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Comment by woweoe | Hacker News Reader

I usually say that walking is the most simple/easy form of transportation. Why is walking to another room of your house simple, but walking anyway in the outside world hard? Driving is basically a second level of complexity that means your focusing on driving rather than sleeping, working or playing. You walk in a mall and a park for example.

I grew up and prefer a lifestyle where the car exists but you have multiple options of public transport. It's easier to be able to take a metro train under traffic jams and buildings to where you need to go, or a bus after a night out drinking. Driving is just a lot of stress and work.

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I mean people don’t put up with those costs and complexity for no reason.

Carrying stuff and long distances are the big ones for me day to day. My nearest grocery store is 1.5 miles away, my friends 19 miles away, the nearest Costco is 5 miles away, IKEA is 11 miles away.

Just last weekend I rented a small venue for a birthday party and had to transport about 100 lbs of food, drinks, serveware, decorations, and alcohol 18 miles of highway.

The weekend before I was camping at a festival and again the car was packed with coolers, tents, and clothes. That was a 56 mile trip.

Getting to my airport is 2.5 hours by public transport or 20 minutes by car.

I currently live in Japan but I have lived in major cities of the West as well.

For big items the locals will usually do home delivery, and for groceries the norm in most of Europe and Asia is to buy them every few days in smaller amounts when you need them (since centuries ago) and therefore you do not need the car.

For the camping you would rent a car. I said that the car was still something I expected to be able to use. Switzerland for example is famous for its car journey holidays but most people use public transport.

I don't think most people are arguing that you as an individual should switch to walking or public transit without anything else changing. The situations you describe are the way they are because we've spent decades heavily investing in making cars the most convenient or often only option. The suggestion is that we should consider making different choices going forward so people have other options. Everything doesn't have to be so far away and things like public transit don't have to suck.

I also think there's a misinterpretation that alternatives to cars means nobody should drive anywhere. For something like going camping, it's hard to argue that a car doesn't make the most sense. But the point is to make it so you don't have to drive everywhere for everything and can save the driving for when it really is the best option.

"I also think there's a misinterpretation that alternatives to cars means nobody should drive anywhere"

From reading the comments on this thread and the other regularly posted ones, I don't think that's a misinterpretation at all.

>Everything doesn't have to be so far away and things like public transit don't have to suck.

I think this is hard to do while also allowing for people who want to live in a rural area to do so. Towns and cities are great candidates for centralization, but when you have a low population over a large area you can only justify for example one grocery store, and spreading public transport over a large (and likely low income) area is prohibitively expensive. having everyone live closer together effectively solves both problems, but most people in these areas either don't want to live in cities or can't afford them, so having a inexpensive car and driving is the cheaper option.

> I think this is hard to do while also allowing for people who want to live in a rural area to do so.

There's no reason it has to be some one size fits all solution. Investing in transit options other than cars in cities and towns where it makes sense doesn't mean trying to force light rail to work in rural areas or whatever. The problem is actually the opposite, where we've set things up such that the transit option that makes sense for rural areas is the norm everywhere.

The area you live in was built to force you to own a car. It is not an accident, or a naturally occurring phenomenon, that it is intolerably inconvenient and dangerous for you to get around any other way.

> I mean people don’t put up with those costs and complexity for no reason.

Consider the cause and effect here. You live far from everything because cars make that possible. The world after cars became designed for cars. There are advantages and disadvantages to car society but to participate at all as a baseline member of society you need a car. Part of owning a car is just recovering what functionality you would have in a world that wasn't designed for cars.

> Why is walking to another room simple but walking in the outside world hard?

I'm pretty sure if houses were so big it took 2 hours to walk from one side to the other people would drive in them. Best not to ask rhetorical questions with obvious answers.

"Why are people happy to cycle to the shops but not to cycle to Australia for holidays?"

"Why are electric toothbrushes so affordable but electric cars are still the domain of the wealthy?"

Most people aren't going to australia with their car, they are actually only going under 3 miles with their car: https://insideevs.com/news/585399/majority-daily-car-trips-l...

3 miles is still a long way to walk. People in Europe would not typically walk that far either. Cycling 3 miles is fine though.

Why are you in a place where everything is a two hours walk away? The thing is that most people around the world live in neighborhoods or villages where everything they usually need to buy is within walking distance.

I explicitly said that I had a car when I was younger but opted to use public transport most of the time, and I kept the car because it was useful for random occasions (and coincidently I did actually fly to Australia).

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