[nilkn]

As a typical kid in the US, it's virtually impossible to ever go anywhere on your own without getting a car. And the chances are high you won't get a car anyway, because your parents can't afford to buy you one and, well, how exactly are you supposed to afford your own car as a jobless kid?

The only way is to get a minimum wage job and suck out a considerable amount of time from your high school studies and extracurriculars, all just to have a car. But educational achievement is ranked very, very high in priority in the US, so a lot of kids who understand that are going to choose to just forgo the car completely if their parents can't get them one.

To top it off, most kids in the US have, up until college, never experienced a walkable microcosm of society, outside of shopping malls. The idea of living in this little walkable world is so exciting that it becomes worth the cost. It's like taking a (short) lifetime of observing all the systemic problems with American life and then finding a new little world that recognizes all those problems and fixes every one.

In that sense, in the US, going off to college comes with this tremendous sense of relief, where you feel like finally, for the first time, life is starting to make sense. Almost all college students will ask themselves repeatedly on first matriculating, "why the hell wasn't life like this in high school and earlier?"