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It really is a "the grass is bleaker on the other side" situation. As a public transport person I feel weirdly constrained by the idea that a day's itinerary will inevitably have to see me return to wherever the car is parked, impossible to do spontaneous things like walk a few stops, ride with an acquaintance or something like that that would eventually take me home, but not return to some previous stage. With a car, everything that happens outside the car is inevitably out-and-back. A car person will never miss that little freedom because they don't know it and objectively it's truly not that big an issue. But if you are not used to the pattern of always returning to wherever you parked it can feel surprisingly limiting. Similar things apply in the reverse, to a public transport person it's just natural to mentally map out a city's topology in units of line changes required, but a car person will feel outrageously constrained.

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I used public transportation (and cycling) throughout most of my twenties and only got my own car in my thirties. Public transport only works when you live in an urban area with good connections. Where I used to live, public transport was often delayed, or on strike. During winter it was annoying to have to wait in the cold for a bus or train that had 30+ minutes delay. And during rush hour the train and bus were so packed you could not sit down for most of the ride.

Meanwhile, with the car, I don't have any of those frustrations. During rush hour I'll sit in my car rather than waiting in the cold or standing up in a train. Given, finding parking can sometimes be frustrating, but it's a minor frustration. Going grocery shopping (or anything larger and heavier) is way more convenient with the car as well.

That said, bicycling is still one of my favourite ways to commute when the weather permits. :-)

Yep, once I started cycling, public transportation became a painful exercise in constraint. I would even prefer to cycle through freezing temperatures on icy roads rather than cram myself into a train or on a bus. Luckily for me, the bike ride was a 20 minute commute for most of my 20s, while the bus/train would be 40 minutes, and a care would also be about 30-40 minutes with traffic. True freedom for me is the motorcycle. I have a car now, but once I got a motorcycle, I got all the benefit of being outside, and somewhat on my own two feet, with the range to take trips out of the city and neighboring states for day trips. Unfortunately, with the way that people drive today, I ride my motorcycle less and less.

Motorcycling is also significantly cheaper than is owning a car. The average used car price in the US buys a top-of-the-line, brand-new motorcycle. Used (and even new) motorcycles can be had for significantly cheaper. The insurance and fuel costs are significantly less as well. A motorcyclist will have half the cost or even much less than that of a car owner.

I know people always respond that motorcycling is more dangerous than driving a car. I think you have to look through the statistics. For example, over 70% of motorcycle accidents are single-vehicle crashes - typically the motorcyclist failing to properly negotiate a curve or turn. Many of the remaining accidents are caused by high-speed riding. In my own experience, I've had normal encounters that were I driving a car would have resulted in an accident, but by riding a motorcycle I have the ability to easily maneuver to avoid the accident. A motorcycle is the most maneuverable vehicle on the road in terms of swerving, braking and accelerating. Despite those facts I have friends who act like riding down the street is a death-defying experience and are amazed I'm still alive.

I have an ulterior motive for advocating for motorcycles - electric motorcycles are becoming a thing. The Ryvid Anthem is under $9K and has a removable battery that can be easily removed and taken inside to charge using normal household current. It's going to be interesting to watch this market over the next few years.

I would probably still use a car for many things, but am somewhat open to the idea of a motorcycle, but I HATE the noise. An electric seems like it would resolve that concern, no?

Electric motorcycles are very quiet, so yes, electric motorcycles resolve that concern too. They're also twist-and-go - there's no clutch. Some people (like me) would miss that, but there are many others who would love not having to worry about it.

> Many of the remaining accidents are caused by high-speed riding. In my own experience, I've had normal encounters that were I driving a car would have resulted in an accident, but by riding a motorcycle I have the ability to easily maneuver to avoid the accident.

To make sure this isn't downplayed. Having riden a motorcycle for years, many car drivers _do_ _not_ _see_ _you_. That car that just pulled out in front of you at a T stop would not have done so if you were a car. This is one of my biggest peeve that people who can't see a motorcycle are allowed to drive. You know whats smaller than a motorcycle? Pedestrians.

That said, parking a motorcycle is the best thing. Fits everywhere, just try to avoid backing up a slope.

Many people think that "because I'm on a motorcycle" or "because I'm on a bike" or "because I'm a pedestrian" they're magically granted some special protection from morons on the road and the laws of physics. Sure, "the law" says you might have the "right of way" but does that really matter when some idiot in a 2 ton truck runs you over because he was looking at his phone?

