[rincewind]

People who say "electric cars are good enough now, the median distance driven is just 20km anyway" act as if that's a good thing.

If you use an electric car only for a commute, why not commute by bicycle or by bus? Why buy an electric car at all if you only ever drive short distances? Why not take the train if you are going long distance only four times a year?

Why even buy a new car then?

[Nullabillity]

Public transport is never going to provide a comprehensive point-to-point network, and every switch dramatically increases the cost (in terms of time, effort, and finances). The only way it can be remotely viable for commuting is if your city is organized into a hub-and-spoke model where everyone commutes into the same city core.

But that gets you very congested stations (great for occasions like COVID!), and is murder for a city's social life (since you're more than doubling the cost of visiting friends). I know, because I live in a city^Hhellscape designed like this...

Bikes, you say? Well, my old 20km commute took around an hour by ebike, around twice the time of the car. And that was an unpleasant experience in the best case, that got virtually unviable with weather (rain, leaves, ice, whatever else). And again, unviable for socializing since nobody I'm visiting is going to have an ebike charger (nor is it guaranteed that I'd be staying there long enough for it to work).

[bluGill]

Public transit can be organized much better than that. There need not be one hub in a city for example. Sure it will never cover 100% if all cases well, but it can cover enough to get the majority of the people to not have a car at all.

Most of the leaders of transit systems are not interested in good transit though. (The exceptions don't speak good English from what I can tell )

[Nullabillity]

> There need not be one hub in a city for example.

That's not a solution, that's just moving to another point on the continuum between the downsides of hub-and-spoke and the downsides of point-to-point.

And this kind of hub bifurcation typically only serves to make residential-to-residential journeys even worse, setting up social barriers based on which hubs people have easy access to.

> The exceptions don't speak good English from what I can tell

Can't really respond to this if you're not interested in citing which "good" example you'd like to see emulated.

[bluGill]

the ultimate spoke location is a grid system with hubs every block, and a larger grid with express stoos every few blocks, with a still larger grid... no city in the world comes close to the population to support that.

Mass transport is a compromise to serve the masses well, but there are always losers in the compromise. Residential to residential is general the hardest to serve because other land uses value the easier to get to places far more.

There are many different cities with different constraints. They have pick different answers to the compromise. South Korea, France, Japan, and Switzerland just to name 4 very different systems that are fairly good. Each have things to learn from each other.

[sfifs]

When you're buying a car, you're buying optionality for personally controlled mobility that's comfortable, immediately available, weather proof and able to carry people and cargo - even if you regularly take public transport, there can be major benefits to this.

Today, i live in a modern mega city were this kind of facility is available at any time of the day with a wait time of < 10 mins although i have a few situations a year where I've had to cancel appointments because i just couldn't get a cab. These instances are few enough that I don't bother with owning a car.

However in my previous city, many of these conditions were simply not true - so I had a car and because it was a low cost of living country, a driver too from the time we were expecting our first child to minimise the strain and uncertainty of chaotic traffic and parking. I used to get dropped at a convenient public transport point in a way that minimised my total commute time.

Where my parents and cousins live, most of these conditions are not true and they're forced to own a car.

As another example, in Japan, a very large proportion of households own a car for the optionality even though most commute via train to work because the places they live in don't have the facilities.