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Comment by PunchyHamster | Hacker News Reader

wait till you see what people do with car payments

Selling my car that I fully owned in favor of a nice bicycle and an e-scooter was one of my best financial decisions in the last few years.

I don't have to deal with insurance, parking (if parking is free by you, it shouldn't be), maintenance (I work on them myself, I just pay for cheap parts), and fuel is effectively free. That's all on top of the car payment for people who haven't paid off their car.

Genuinely wish I had done so when I lost my job at the beginning of the pandemic. I've dumped so much money into a vehicle that's falling apart, which I've driven probably less than 25k miles since. If you can't justify car ownership with your income, they're a money pit.

My car is fully owned and justified by my commute taking 3x longer by bus. Time saved is as important a measure as miles driven.

So was mine, but time saved driving didn't justify the amount of maintenance I would have had to do on my car/sanity with 5 min in car + 2 hours on a coach vs 50 minutes fighting interstate traffic + paying for parking.

We should ask some game theorists why the busses are so slow :-)

They achieve the same peak speed as my car, but they make many more stops and take a (for me) non optimal route.

You do understand that unless you live in a relatively warm metropolis this is literally not an option right?

The Netherlands would like to have a talk with you.

Tell me you’ve never slipped on ice riding a bike in Europe in the winter without telling me you’ve never slipped on ice riding a bike in Europe in the winter.

Europe has a concept novel to most Americans which is known as public transport.

I’ve lived in Europe for 18 years.

People bike all winter in Germany and the Netherlands.

There are real infrastructural reasons it's harder to do in North America compared to Europe, but that's not it.

Biking is relatively popular and definitely feasible within ten km or so from most city or town cores here in Scandinavia, not just the metropolises.

You need to travel more. Plenty of people in Canadian cities rely on public transport just fine.

You do understand that coats exist, right? I live in New England. I bought a heated jacket for less than the price of two months of parking.

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