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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I can't wait until the MTA gets so bad that people tell me, "you take the subway? sorry, we're not interested."

But in some sense, having a reliable vehicle is a microcosm of a particular location and mindset. Nobody I know owns a car. We still mostly get to work on time, though.

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He's in Iowa. In these midwest states (Nebraska for me), public transportation is very scarce.

Most jobs out here require we own a car, or have some way to reliably get to work. Most of the time that does not involve public transportation in any way.

That's worth a whole discussion in and of itself. Iowa is a terrible place to be: Homeless, looking for a tech job, without a car.

Yeah. My comment was not meant to be a smug "hah, country folk" comment, but rather a reflection on how poor urban planning hurts so many people. I legitimately believe that it's impossible to work for certain companies in Iowa if you don't own a car. And you can tell from the story how hurtful that is to individuals and those companies.

Does everyone have a driver's license there? In France none of my friends (and I) have one and we never really needed one.

Yes, pretty much the only places in America that you can survive without a car are New York and San Francisco, but who can afford the rents? I lived in Honolulu for several years and took the bus to work there, but it worked because I had a reverse commute and because the island is small and the ocean prevents expansion in several directions, the bus routes pretty much only run in two directions, which makes commuting possible, whereas in Chicago you would probably have to take a bus and then a train and then change trains to get to work and that would add up to about two hours commute each way each day - a deal breaker for me.

I would say Chicago too.

So how do for example blind people who cannot drive find work?

A better question is "What jobs can blind people do?"

All jobs that involve sitting in front of a computer and typing things.

Kinda ignorant.

Less than 20% of people who are partially or totally blind are employed[1]. The vast majority simply don't.

[1] http://www.afb.org/info/blindness-statistics/adults/interpre...

You can reliably get to work by walking... if you are homeless, you can reliably get to work by sleeping in the parking lot. I just really don’t see how not having a car is at all relevant to the question of reliably getting to work.

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