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by wayanon 1887 days ago
It’s weird because I associate car ownership with wealth! I’m in my 40s in London in the UK earning an ok salary and neither me nor many of many friends have a car.
6 comments

Outside of the big cities in England almost everyone has a car too. Most of the US is like that.
I don't know much about London, but in the US the arrangement is that expensive cities provide work and hoards of minimum wage workers live in exurbs 1-2 hours away from those cities. They have to wake up at 6 am, spend an hour or more in atrocious traffic on a highway with other minimum wage workers, then do the same in the reverse at the end of the day. On a bus it would take 2x longer. They don't have a choice. Now if you force them to swap their rusty gas cars for ev ones (beware, 3k usd for them is a massive expense) and force them to spend 1 hour a day recharging those ev cars, the US economy would stall as the wealthy hipsters in the cities won't do the service jobs.
Just one point of contention here:

You don't "spend" time recharging an EV unless your one-way trip is longer than the maximum range.

You get where you're going, plug in and come back to more power than you had before you left.

Maybe provide a fleet of clean, well run, electric, regular scheduled, buses and they won't have to sit in the traffic in their individual cars.

Provide bus depots with car parking in the exurbs so that there is the possibility of short driving commutes to/from the depot.

Use smaller, much more frequent, shuttle buses to pickup/drop off "on demand" between houses and those hub depots, then they don't need the car to get there.

Or we could just allow construction of more housing in cities?
London has the Tube and buses and bike lanes - try living in the US without a car... ( ex-pat Brit now in the US)
In the US people may be homeless, but they'll still have a car. It's THAT essential to living...
where I live, having reliable transportation (i.e. owning a car) is pretty much a job requirement wherever you work.

a lot of people don't exactly understand just how _sprawling_ the US is.

yet in rular Poland, only rich people (or disabled, elderly, wihout driver license, who have no other choice) can live comfortably without car