[cancelkooks]

I am very pro-pedestrian / anti-car, but that’s in the context of how to actually get around town most of the time… obviously (to me) you use the car to leave town and see the wonders of our world.

If people that live in cities are to be relegated to never leave, I for one am not interested.

[stephen_g]

Yeah, cities that have good enough transit, you often don't need to own a car, and can use an on-demand rental service for this kind of thing. (You locate a nearby car in the app and then unlock it through the app when you get to it). It's usually way, way cheaper than owning a car, and handy because for example, if you need to move stuff, you can get a van, and otherwise you can get a smaller car. You don't fall into the trap of driving a big SUV empty all of the time just in case you want to move gear, and then when you have to move stuff to realise that a lot of SUVs don't actually have that much more space than a decent sized hatchback!

[throwaway894345]

> It's usually way, way cheaper than owning a car

It’s usually cheaper than each person owning their own car, but more expensive than a household sharing a car. Of course, this varies widely from city to city and it depends on how often people rent cars or use rideshare or taxis.

The nice thing is you get fast, comfortable transit all the time, but the really nice thing is how much stuff you take advantage of that you might not otherwise. For example, I’m already paying for a car, so going on big road trips is only a marginal extra cost (rather than $100/day + hassle for a car rental). Similarly, I probably wouldn’t have gotten into camping if I had to rent a car for each trip. I probably also wouldn’t visit family as often.

I definitely see the appeal of not needing to own a car, but I tried it and it wasn’t for me. For my city, I’d love to see them start by cleaning up and policing existing public transit (for example) and then scale up from there.