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Comment by karmelapple | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know if research exists for this, but I wonder how much of the influence of people moving from rural or suburban areas in the USA to urban areas in the USA contributes to additional cars in US cities.

I grew up in a suburban area, and even though I live in a dense city now, having a car still seems mandatory to me somewhere deep in my brain, even though I know I could now get by with the occasional zipcar.

Suburban areas typically require a car since public transportation is nonexistent, and growing up in an environment for 20 years sure can condition someone’s preferences.

I wonder how many people truly like driving? And where’s the line lie between “I am willing to drive” and “I am willing to not drive” ?

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It’s a huge factor contributing to income inequality as well. In a car free city you’d have to have affordable housing because otherwise you’d have no service people, since they wouldn’t be able to commute.

Ironically, drives to eliminate cars typically disproportionately negatively impact poor people. Wealthy people value their time over money, and so tend to retain their cars even when faced with higher costs. Poorer people will give up their cars to save money in exchange for spending hundreds of additional hours per year walking and commuting on public transit. In an ideal world, yes, they'd move closer to their jobs. In the real world, they'll commute, have to make multiple transfers between different modes of transportation, and lose precious hours from their days. This is particularly of a great impact to lower-income folks since they can't claim back those hours by hiring out things like cooking, cleaning, and maintenance. Affordable, efficient point-to-point transportation is of great benefit to this class.

This is the reason why a cultural transformation is needed, cars are a local maxima for mass transportation, but there are much better and viable options

I'm not sure that the drive should necessary be away from cars. With the advent of driverless cars, there is a new option: shared cars. They provide the time-savings of point-to-point transit for the already time-strapped lower class, can (optionally) enable ride sharing for cost and congestion reduction, use the existing infrastructure, and with sufficient percentage of self-driven cars should provide throughput similar to busses ... all while eliminating the need for parking in city centers. They are the best of everything.

No, try more like Tokyo. It’s great.

Can you give a few examples?

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