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Comment by aerique | Hacker News Reader

Honest question:

We lived with one car (a car that was given to us) for 4 ½ years. During that time, I walked or rode my bike to school to save on gas. We recently bought a second car with money I saved from my web design business.

Is the US really structured so that owning one car is (seen as) a problem?

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Outside of downtown urban centers, somewhat yes. Generally you need one car per worker. Part of the reason cities are becoming popular again is because people don't want to have to deal with all this bullshit, and be able to walk/bike/public transit to work in less than 30 minutes.

Here's some of the reasons why it feels like you need one car per worker:

You don't live super close to work because either you can't afford it or it's not very safe. In this case close means like 5 to 10 minutes driving time, which is at most like an hour or so walking or biking.

You could carpool with another worker who lives close to you, BUT jobs aren't secure. If the only person who lives near you quits/gets fired/gets laid off and you don't have a car, you either need to buy one fast or you need to find another job. What ends up happening is you switch who drives to work each week, but that means you still need a car for your weeks to drive.

You could drive with your spouse, but they probably have work in an entirely separate direction since you optimized for both of you to have the shortest collective commute. That means using more gas to go out of your way to drop someone off and either working weird hours or waiting a long time for the other person either after a drop off or before a pickup, Also, not everywhere will let you just hangout at work waiting for a ride.

You could walk or bike to work, but that will take a long time (>30 minutes at least) on infrastructure not really set up to support that and with no cleanup facilities or places to change at work (some places have showers, but its rare).

Public transit might actually take longer than walking/biking because of all the extra stops or because you have to take a circuitous route with several transfers. Not to mention that public transit isn't the best outside of urban centers and a few commute corridors, so there will be a lot of waiting if you miss a ride/connection. depending on where you live, you might need to drive to/from public transit near your house because of how long it would take to walk to the pickup point.

Taking a taxi will be more expensive than buying a car and paying for gas yourself.

Here's what Google maps gives me for my roughly 15 mile commute in Memphis TN

Driving- 24 minutes (from experience this is fairly accurate)

Public transit- 2 hours 15 minutes. Involves two buses with the second going through one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city and eventually leaving me 6 miles from my office.

Biking- 1 hour 30 minutes. This would be an adventure, but I've actually considered trying.

So, it's basically impossible for me to get to work any way but driving. I could car-pool but I've yet to find a co-worker who lives near enough.

FWIW, Google Maps biking time estimates are for a very leisurely ride. If you're not already comfortable on a bike, by the time you are, you should be able to easily shave half an hour off that time, unless you're going uphill the entire time.

Depends where you are. Larger northern/coastal cities are often almost European, but elsewhere.. Subjectively speaking, I noticed two main issues:

1) Practical: cities/towns are often extremely spread out/car oriented, often with no footpaths connecting different areas forcing you to walk in the road, and occasionally you'll find that there is no way to travel between two points other than highway/interstates (which does have a hard motorized vehicle dependency).

2) Social: Especially further south, people not travelling by car are often 'viewed with suspicion' (vagrants, murderers, bogeymen).

I'm from the South and I have no idea what you're talking about. Those are just people who don't have a car, which is common in the poorer rural areas of the South.

I just moved from San Francisco, CA to the Washington, DC area. I'm currently staying at my dad's place in Alexandria, VA.

San Francisco has a very good public transit system, at least compared to any other suburb in which I've lived. In San Francisco, I could be most places I cared to be within 30 minutes. There was literally a bus station outside of my apartment window, and I could catch probably a dozen different bus lines within a six block radius, maybe more. I lived without a car for over 5 years in SF, and it was fine.

Alexandria, VA is different. The closest Metro Station a light rail system, is a 20 minute walk by foot, and it has little to no parking. Pretty much anything I want to do is at least a 20 minute walk away. At the moment I can borrow my dad's car, but if I had to walk, my life would be dominated just by trying to get around. Sure, I can survive without a car in Alexandria, VA, but it'd kind of a pain in the ass.

I can't imagine trying to live in a rural area without a car.

Lest anyone get the impression that DC has terrible public transit (it actually has very good public transit), San Francisco and Alexandria aren't directly comparable. Alexandria is to Washington DC as Berkeley is to San Francisco.

None of that makes amorphid's description wrong.

DC is at least as good as San Francisco for living without a car. You're having problems because you're out in the suburbs. Move into DC proper or even to a more accessible suburb like Ballston, Clarendon, Crystal City, etc or even just move a bit closer to old town Alexandria and it's very easy to live without a car.

DC is fine. But "DC" is a tiny part of the "DC area". I grew up in Annandale. A car was necessary. An old friend of mine lives in Alexandria, in Del Ray. He takes the train into DC (which takes him about an hour total, when you add up the walking, waiting and riding). But his family needs a car because his wife works in a school that is not in walking distance, their parents live in Arlington and northwest DC, and most of their kids' activities require driving.

