[booyaa00]

Lots of people don't want to live in a city.

For me, living in a city is a horrible existence. So living in the unspoilt countryside a car is pretty useful to get around.

A car is freedom. Do you really want to be completely dependent and beholden to some public transport system?

[jseliger]

A car is freedom. Do you really want to be completely dependent and beholden to some public transport system?

Per the link, I view a car as slavery, and, per The High Cost of Free Parking, car infrastructure is much more expensive than is commonly realized. Owning a car is being a slave to car payments, to saving for the car, to the insurance company, to the repair shop, to the driveway or parking lot, to paying around $10,000 a year in TCO.

Lots of people don't want to live in a city.

Which is good! They shouldn't. The challenges come from the way we've structured an entire society to subsidize parking.

To some extent that's changing, with people like Glaeser, Shoup, and Yglesias in the intellectual vanguard. The issue is also getting more prominent in part because the startling cost of living in many cities and inner-ring suburbs is causing intellectually curious people to ask both why this is happening and how it can be alleviated. Both questions go back to politics.

[lsc]

People throw around the world 'slavery' way too lightly, considering it's historical connotations.

[dllthomas]

"Freedom", too, for that matter.

[lsc]

meh, 'freedom' has never had a good, solid meaning. Kings have been using that word for centuries.

Slavery, until fairly recently has meant 'owning another human' - I mean, hell, I'll buy the use of slavery to mean 'having a choice between doing what another human wants and dying'

My problem here is expanding it to mean 'having to pay a small fee or suffer discomfort'

[saraid216]

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=slave&allowed_in_fr...

Slavery was turned into "owning another human" by abolitionists who wanted to play up its squick factor. It was previously just a state of submission and would be interchangeable with "servant".

The sense jseliger is using it is in the sense attested from the 1550s: that a car owner has lost resistance to a habit or vice; in this case, the "habit or vice" is the acceptance of car infrastructure in city design and the habit of looking at the world through the needs of one's car, namely to find parking, to calculate finances based on a car's needs.

[lsc]

Thanks. I was not aware of that etymology resource. Interesting that it started out as a racial slur, then became something much less serious, then again became something more serious.

[sibartlett]

Some words have multiple definitions. Here's one of the definitions of the word "slave"... someone entirely dominated by some influence or person; "a slave to fashion"; "a slave to cocaine"; "his mother was his abject slave"

[quatrevingts]

The unspoilt countryside can certainly be pleasant, at least for the few that are well-off retired, or don't need access to an urban center to make a decent living, and don't mind driving an hour to do anything.

Start putting McMansions and Applebees in the countryside, and it becomes spoiled rather quickly.

[bguthrie]

I live close enough to my workplace and the basic necessities that I could walk to them if I so choose. Most people who own cars now live so far away from these things that they can no longer live without their four-wheeler. That doesn't seem all that free to me.

[pouetpouet]

If you live there, it's not unspoilt. If you love nature, stay away from it, you have a bigger footprint in the country than in an urban core.

If you have a partner, it's not about the freedom of owning a car. Many couples/families own multiple cars. You can still own a car for "freedom" but live your daily life with one car less.

One car less.

[grayarea]

> Do you really want to be completely dependent and beholden > to some public transport system?

With a car you are dependent and beholden to a public transport system. They are called roads and highways.

[dingaling]

> So living in the unspoilt countryside a car is pretty useful to get around.

Countryside is not 'unspoilt' if it features roads and cars, let alone houses and agriculture.

[im_a_lawyer]

That's great but you assume that there is a choice. I want to live in a nice city, but I can't. Trillions of dollars, decades of government policies and dozen of agencies with their "homeownership" programs destroyed our cities and permanently put them at a disadvantage. My city alone lost almost 1 million people so far, where blocks with only 2 or 3 houses left standing are plentiful(this isn't even Detroit!) yet the surrounding suburbs are thriving. This didn't happen out of choice. If people like you paid the full price of suburbia or if the situation was reversed and government rewarded city living instead of suburban living then your lifestyle would change really fast.

[eru]

> I want to live in a nice city, but I can't.

If you want city living badly enough, there are countries that still have viable cities.