Hacker News Reader

Comment by sasaf5 | Hacker News Reader

I spent the first 10 years of my working life without a car. Then bought one just to see what was going to happen. Here are some niceties of car ownership:

- No need to plan around transportation times.

- Staying at the party after the last subway: the crowd changes a lot.

- Intimate conversation with friends/partner, while listening to music of your choice.

- Dressing up without worrying about others staring. It applies to your passengers too! You will see your friends really thankful for your ride, wearing suits/dresses/high heels!

- Hability to change destination on the go.

- Having a strong excuse not to drink, then partying till 6am, waking up without a hangover and going straight to the gym.

- Going to wherever after work on a Friday night.

I never regretted it.

View on HN

> No need to plan around transportation times.

These two really depend on the system and frequency; non-issue for high-frequency underground systems, say. There'll be another one along in 3 minutes.

> Staying at the party after the last subway: the crowd changes a lot.

This depends a lot on the system as well. In Dublin, traditionally, we only had night buses on weekends, they were infrequent, and they used weird Frankenstein routes (they'd take like five normal routes, and make a route that passed _all the stops of all five_) so they took hours. In the last few years, a bunch of normal routes have started going 24 hours; makes things a lot easier. I was recently out inconveniently far from home, at 4 in the morning, resigning myself to an hour walk home, or else trying to somehow get a taxi, when I noticed that there was a bus coming in ten minutes at the stop outside the bar, which would bring me to five minutes walk from home.

The dressing up is an interesting one. I always felt uncomfortable wearing formalwear on the subway in rougher areas at night. No one bothered me though ( because of clothes, I got the usual aggressive riders other times).

It affects one gender a lot more than the other.

Not here really. I go to pretty kinky parties and I often find myself on the metro with other partygoers. One time pretty recently there was fellow partygoer (unknown to me but clearly from the same party) who even had her boobs out in the metro (at 4am) and no comments or even weird looks were made. It made me happy seeing the tolerance and diversity (and, admittedly, the boobs too ;) ). Nobody was being weird or trying to sneak a photo or anything.

Though strangely enough a friend of mine was told off by security for taking off her heels while sitting down (they hurt a bit) but at the same time ignoring the boobs girl altogether lol.

European capital? Curious about such party scene ^^

Yes, Barcelona (not a capital though it is the capital of the state of Catalonia).

Berlin is even (way) crazier by the way. Though I'm not sure how they would deal with this in public there, Germans can be a bit more formal in that sense :)

Germans are more accepting of nudity than most other countries, there are very few laws against it. Partly it's a legacy of the FKK (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freik%C3%B6rperkultur).

Ah ok, but there are a lot of Calvinists that I'm sure would object in public.

Interesting, I didn't know about that movement.

Danger of broken glass on the ground? Would hurt bare feet, irrelevant to bare boobs.

True but she was sitting down on a subway bench and just resting her feet. She was not trying nor planning to walk barefoot.

Interesting - I guess this phenomena is country dependent? Where I live I prefer to take public transport when I go out in formal clothes.

Depends on the diversity level of the city.

Can you expand on what you mean here?

Why not take a taxi?

Because they're so much more expensive, use sketchy pricing systems, often are driven by sketchy drivers and so forth.

> Intimate conversation with friends/partner, while listening to music of your choice.

My friend used to drive a car that we dubbed "the car of truth". Many honest conversations have been had in there.

The crowd at a party changes a lot after the last metro because everyone left it is the sort of person to take the first metro in the morning, not because they have cars.

And some people arrive with the last metro :)

> - No need to plan around transportation times.

Except for the rush hour. When I did ~25km commute one way I had to think when I should leave with the car. With bicycle, time was constant, so I was free to choose when I could leave.

> - Staying at the party after the last subway: the crowd changes a lot. > - Having a strong excuse not to drink

Car is good excuse not to drink - I have used that excuse myself. But there are other ways - you do not need car for this. It does not work both ways: if you want to drink, with car you can not.

My point is: car is convenience not freedom.

Convenience and freedom seem interchangeable here.

Car is freedom to stay late. Public transit is freedom to drink.

You can still take public transit when you own a car. I do it all the time.

Most of those are also perks of having a bicycle :)

Just gotta get custom made SPD dress shoes :)

Terms and conditions apply.

I'm currently running an errand and I took an Uber here because it's absolutely pouring at the moment and I don't need this sort of excitement in my life.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com