In DC, as in San Francisco, the trains are more for commuters to get into and out of the city. They're not really for connecting within or outside of the city. The NY area is better about that. (But not great.)

If I ever moved back to the area, I would seriously consider Bethesda. Easy access to DC, and a neat town in its own right.

> But "DC" is a tiny part of the "DC area".

Every city has outlying suburbs and not a single one has excellent transit throughout the entire metropolitan area. The DC metropolitan area has the lowest mode share for private automobiles and the highest mode share for public transportation of any except for NYC. It is objectively the second best city in the US for getting around without a car. It is clearly not as good as NYC but it is certainly not worse than San Francisco.

Berlin has excellent transit throughout most of its metropolitan area, and it's a large, low-density city.

Correction: The DC Metro is not a lightrail system.

I don't know about Waynesboro in particular, but in most US cities, public transport is between abysmal and non-existent. Add this to the fact that most cities are not as densely packed (as say Europe) and a penchant for suburban living, cars are quite important for commuting and to maintain a basic quality of life. It is a decent thumb rule that any working person or someone running errands will almost definitely need a car (eg: the nearest supermarket for grocery shopping might be about 5 miles away). So it is extremely common to see families have a couple of cars because the logistics would be very tough to manage with a single car.

Yes. With the exception of some major cities (and even then usually restricted to the central cores) it is nearly impossible to do anything without a vehicle. Areas surrounding cities (the suburbs) usually have some form of public transit but the quality in most cities is so poor that it is impossible to use on a regular basis. Rural areas often have no transit whatsover.

Buying groceries, going to work, doing any other errand outside of the house requires a car. Therefore, if two adults live in a home, they generally need two cars if they are going to be capable of being independent.

All in all, it's a pretty terrible situation.

Yes. If you live outside the center of a major city, you must own a car or rely on other people for rides. There is often no public transit, and the distances between things can be very, very large (easily 10-20km between small towns, and expanding the further west you go). Most non-Americans underestimate how enormous the USA is, even on a local level.

If you're a couple and both of you have jobs, it's not always feasible to have one person drop off the other before work because things are so spread out. Without public transit, this means people often need 2 cars.

It is not uncommon to commute 30 miles or more to work (one way) in Los Angeles, for example. My commute used to be 62 miles each way, then I cut it to 45 miles, and now it's about 10 miles. There is no effective public transportation system that could take me to/from work faster than even driving in rush hour traffic could.

So at least in LA, it is definitely a big problem to not have independent cars.

Edit: I should also say that where I used to live in Europe, those commuting distances would take me to completely different cities!

LA is all about the neighborhood you live in. LA neighborhoods are basically self-contained cities. if you choose the right one, you don't need a car. e.g.: santa monica, venice, west hollywood, downtown, silverlake, dt culver city, dt pasadena, etc, etc, etc. these are dense urban areas with top notch city housing within walking distance (10 minutes) of everything. it's city-expensive but not like NY or SF (with exceptions, like santa monica).

most people in LA commute clear across the entire county, which is why they need a car. most of these people are middle class, they could move if they wanted to, but they don't want to.

today, with uber and other services, the only reason you would "need" a car in LA is to commute, unless you make terrible living choices. also the expo line (downtown-west side light rail) will be done in a year.

30 miles one way doesn't sound uncommon in Tokyo as well, though the extensive public transportation system makes the need of cars much less than US. So I think it also depends on the policy of city design. I guess it's harder to omit cars for the rural parts of US rather than cities.

(I lived in LA about a year without car. It's ok if you're single, but if you have family it's a totally different story.)

Yes, the U.S. is a giant country geographically and many areas have poor public transportation as a result of how spread out it is. Virginia is a fairly rural state.

The US being a giant country has very little to do with the US being mostly car-dependent for the activities of everyday life. We built most of our settlements on the inexpensive outskirts of existing settlements, with free roads and cheap (and secure, as the world's greatest oil producer at the time) oil. We saw such development as 'business' & 'industry' rather than 'planning', and largely consigned design elements to private developers, with the asterisk that we would pay for whatever roads and utilities they needed - including an interstate highway system that was practically a wonder of the world at the time. Strong tax inducements on depreciation of commercial property, and ownership of a single-family home, resulted in an ever-growing sprawl. We actually tore up most of the public transportation that existed in the early 20th century, and the economic vacuum of urban decay accelerated itself with racial tension that much of the rest of the world does not have.

The kicker is that many populated areas are spread out because the local public infrastructure cannot support higher density. It's a vicious cycle. Can't provide better infrastructure because of insufficient density; can't increase density because of insufficient infrastructure.

Most people don't need to live in Wyoming. So they don't. People want to live in cities, for the additional synergistic opportunities. They are driven away by the municipal corruption that spends their higher in-city taxes on sinecures and pensions rather than on actual services and infrastructure.

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