I was a rider until I got in an accident (in the car) last year. Someone not paying attention blew a stop sign at nearly 50 mph and t-boned me. My car was totaled but luckily I walked away with only a bruised ego. Had I been on the motorcycle I'd be a smear on the road today. There are too many idiots and reckless people on the road to make it worth it to me any more.

My father always said you can be dead right. Meaning you may have been right and the other driver was being unlawful, but you're still the one who's dead.

By that argument you should never cross a road as a pedestrian...

FWIW I do agree, the safety aspect is by far the biggest downside of motorcycles/bikes. But there's plenty that can be done to make both a lot safer, and examples of countries that have pulled it off successfully. And once you have a significant fraction of people no longer using cars, roads tend to become safer for everyone.

Obviously one has to cross the road as a pedestrian sometimes but if I'm being honest in many places around where I live in the US I go out of my way to not. Stroads plus the lack of sidewalks, guarded crosswalks and blind corners make it so that it's dumb to cross in many places.

Even guarded crosswalks are hit or miss (no pun intended). The lights are all timed for vehicles and most drivers around here think stop lights are more of a suggestion than a rule. I've lost count the number of times I've almost been hit crossing the street by a person trying to turn left before the light changes.

Having grown up in a much smaller town where we walked/rode our bikes everywhere it's jarring.

Everything you describe is exactly why I would never care to live in a city designed for cars over people, of whom some will use cars from time to time.

If you remove hooligans, drunks, new riders, and new-to-that-bike riders, motorcycle accidents states look probably an order of magnitude better.

> A motorcycle is the most maneuverable vehicle on the road in terms of swerving, braking and accelerating.

Rider here. I score you one out of three.

Motorcycles turn worse and brake worse than four-wheeled vehicles.

Strong +1 on the motorcycle. I grew up around motorcycles (different country, and not urban neighborhood). But where I currently live I wouldn't trust other drivers enough to actually drive one.. :(

> Public transport only works when you live in an urban area with good connections.

It also works when you live in a rural area with good connections.

(I live in one such. I was going to say “I’m lucky enough to live in one such” but there’s no luck involved: I chose this place because of it.)

I am (well, was, pre-pandemic) the odd Los Angeles tech worker who used the bus & my bicycle for all my commuting, and many of my errand runs.

I always enjoyed reminding my car-enslaved colleagues, "I never have to park the bus."

People fail to notice for all the time (and distance) spent walking back to retrieve their car. It always felt like such a victory to hop on and off busses, taking care of four or five errands, and never once having to retrace my steps.

> I always enjoyed reminding my car-enslaved colleagues, "I never have to park the bus."

Clearly spoken as someone who's never played (defensive) football!

> As a public transport person I feel weirdly constrained by the idea that a day's itinerary will inevitably have to see me return to wherever the car is parked...

Do you feel the same way about your home? Your day's itinerary will inevitably have to see you return there, too.

Too see the other side, it may be useful to think of a personal car as home-like transportation infrastructure and always using public transit like living full-time in hostels.

Driving is not like being at home because it requires active focus and continuous observation of an evolving social situation where other people’s decisions could cost lives.

If sitting on a train is like being in a hostel, then driving is like doing tedious office work in a cubicle. I’d rather hang out at the hostel.

Maybe for you but not for everyone. I’ve been driving for almost 30 years, consistently speed well above the speed limit, text and drive, and probably all of the other no nos that some people preach. Still never been in an accident or been pulled over and I pretty much am zoned out whenever I drive.

this is concerning. Please do not text and drive.

Indeed, driving is a social situation where other people’s bad decisions can affect me very negatively. Even if I drive carefully, it’s not enough because someone else out there is texting, confident that their sample size of one means nothing can happen. This dynamic doesn’t exist on a train.

> Driving is not like being at home because it requires active focus and continuous observation of an evolving social situation where other people’s decisions could cost lives.

You're unreasonably expecting the analogy to be a perfect map between the two situations, when no analogy ever is.

My car is more home-like than a bus, because the car is my space.

Right on. I have a van I built out for camping, I cart the kids around in it all the time exactly because it’s basically a second home! Everything we need all the time. A place to chill out / wait out a melt down, change a diaper, have a bite to eat.

Even a Honda Civic can accommodate these things far better than a bus.

As you say, it’s our space.

It's probably not useful to think about car-only infrastructure here in this context as an "either or" scenario or something to empathize with "if only we saw how it felt to be a car owner" for a couple of reasons but primarily because there isn't anything to empathize with since the vast majority of Americans either commute via car now or have in the past, or use a car for all of their daily activities.

