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Comment by dagw | Hacker News Reader

In a well-designed city, most people don't really need a car.

For me a car isn't for getting around the city or getting to work (I much prefer walking/biking/taking public transport for that), but getting away from the city. To get to my favourite walking trail by the sea or the local ski slope is a 30 minute drive or 1.5+ hours by public transport. Getting to the slightly larger ski resort is a 90 minute drive or almost 4 hours by public transport. Getting to a national park I like visiting is a 2.5 hour drive and virtually impossible to get to by public transport. With public transport I can vacation in most major cities in Europe. With a car I can vacation in tiny beautiful out of the way places I never would have even thought of visiting before I got car.

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This is a classical circular problem of transportation planning: when deciding whether to get a car, and if yes which car, people often use their vacation as a use case. And then, when they got that VW bus to go to the seeside once a year, using it in the city is the logical choice, because it is just lying around. Basically, getting a car is expensive, but once you have it, using it is cheaper (and often faster and more comfortable) than the other options.

So a lot of the discution about getting people "out of cars" is not about getting people to never drive, but to get them to not own a car, such that they have to make the concious decision of renting a car for the holidays, if this is the best choice, for instance. What you describe sound like this.

Obviously, this opens the question of how to improve the car rental market to make those options real options. This is where car-sharing systems and the like come in.

Car sharing is great for the occasional need for a car. Not Just Bikes calculated that if you need a car only once a week, car sharing (which is really short-term rental) is cheaper than owning your own car.

If you need a car for a longer trip abroad, you probably need a different kind of car rental, but the advantage is that every time you can tailor the kind of car you rent for the purpose you need it for. Get a station car or minivan for vacation, a tiny electric car for a short trip with no luggage, or a van if you need to move some serious stuff.

That's really the key point and where a lot of the disconnect comes from.

If I lived in Boston/Cambridge, say, and rarely needed/wanted to leave the city I'd probably be fine with not owning a car. But just 5 minutes ago, I was emailing with some friends about getting together on the weekend somewhere out in the country. Yes, I could rent a Zipcar or a conventional rental but that gets old for doing things out of the city on a regular basis--especially spontaneously.

But there are comments on this thread to the effect of "But I don't really need to go anywhere. I have the Internet." And that's a fundamentally different perspective and set of priorities.

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