is no reason transport needs to force a schedule life on you. Good transit is frequent enough that when you decide to go you just walk out the front door to the station and wait for the ride to show up - it will be soon enough.

But you have never seen that so it hasn't occurred to you that it is possible.

But you have never seen that so it hasn't occurred to you that it is possible.

I don't believe it is possible, no. Even in places with frequent trains during the day, they typically stop at night. Say I need to take someone to a doctor and fill a prescription at 3AM. The usual pharmacy and urgent care are closed. Is there a city on earth that has trains to exactly where I need to go, every five minutes, at 3AM? Will the train get me there as fast as, or faster than, a car?

IMO transit is incredibly useful for situations where everyone is doing the same things at the same times. But it forces you onto a schedule and a destination, with little flexibility.

that is rare enough - for most people - that a taxi would save you money.

But it's not about the money, of course :)

Privacy, for one thing -- I don't think I'd ever want an unknown third party in the vehicle with me when I'm taking someone or myself to or from an unscheduled medical visit.

The reasons I own and drive a car would be impossible to meet by anything except self-driving personal transit pods that can link up with other pods to form dynamic trains. That's the sci-fi future I'd like to live in, where I have a private pod, but if I want I can connect to a train for a long distance ride, use the dining car, meet other people along the way, etc. Kind of like how ferries work now, except you could stay in your car if you want, and faster.

I guess if there was a way to force drivers to pay for the externalities of pollution, that would be a reasonable fair middle ground. Then it simply becomes a question of to what degree that privacy is valued.

I suspect it would push the cost of driving out of the reach of your average person though.

But this is only true if you live in major cities and quite often only the capital.

You often see this (in the UK) where people living in London assume that everyone else has 24 hour bus services.

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