[trymas]

waat?

Current situation with prevalent "private travel", i.e. cars in USA (and probably "the west" overall??) IS due to corporate and political interests.

Car manufacturers, "big oil", road construction companies, politicians collecting taxes from cars (fuel sales, road use, cars themselves[0] and car parking), banks leasing money to buy and maintain cars, insurance, landlords owning car parks, etc.

They are very very interested that private car ownership wouldn't go away and are fighting it tooth and nail. You need to own multiple cars per household spend thousands on leasing, hundreds on parking, to just go to work and of course there's fuel.

Though somewhere like London, Paris or Tokyo - why would you want to do daily commute in a car? If you are a billionaire, driven by personal driver in your Bentley or Land Rover - sure, but otherwise metro is cheaper by an order of magnitude and I'd bet often times much faster too. In those places rich and heads of state take trams and metros.

I probably not need to remind you that "richest man" lobbied some failing projects to upsell his car sales, instead of allowing high speed rail to be developed.

[0] this of course depends from country to country and from state to state.

[AlexandrB]

I think you vastly underestimate how much people like their cars. Sure there are corporate interests who benefit, but they don't force folks to change cars every 3 years or make big "crossovers" and SUVs the most popular car type in the US and, now, Europe[1].

Cars are just really convenient to have when you need them and folks will put up with all kind of costs and other inconveniences to own one.

I think it's really important to have robust and safe public transit so car use can be minimized when it's unnecessary, but I don't have illusions that this will lead to some kind of car-free utopia.

[1] https://www.motor1.com/news/707655/suvs-more-popular-europe-...

[criddell]

I think you underestimate just how much many people like their cars and enjoy driving. People generally spend far more on their vehicle than they really need to.

If I lived in London or Paris I wouldn't commute by car. But I don't live in a big city and, at this point in my life, I don't want to (although I'd love to have a little pied-a-terre for part time use). Instead, I live in the 'burbs of a pretty car-friendly city and life is good.