> Do you feel the same way about your home? Your day's itinerary will inevitably have to see you return there, too.

This doesn't make any sense and misses the point that was made.

> home-like transportation infrastructure

The only thing I can do in my car is sing as loudly as I like. Otherwise I am forced to focus on ensuring myself and others stay out of mortal danger, which requires a lot more energy than lounging in my home.

No, because I'm very much used to having a permanent place of residence. But I'd expect a nomadizing homeless to feel exactly as you described about permanent homes (not necessarily as in "would prefer to do without" but as in "there would be some parts of not having one that I'd really miss"). This was my entire point.

People who spent their life in vim don't miss the tiniest bit of whatever Jetbrains products have that isn't in vim, and likewise people who spent their computing life in IntelliJ and the like don't miss anything of what the vim crowd considers essential.

True freedom is a folding bike! Ride to point a, take your Brompton with you on the train to point B, ride to point c, etc.

True freedom is city bikes. Go anywhere worry-free, empty handed, come back using a simple card. 35€ per year in Lyon, France. Unplanned arrival at 1am in the wrong train station? A bike is still waiting for you.

Drawbacks: It’s only free for 30 minutes per trip; Sometimes you still get the bike stolen for 150€.

Sadly cold climate areas struggle with making this a reality. Boston has a big network of these bikes and ridership is huge in the warmer months, but drops off a cliff when it gets cold and icy. I know areas in Europe achieve this, but Copenhagen is warmer and less snowy than Boston.

Meet Oulu, the winter cycling capital of the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU - including the reasons why people do not cycle in winter (it's not primarily the cold)

And you are at the mercy of the whims of politicians. One city I lived in, they simply ended public transport altogether. Another city, they rerouted the lines in the poor part of town which made life incredible difficult for the older residents there. Their trip to the grocery store went up by two hours.

Must be nice to live in a country where public transport exists and is reasonably functional to get you places without having to wait 25-30 minutes at every leg of your journey.

I live in a city where that's the case for my day-to-day, but I certainly pay for it with increased rent, among other things. Still, life's too short to live somewhere you hate.

You still have that freedom to walk anywhere after parking you know. I have done this 100’s of times. Just park then from there go anywhere you want then just take a taxi or lyft back to your car. Public transport sucks, not sure why so many people people like it. Driving is much better unless you live in a large city like NY or LA. My own climate control, radio for music and podcasts, plus driving is therapeutic. I hate being around so many people packed in a train, airplane, bus.

Driving is a luxury, and should be priced accordingly

It’s quite expensive to buy and maintain a car

Yes, and public roads should be an additional cost.

I'm not interested in banning cars, but I am interested in charging appropriately for sprawl and air pollution.

Car registration fees / gas taxes do pay for that?

They contribute to but don't even come close to covering the total cost (at least in the United States but I suspect it's similar In Europe)

Driving is net subsidized, even before pricing in these externalities.

It is ridiculously expensive but the freedom is unparalleled. It would takes two hours to go across town. It takes 30 minutes by car. This is in Helsinki. Public transport works only to and from city center, sideways travel is royally painful.

Cars are chains that bind us, nothing more. The "freedom" to pay for insurance, gasoline, tires, batteries, and whatever else happens to go wrong. Cities with a proper public transit story also tend to have better driving experiences too

Hire a car to drive to your car?

That sounds like a parody of car-centric living. I can hardly believe that this is a serious suggestion.

Public transit is also a germ factory and as somebody who's immuno-compromised I really like not being sick all the time.

When I used the metro for commuting I got sick all the time. This is of course anecdotal but it really felt that way at the time.

> Just park then from there go anywhere you want then just take a taxi or lyft back to your car.

I thought I had heard it all but "take a lyft back to the parking lot your car is in" is a new low in car culture degeneracy.

Why it's very practical. Lets say you live in the suburbs 30 minutes from downtown. You find a parking lot park your car and just walk wherever from there. At end of the day if your tired and the car is to far just get a lyft back.

Sitting on a train or bus with screaming kids and breathing everyones air is not something that enjoyable. I prefer my own car it's more freedom.

Would you still agree if you had to deal with the externalities? Your suburban life is being subsidized heavily by that downtown area. At the end of the day if I'm tired the last thing I want is to get on the road-- I would rather arrive at my destination without putting the cognitive effort in to pay attention to the road

I would say downtown is also subsidized by rural areas that require cars. The food you eat is not grown downtown, factories where the products are made that you use are not made downtown. Downtowns are very artificial and consumer oriented. The entirety of downtown couldn’t even exist with the the people living outside it making the food and products you use. Yet the areas outside downtown could easily exist without downtown.

