[tropicalbeach]

You still have that freedom to walk anywhere after parking you know. I have done this 100’s of times. Just park then from there go anywhere you want then just take a taxi or lyft back to your car. Public transport sucks, not sure why so many people people like it. Driving is much better unless you live in a large city like NY or LA. My own climate control, radio for music and podcasts, plus driving is therapeutic. I hate being around so many people packed in a train, airplane, bus.

[shortcake27]

> Public transport sucks, not sure why so many people people like it.

I think you may have forgotten that countries other than the US exist. Public transport in most European cities is absolutely phenomenal. And people like it because it’s cheaper and more convenient (when done right).

[TheCoelacanth]

Hire a car to drive to your car?

That sounds like a parody of car-centric living. I can hardly believe that this is a serious suggestion.

[flangola7]

> Just park then from there go anywhere you want then just take a taxi or lyft back to your car.

I thought I had heard it all but "take a lyft back to the parking lot your car is in" is a new low in car culture degeneracy.

[tropicalbeach]

Why it's very practical. Lets say you live in the suburbs 30 minutes from downtown. You find a parking lot park your car and just walk wherever from there. At end of the day if your tired and the car is to far just get a lyft back.

Sitting on a train or bus with screaming kids and breathing everyones air is not something that enjoyable. I prefer my own car it's more freedom.

[earthling8118]

Would you still agree if you had to deal with the externalities? Your suburban life is being subsidized heavily by that downtown area. At the end of the day if I'm tired the last thing I want is to get on the road-- I would rather arrive at my destination without putting the cognitive effort in to pay attention to the road

[tropicalbeach]

I would say downtown is also subsidized by rural areas that require cars. The food you eat is not grown downtown, factories where the products are made that you use are not made downtown. Downtowns are very artificial and consumer oriented. The entirety of downtown couldn’t even exist with the the people living outside it making the food and products you use. Yet the areas outside downtown could easily exist without downtown.

Cramming as many people tightly packed into small cube apartments in one area so you can build a train or have a bus is highly detrimental to peoples mental health and every study proves this.

Space is important and cars solve this.

[flangola7]

I know this is parody, but there are Americans out there that unironically think like this.

[mcdonje]

>I hate being around so many people packed in a train, airplane, bus

I hate being in traffic. On a bus, people are around but you usually don't have to think about them. You can read a book. In traffic, people aren't next to you, but you have to constantly pay attention to them.

[thedrbrian]

> In traffic, people aren't next to you, but you have to constantly pay attention to them.

Sounds like someone has never had to take a bus or public transport in a rough area.

[mcdonje]

That's a bad assumption.

[ldhough]

I recently moved from a Florida city (after growing up in Florida suburbs) to DC and left my car behind. Not sure if DC counts as a "large" city in this context as it certainly a lot smaller than NYC or LA but the public transit and walkability are excellent and were huge motivations for me to move here.

In Florida everything requires a car, even in the cities you still need one let alone the suburbs. From other places I've visited in the US it seems like Florida is far from unique in this regard. It can easily be a 20+ minute drive to get dinner, go to the grocery store, etc. Driving requires constant focus to be safe (and is still pretty dangerous) while I can read on my phone on the metro (plus most trips are shorter). Most of the time I can just walk and don't even need to take the metro which is good exercise and a good time to think. Sitting in traffic was a common occurrence and and I can't think of anything as annoying that happened as often.

If I do need to take a long trip I can rent a car or use Uber, ends up being far cheaper than frequently filling a gas tank and all the other maintenance involved in car ownership even though I had cheap insurance and no car payments.

To each their own but those are the reasons why I personally much prefer public transit to driving, although I wouldn't say I like either. Walking however I enjoy greatly.

[JohnFen]

> Public transport sucks, not sure why so many people people like it.

Public transport sucks in the US, but that's just because the US has a weird hostility towards it, so doesn't properly invest in it. There's nothing about it that makes it have to suck.

[lotsoweiners]

We’re not hostile to it and we have good or at least adequate public transit in a lot of major cities. We just don’t need it everywhere. I live in a very suburban town and can’t imagine that many people would really want to take it. My town skews heavily Mormon (large families) and elderly. That is not going to get much ridership yet some people still keep proposing light rail extension to my town.

[patmorgan23]

You don't think those elderly people who are having trouble driving would love the opportunity to hold on a light rail line so they can take a stroll downtown in with their grandkids?

There is no good transit system in north America. If you want to see good transit you have to go to Europe, Asia or Latin America, where even small towns can have robust transit with high ridership.

North America is comically car dependent because we build everything only focusing on how cars are going to get in and out, and require ludicrous amounts of parking onsite basically everywhere.

Our transit systems are almost always an after thought in the land use planning process. We surround places in seas of parking and put transit stops on the edge of them or put transit stops on highway access road with no sidewalks. The transit systems are often viewed and built as a charity service provided for the poor that no respectable person would use daily. The schedules rarely have sufficient frequency to make the service actually usable.

Our zoning codes make building walkable places that could support and be supported by transit illegal or restrict them to only small specific TOD projects.

Here's a great video essay on what north America gets wrong when building transit https://youtu.be/MnyeRlMsTgI

[JohnFen]

> we have good or at least adequate public transit in a lot of major cities.

I don't think this is actually true. I can think of two cities that have decent public transit: New York (so I hear, I haven't been there) and Chicago. I've been to a lot of the other cities, including many who have won awards for their public transit, and I would call the best of those "poor".

[Mezzie]

Public transit is also a germ factory and as somebody who's immuno-compromised I really like not being sick all the time.

[serpix]

When I used the metro for commuting I got sick all the time. This is of course anecdotal but it really felt that way at the time.

[MengerSponge]

Driving is a luxury, and should be priced accordingly

[bathtub365]

It’s quite expensive to buy and maintain a car

[MengerSponge]

Yes, and public roads should be an additional cost.

I'm not interested in banning cars, but I am interested in charging appropriately for sprawl and air pollution.

[plandis]

Car registration fees / gas taxes do pay for that?

[patmorgan23]

They contribute to but don't even come close to covering the total cost (at least in the United States but I suspect it's similar In Europe)

[thefringthing]

Driving is net subsidized, even before pricing in these externalities.

[serpix]

It is ridiculously expensive but the freedom is unparalleled. It would takes two hours to go across town. It takes 30 minutes by car. This is in Helsinki. Public transport works only to and from city center, sideways travel is royally painful.

[earthling8118]

Cars are chains that bind us, nothing more. The "freedom" to pay for insurance, gasoline, tires, batteries, and whatever else happens to go wrong. Cities with a proper public transit story also tend to have better driving experiences too

[mcdonje]

>unless you live in a large city

Most people live in large cities

[areyousure]

In case anyone is curious, I downloaded US Census Bureau data on the population of all incorporated towns and cities in the United States, eg from https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/popest/2...

It appears that the median resident of the United States lives in a town or city of population 18,290 (as of the census date April 1, 2020).

As a quick sanity check, the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... cuts off at population 100,000 and mentions that > The total 2020 enumerated population of all cities over 100,000 is 96,598,047, representing 29.14% of the United States population

[mcdonje]

Most of those are suburbs. 85% of the US population lives in metropolitan statistical areas.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_are...

[lotsoweiners]

Sure but most large cities aren’t just urban areas. Dallas, Houston, Denver, Phoenix etc are all large cities that you could live in and never have any reason to be near a high rise building.

[fragmede]

Are those really cities though? A huge concentrated mass of suburban sprawl and strip malls doesn't count as a city in my book.