I have used public transport since I was 14. I'm twice that age now. I never needed a car to get anywhere.
but i didn't. i made sure that i lived somewhere with a direct bus to work and it turned out to be fine. same in los angeles later. also auckland, nz.
with that experience i concluded that i won't need a car, ever. it is all about arranging how you live.
Some people act so entitled... Not everyone has the same circumstances and infrastructure around them. Go to a poor part of eastern Europe. My mother has 2 buses to the nearest city in an entire day... (Not mentioning it takes like 5-6x more time.)
Why is building more bus stops, more metro stops, more train stops, more bike lanes, so terrible? And how is forcing car ownership better?
Or 480€ if you get it trough your employer, which amounts to 40€ a month.
And very few people have a travelcard for the entire city, just you payg on your phone/watch/card for what you use. Unless you literally are crossing London 10 times a week an annual travel card is meaningless.
If your weekly travel sees you routinely hitting the cap then a travel card may represent better value.
The annual london travel card is much cheaper than operating a car. Not to mention public transport is london is an order of magnitude faster than car for most intra-city journeys.
Also, poor Eastern Europe people use more public transport, vause cars are more expensive.
a similar location in the US would have no busses at all.
remote places exist. if you live there you may need a car. but that doesn't translate to needing a car everywhere.
You could park your car near a metro stop, or train station on the edge of the city and use public transport to complete your journey.
That way city dwellers don’t need to sacrifice huge amounts of space for cars they don’t use, along with dealing with the consequences of urban heat islands. And you don’t need to spend you life sat in traffic because there will never be enough roads in major cities for everyone to travel by car.
Get rid of cars in town, leave a few single-lane roads with a 10mph limit for deliveries etc at specific times.
What if grandpa walks with a cane and your wife is 9 months pregnant? What if it’s below freezing and there’s 8 inches of snow on the ground? All of this to cut out a handful of parking spaces for a town of 500 in the middle of the Great Plains?
Or you take a half way approach, only have accessibility spaces in town, so those unable to use a bike, or similar small personal transport device, can drive and park.
As for groceries, we solved that a long time ago. They’re called cargo bikes, you can even get electric versions. Great for filling up with groceries and children.
Also we’re not talking about towns of 500 in the great planes. We’re talking about towns and cities of thousands to millions of people. You would have be an either an idiot or trying to be deliberately obtuse to assume this discussion is talking about villages in arse end of nowhere.
Furthermore, I think you’re really underestimating what it’s like to live in a cold northern place during the winter. There are snowstorms that go on for hours and hours and you need to plough and salt the roads hourly just for cars. Bikes are A LOT less tolerant of poor conditions so it would be even worse. Not to mention the fact that people like to be comfortable so nobody’s going to want to ride a bike in a blizzard. If a city tried to force everyone to use bikes then people would move away.
A bike path capable of taking 200 bikes / hour is always going to be smaller than a road that can take 200 cars / hour. Bikes are physically smaller, you can fit plenty of them into the footprint of a single car.
> Furthermore, I think you’re really underestimating what it’s like to live in a cold northern place during the winter. There are snowstorms that go on for hours and hours and you need to plough and salt the roads hourly just for cars.
Most of the world doesn’t live in these locations. If your city is really so bad that it impossible to move around without a car, then stick with a car. Doesn’t change the fact that most places are perfectly compatible with bikes.
> Not to mention the fact that people like to be comfortable so nobody’s going to want to ride a bike in a blizzard.
Wear a thick coat. There are plenty of places where that have blizzards and the majority of trips are made by bike.
> If a city tried to force everyone to use bikes then people would move away.
There’s more to a city than just the number of cars in it. There are plenty of cities that already punish car driver heavily. Their populations still grow, their economies still grow. Providing enough roads and space for everyone to drive is not a requirement for a successful city, arguably the opposite is true. The worlds largest mega cities have the best public transport, and some of the most punishing and expensive to use road infrastructure. Just look at cities like Tokyo, London and Paris.
2. The total parking area in NYC adds up to TWELVE Central Parks.
3. Cars are a leading cause of death by accident in the world.
4. Driving a car for 1 hour reduces your life expectancy by 20 minutes.
5. They emit toxic fumes and greenhouse gases.
6. Car tires shed microplastics, which might be even more harmful than the toxic fumes they emit.
7. This article.
Now please tell me, what tolerance do these glorified killing machines deserve?
Surely driving a car for 60 minutes ought to reduce your life expectancy by something like 59 minutes, at least -- much like anything you do for 60 minutes.
I'm not just trying to be funny, there's a point here: you'll say "yeah, but it's 20 minutes more than otherwise" and I'll ask "so what is this otherwise?"
Obviously, if you compare to riding an ultralight airplane for 60 minutes, I think the car is going to be better – especially in bad weather. So what's the comparison for this number?
If you're just comparing demographics, I'm forced to point out that correlation is not, in general, direct causation. We might just be observing something else that happens to affect both car usage and life expectancy.
(To be clear, I'm doing this to find the steel man of your argument. I dislike car-centric infrastructure as much as anyone, but I wouldn't want to use weak arguments.)
> So what's the comparison for this number?
In one column you have the age a person died, in another one you have the estimated time they spent driving during their life. Not a rigorous proof of causation, but I mean... which part of the dataset would you like to be in?
Depending on situation, this might be acceptable to some when no other option takes less than 133% more time. But it is something you should definitely take into account. It is also kind of unfair to interpret it like this because cars can screw up traffic for other vehicles too, like traffic jams hinder public transport in my city on a regular basis.
If that were true, a child born with a life expectancy of eighty years would be dead by age forty. Life expectancy is measured in terms of projected age at death, not years remaining to live. An ordinary benign activity should not change your life expectancy very much, almost by definition.
I would not expect a child who drives 24 hours a day, 7 days a week — from birth — to live much past the age of forty.
If, on the other hand, you commute one hour per day for five days a week for twenty years that works out to about 217 days or just under 2/3 of a year of lost life expectancy. Is it nothing? Absolutely not. But it’s not as absurd as it would seem.