Which is weird, because (until last year anyway, when used car pricing went crazy) cars were by-far the cheapest major expense an average American has. Most Americans drive, in large part because the car is free money -- the drastic housing savings and occupational/educational/commercial opportunities more than make up for the small amount of cash it costs to own and operate one.
Just on rent savings alone, my car pays me to drive it. (The car costs me about $400/month in full TCO, but that car easily saves me $800/month or more just on rent alone, not to mention trips or kids school runs or visiting friends or shopping or so on). And that's not even factoring in that people's time has value, and any alternative form of transit easily double-to-triples the amount of time a given trip takes.
> I was able to reduce my monthly expenses by about 20% just by going car free, and I refuse to ever own a car again.
That sounds nice, and maybe it's just the midwest in me, but I've never seen a person who can actually save money by not-owning a car. Many people claim as such, but then you dig a little and find out they were already wealthy to begin with, which is the only way they were able to get away with it.
(e.g., "you should totally sell your ~$20k car, and with the money you save, you could totally move your family into a $600k-more-expensive half-the-size downtown condo and go car-free. You can just pay a small $50/trip for an Uber whenever you really need that car" -- like, it sounds nice, but the math here doesn't check out at all).