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).
That sounds like a parody of car-centric living. I can hardly believe that this is a serious suggestion.
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.
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.
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 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.
Sounds like someone has never had to take a bus or public transport in a rough area.
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 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.
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".
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
I'm not interested in banning cars, but I am interested in charging appropriately for sprawl and air pollution.
Most people live in large cities
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
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_are...