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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

> people's preferred method

You have some evidence of this?

To be fair, I think this is just definitional? If you would normally do one behavior, but an increased cost to it causes you to do something else; I think it is fair to say the first would be your preference?

Now, if it was claimed as a superior method, that would be different. I could easily see it being people's preference as much from habit and availability as from any active preference. Certainly few people want to sit in traffic. But without an obvious immediate cost, many will jump in the car to drive somewhere.

If you would normally do one behavior because it is being heavily subsidized by other people and you are not bearing the cost of that behavior. Of course people have a preference to not bear the cost of their own externalities

Status quo bias. The previous behaviour was also affected by government policies including taxation and infrastructure spending.

There is no objectively neutral baseline of preferences here as long as civilisation exists.

This is always a time/cost/convenience/habit formula to everything. If you change anything in there of course people adjust to their optimum. If you introduce large roadworks in the heart of manhattan you'd get less cars too because people go by train/bike.

> To be fair, I think this is just definitional? If you would normally do one behavior, but an increased cost to it causes you to do something else; I think it is fair to say the first would be your preference?

Good point, but I don't think people prefer the car. Rather, I think they prefer the convenience a car provides. Sure, there are some people that love driving, but for the rest of us, I'm pretty sure driving is a means to an end. (As an aside, I'm also pretty sure that by-and-large people that love to drive aren't wanting to drive into NYC ).

Rather, if people prefer the most convenient method of travel, and if something becomes more convenient, they will take that.

All this is to say, driving isn't their preferred method of travel. Rather, it just happened to meet their preferred levels of convenience. And not all of that is money related. Being able to take public transit and sit and relax and enjoy the ride and not deal with traffic and listen to an audio book, I love that. And if it's good enough, I don't drive. But I do still have a car and drive more than I take public transit. Not because my preferred method of travel is car. Rather, my preferred method of travel is whatever gets m to my destination in a reasonable amount of time, price, comfort, and safety.

I'm sure this is more likely a thought experiment and not as useful, but you had an interesting question, and it got me thinking.

Example of the "force of habit" factor:

Every time my mom comes to visit us in the city, at some point she says she could never live here because she couldn't imagine having to drive in city traffic every day. And every time she does that, I remind her that her car hasn't moved even once since she first arrived a week ago. Mostly we walk everywhere. And every time she responds, "Oh, you're right. You know, that's been really nice."

She's lived in suburban and rural areas her entire life. The idea that she simply has to get in a car to go anywhere is so ingrained into her psyche that even a solid week of not driving is insufficient to dislodge it.

>She's lived in suburban and rural areas her entire life. The idea that she simply has to get in a car to go anywhere is so ingrained into her psyche that even a solid week of not driving is insufficient to dislodge it.

I'm in a suburban area. When I was a child, I got driven everywhere - until I was old enough to take public transit by myself.

I'm about to walk ~3km (2mi) each way to a grocery store, something I do regularly. I save thousands of dollars annually like this. I could feed myself several times over with that money.

It will never stop being strange to me that people actually get that car-dependent mindset ingrained into them.

1. Possibly reasons like this: https://archive.is/tjdZ2 ... to save you the click, the title/subtitle reads:

> When Getting Out of Jail Means a Deadly Walk Home > Nearly every day in Santa Fe, N.M., people released from jail trudge along a dangerous highway to get back to town. Jails often fail to offer safe transport options for prisoners.

2. You must have a preference for walking, since a bicycle would be at least 3x and as much as 10x faster than walking.

3. The thousands of dollar number seems misleading. If you bought a car solely for this purpose, yes, I believe you're right. But that seems unlikely. The actual marginal cost of using a car you already owned for this purpose is on the order of $3-500.

I commend and support what you do (though I prefer to use my bike when I can). But I don't think the financial benefits should be overstated. There are, of course, other benefits.

The average annual cost of owning a car in Canada is >$16000 CAD. In the US it's even higher at >$12000 USD.

Obviously owning a bike, taking public transit and taxis, and occasionally renting a car isn't free, but if you live in a walkable neighbourhood and can take public transit to work it's easy to keep your monthly transportation expenses under $200. The great part about not needing to own a car is that there's no sunk cost that incentivises you to choose one option over another.

"If you live in a walkable neighborhood" is doing a ton of work there. The increase in housing cost almost certainly eats at whatever savings you might see. And the opportunity costs of having fewer work options is not nothing.

My original point was that I'm a little perplexed at how high other people's standards seem to be for a neighbourhood to qualify as "walkable".

I don't think revealed preferences are the only reasonable way to define "preference."

To use an extreme example: Does the homeless alcoholic divorcé really prefer to be homeless and divorced?

For a more abstract example, consider games like the Prisoner's dilemma, where "both defect" is worse for both players than "both cooperate" but choosing to defect always improves the result for a player. Surely both players would prefer the "both cooperate" solution to the "both defect" but without some external force, they end up in a globally suboptimal result.

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