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Comment by jna_sh | Hacker News Reader

Cars have always felt more restrictive to me. I don’t want to have to worry about parking or road access or fuel when I’m visiting somewhere.

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I have never understood the anxiety americans have related to parking. (unless you’re going to a music festival etc)

You literally just drive around for 5ish minutes and you find a spot. Ive lived in two major cities in america fwiw.

Then you haven’t had the full experience. Let me walk you through the awful things about parking:

* circling the block over and over until you find a spot.

* making sense of the layered rules on parking signs to make sure you can park

* finding the parking stall and/or downloading the app to pay for parking.

* making sure you have no valuables visible and each car ahead and behind have enough space to get out.

This is experience based off living in DC, NY, and the Bay Area. I’m actually OK paying for a car - but I have an absolutely no time for parking and traffic.

Lived in Berkeley for a year after graduation while commuting to South San Francisco and it was nearly impossible to find a street parking spot after getting home from work.

Just an anecdote to cancel out your anecdote.

I made the mistake of owning a car in Manhattan. I wanted to have it, but having to move the car like 3 times a week was a chore in itself and usually would end up eating up an hour or more trying to find something before giving up and going a bit far just to park it.

I’m not American nor live in America. But as a resident of cities whose shape pre-dates the car across several dense European countries, I can relate to those fears.

Indeed, the dread of having to park somewhere, especially street parking, or in some hideous paid parking lot or scary parking deck, was always a huge turn-off of driving places. It's so much nicer to be able to take public transit and not have to worry about that.

Cars are a viable option only on low-density rural areas + long distance trips. Short distance you can do by biking (e-bikes are the modern evolution of the old two-stroke scooter) or walking. In high density public transportation is massively faster, cheaper, and more efficient that personal automobile.

>In high density public transportation is massively faster, cheaper, and more efficient that personal automobile.

This assumes the public transportation is competently run, which is a rarity in the Anglophone world. In the UK I think the only good one is TfL.

Meanwhile Birmingham has a million people and no metro.

The one time I visited NYC the subway seemed third world.

UK here: My brother and my 3 (adult, independent) kids all seem to manage fine without cars, and have done so for years. Only one of them lives in London, the others in much smaller places.

Sure, there are plenty of areas where it would be really difficult. But there are also a lot more places than just London where it's perfectly possible, depending on family circumstances and lifestyle choices.

Yeah I live car-free in Cardiff. It's doable. But I won't kid myself and say that the public transport is good. It's mediocre like every British city outside London. It's a city of half a million and we don't even have a tram. As a nation we have far too low expectations for public transport.

You're entirely right that public transit in the UK isn't great. Compared to European countries like Denmark, the Netherlands, or Switzerland, it's mediocre. But compared to American transit it's incredible.

Two big differences in country design:

- in the UK, I felt like I could get to any town by transit. I imagine that isn't strictly true, but compared to the US, where I live in a half a state that's entirely devoid of any trains... big improvement

- UK cities are walkable, that is you can generally get anywhere just on foot. In the US cities I've lived in, downtown generally supports foot traffic, but as you get further out the sidewalks disappear, get scarier, and never have anyone walking around then.

Glasgow and Edinburgh are fine for public transport.

Most cities in the UK are small enough that you can walk most places. Maybe combined with catching a bus into the center and back out again. Birmingham is possibly in an awkward middle ground where it doesn't have good public transport but is big enough that that's awkward.

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