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Comment by cesarb | Hacker News Reader

> Take away the car and people cannot live. [...] It is almost impossible to find a job and a house you can afford in walking distance of each other,

As a Brazilian, that statement feels bizarre. Yeah, my job and my home are not in walking distance of each other. I simply take the bus. Sure, some jobs are not within reach of the bus (or the ferry, or the metro, or the light tram, etc), and some jobs need a car (for instance, it would be hard for a HVAC technician to take all their equipment on a bus), but saying it's "almost impossible" to find a job?

> demanding there be things like grocery shopping as well make it not feasible for most people.

That also sounds bizarre to my ears. Most places I've known have small grocery shopping places on nearly every corner. You just have to walk.

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Unfortunately that just isn't true in large parts of the US. Many cities have no public transit, and no accessible grocery stores.

Being able to live car free is pretty much limited to (expensive) major cities and some (expensive) mid-sized college towns.

The city of about 50,000 I'm from not only has no public transit and limited sidewalks, it doesn't even have crosswalks across the two main 6-lane roads that divide the city, so you can't safely walk more than about a mile even if you wanted to.

Even in cities with public transit often it is so bad that isn't reasonable to expect someone to use it. Reasonable transit must run 24x7/365, at least every half an hour. Miss a day and someone can't get someplace they might want to. More than half an hour between bus/trains and it isn't reasonable. Miss the over night - maybe you can do this if you have taxi service for the same price (which might be cheaper overall for the few people who want to ride at 3am). Half hour is the minimum, it is possible to plan your life around that level of service and not be impacted too badly, but you will hate it (particularly when the line is a little longer than you expected: you miss your bus and so your ice cream melts by the time the next comes)

Not just the US, it's like that everywhere. Private transport will always be necessary as people need to go on routes with low demand. Only counterexample I can think of is Singapore, which has a vast network of buses and trains that go to everywhere.

I'm trying to think of a city of 50,000 people in western europe with no public transport, do you have one in mind?

Even in cities with public transit cars have a very high mode share in rich countries. Some of it is 'trades' that need to carry tools and parts with them, but a lot could take transit but don't for unknown reasons

"Being able to live car free is pretty much limited to (expensive) major cities and some (expensive) mid-sized college towns"

I live in the UK (hardly a bastion of public transport) in a town of under 10k, and have a car. The main requirement for a car is to take my youngest to Drama club in the next town where it finishes at 9pm, well after buses have stopped. There is a drama club in the town, but as we only just moved we didn't want to move him. Likewise we're driving him to his old school until the end of July as he'll move school then.

I used to live in a village of 300 people, and sure you need a car there.

Sure it was nice to drive the 4 miles to the garden centre at the weekend rather than take the hourly bus, but it's not a requirement.

For a town of 10,000 people, let alone 50,000, to say you can't live car free is nonsense.

Of course America is different. Their towns are far less dense, they don't even have "sidewalks", they are consciously built so you have to drive everywhere, but that's unique to the time American towns were built.

So again, what towns in Europe with a population of 50,000 have no public transport.

As an American I can report there are sidewalks nearly everywhere. They are used for exercise only: getting anywhere is frusterating but if you just need to run (or walk the dog) they are great.

45% of Americans have zero access to any public transport of any kind.

And the other 55% may have access but often it doesn't meet people's needs (it may not go when/where they need to go)

Only 11% of Americans use public transit at all on a weekly basis.

3.5% of Americans use public transit to commute.

Where I live I would half to walk about a half day to get to the nearest place that sells any kind of food and back, which is a 7/11 gas station. To get to a real grocery store and return would require a full day's travel on foot (just checked google maps, 4.5 hours one-way to the closest one). There is no public transportation option at all, the only buses are school buses until you get much closer to a major city. Driving is a necessity in such places.

I live in a well populated East Coast state, so it's not like I'm even really far out in the sticks too, there are many places which are even worse off in these regards.

There are no buses to take here, and the distances are looooong. Your job or grocery store could be 15 miles away, and that's in an urban-ish area. Rural, it's much worse.

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