I live in Dublin, which is at least in Europe so better than many US cities, but certainly not very good on bike infra. I've never owned a car, and planned to keep it that way until... I got a (large) dog. Kids seem a reason many cite, but at least they're allowed on public transport, and the available child-carrying bike accessories are varied & plentiful. Large pets seem to be the seldom-talked about unsolved problem of a carless world - I was a bit shocked at myself at how many transport challenges I hadn't anticipated when we decided to get a dog.
And no, car sharing ot renting is no real replacement.
It requires good public transport, and bicycles, of course.
But merely 'kids' is in no way a 'reson for a car'.
For most people this is only true in cases of infrastructural deficiency. I know someone who works in film who absolutely needs a car due to the remote nature of film sets, but niche roles like that aren't the "typical" commuter route. If you're commuting to an office, you shouldn't need a car unless there's been an abject failure to service that office with proper transport infrastructure.
> A lot of outdoor sports?
Which outdoor sports? If it's jetskiing, sure: you'll likely need some kind of truck/trailer to transport the jetski. But again, that's niche. I'm not aware of any popular outdoor sports with a strong vehicle need.
Outdoor sports, with kids: kayaking (we are talking about three of those by now), skiing (you don't use the train carrying skiing gear for three). And then there is solid public transport were I live, easily reachable from home. It is the work end, and the middle point, were things get tricky.
It is nice so that live without a car works, it just doesn't work for me.
If the public transport journey takes longer than the car journey, the former has room for improvement.
I’ve tried load a kayak onto a cargo bike, it went terribly with anything larger than a very small play boat.
Outdoor sports? Depends on which one, and on whether you want to bring your own gear. Cycling doesn't need a car, unless you want to do it in exotic locales. I used to take public transport to where I rented a sailing boat.
Of course every choice comes with trade-offs, but so does a car. It's good to be aware of your options.
That said, I use public transport a lot less than I used to. When we visit my dad, we now drive, though my brother still uses the train for that. Our next vacation is by train, though.
I live in Dublin and maybe you're comparing it with Amsterdam, but having as reference 3 EU capitals I've lived in before, Dublin is bike path heaven. 100% of all the area I usually move around has bike paths, and even in areas without, drivers are generally aware of cyclists because of this.
If anything I'd complain about certain hostility towards pedestrians, rather than cyclists. Traffic light timing is abysmal and in some crossroads a pedestrian can be waiting for solid 5 mins while cars have had 2-3 rounds of green lights.
One extra issues with Dublin is that it's not as simple as absense of bike lanes, there's a lot of very dangerous badly designed bike lanes (put in as an afterthought by mandate to meet some quota without consideration of how a cyclist might safely traverse them) - the whole grand canal area is this: e.g. there's two-way cycle lanes both sides of Beckett bridge with no safe way to access the bridge from either side. Lots of horribly planned similar examples aroundd the city - shared centre lanes, etc.
True that traffic-light management is a nightmare for all users - as someone who now has a car, and (unfortunately) drives a lot in the city, the experience is equally awful as a cyclist, pedestrian & driver.
It helps massively. I've only been in the US for 4 months of my life, doing everything by car is horrible.
On a conference in Galveston TA, someone told me they went to a drive through funeral... I saw drive through pharmacies and drive through ATMs. It's a special place.
That scene in the first Rambo, when he gets "picked up" by the police while just walking along a road, is fairly realistic. You're not supposed to be walking along roads, if you do there must be something wrong with you.
https://www.thekitchn.com/the-drive-thru-daiquiri-a-weird-ye...
Cameras also work better against cars - even if they have no license plates, you can get a make, model, and approximate year. A pedestrian might go any which way after robbing the store; a car has to stick to paved surfaces.
I had this issue where I had to get a covid test in Orlando and we walked there but they were expecting to come in a car. I ordered an Uber for that, just to sit in the car in a drive through. The whole experience was ridiculous.... The hotel we were staying at was just 5 minutes and we initially said let's just walk.
Sure, I'll give a pass for some degree of paranoia at the time -- lots of us were uselessly Clorox(TM)-wiping our groceries -- though, we were well past the peak when this happened -- but at this point we all know that worrying about surfaces is almost completely pointless. So all this "contactless" stuff is just a bunch of technology providers and payment networks trying to ride in opportunistically on peoples' fears.
Which, mercifully, have subsided along with most of the threat.
A person who is sitting in a car has to go through two windows and rise from a sitting position to attack someone inside. A pedestrian can be facing the window directly and grab with both hands.
If a driver pulls a gun, the employee can duck. A pedestrian can lean inside and shoot them anyway.
A person in a car necessarily excludes the possibility that there are accomplices hidden just outside of employee view. Pedestrians, not so much.
This just seems paranoid. Anywhere that does have a counter, anyone could theoretically put on a Hamburgler costume and jump over it with a big sack to raid the kitchen. But we don't worry about it, because it's vanishingly unlikely.
You can't run a society if you can't trust people at a basic level. You don't fortify every shop against Viking raids.
I mean, I've been in some Bad Neighborhoods where the shopkeepers all have plexiglass and bars and loudspeakers, but it's not remotely typical.
I'll also grant that there are a handful of places where basic norms have broken down, but I think that's mostly overblown by the Right.
You should be able to just interact with people like a normal human being. And mostly, you can. People have just gotten twitchy for dumb reasons.
Hurray for Dutch bicycle infrastructure.
Financially owning a car makes no sense for us living in a medium sized city in the Netherlands. The author of the opinion piece lives in London, where it makes even less sense to own a car.
If you don't want the weight on your back, paniers are your friend.
[1] https://chromeindustries.com/products/barrage-pro-backpack
There's also a rental electric cargo bike in my street for those who don't have one of their own. A great idea.
Makes me really want to tear down the rest of Europe's half assed traffic infrastructure and rebuild it in the same style haha.