Cramming as many people tightly packed into small cube apartments in one area so you can build a train or have a bus is highly detrimental to peoples mental health and every study proves this.

Space is important and cars solve this.

I know this is parody, but there are Americans out there that unironically think like this.

>unless you live in a large city

Most people live in large cities

Sure but most large cities aren’t just urban areas. Dallas, Houston, Denver, Phoenix etc are all large cities that you could live in and never have any reason to be near a high rise building.

Are those really cities though? A huge concentrated mass of suburban sprawl and strip malls doesn't count as a city in my book.

In case anyone is curious, I downloaded US Census Bureau data on the population of all incorporated towns and cities in the United States, eg from https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/popest/2...

It appears that the median resident of the United States lives in a town or city of population 18,290 (as of the census date April 1, 2020).

As a quick sanity check, the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... cuts off at population 100,000 and mentions that > The total 2020 enumerated population of all cities over 100,000 is 96,598,047, representing 29.14% of the United States population

Most of those are suburbs. 85% of the US population lives in metropolitan statistical areas.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_are...

>I hate being around so many people packed in a train, airplane, bus

I hate being in traffic. On a bus, people are around but you usually don't have to think about them. You can read a book. In traffic, people aren't next to you, but you have to constantly pay attention to them.

> In traffic, people aren't next to you, but you have to constantly pay attention to them.

Sounds like someone has never had to take a bus or public transport in a rough area.

That's a bad assumption.

I recently moved from a Florida city (after growing up in Florida suburbs) to DC and left my car behind. Not sure if DC counts as a "large" city in this context as it certainly a lot smaller than NYC or LA but the public transit and walkability are excellent and were huge motivations for me to move here.

In Florida everything requires a car, even in the cities you still need one let alone the suburbs. From other places I've visited in the US it seems like Florida is far from unique in this regard. It can easily be a 20+ minute drive to get dinner, go to the grocery store, etc. Driving requires constant focus to be safe (and is still pretty dangerous) while I can read on my phone on the metro (plus most trips are shorter). Most of the time I can just walk and don't even need to take the metro which is good exercise and a good time to think. Sitting in traffic was a common occurrence and and I can't think of anything as annoying that happened as often.

If I do need to take a long trip I can rent a car or use Uber, ends up being far cheaper than frequently filling a gas tank and all the other maintenance involved in car ownership even though I had cheap insurance and no car payments.

To each their own but those are the reasons why I personally much prefer public transit to driving, although I wouldn't say I like either. Walking however I enjoy greatly.

> Public transport sucks, not sure why so many people people like it.

I think you may have forgotten that countries other than the US exist. Public transport in most European cities is absolutely phenomenal. And people like it because it’s cheaper and more convenient (when done right).

> Public transport sucks, not sure why so many people people like it.

Public transport sucks in the US, but that's just because the US has a weird hostility towards it, so doesn't properly invest in it. There's nothing about it that makes it have to suck.

We’re not hostile to it and we have good or at least adequate public transit in a lot of major cities. We just don’t need it everywhere. I live in a very suburban town and can’t imagine that many people would really want to take it. My town skews heavily Mormon (large families) and elderly. That is not going to get much ridership yet some people still keep proposing light rail extension to my town.

> we have good or at least adequate public transit in a lot of major cities.

I don't think this is actually true. I can think of two cities that have decent public transit: New York (so I hear, I haven't been there) and Chicago. I've been to a lot of the other cities, including many who have won awards for their public transit, and I would call the best of those "poor".

You don't think those elderly people who are having trouble driving would love the opportunity to hold on a light rail line so they can take a stroll downtown in with their grandkids?

There is no good transit system in north America. If you want to see good transit you have to go to Europe, Asia or Latin America, where even small towns can have robust transit with high ridership.

North America is comically car dependent because we build everything only focusing on how cars are going to get in and out, and require ludicrous amounts of parking onsite basically everywhere.

Our transit systems are almost always an after thought in the land use planning process. We surround places in seas of parking and put transit stops on the edge of them or put transit stops on highway access road with no sidewalks. The transit systems are often viewed and built as a charity service provided for the poor that no respectable person would use daily. The schedules rarely have sufficient frequency to make the service actually usable.

Our zoning codes make building walkable places that could support and be supported by transit illegal or restrict them to only small specific TOD projects.

Here's a great video essay on what north America gets wrong when building transit https://youtu.be/MnyeRlMsTgI

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