With COVID, I avoid taxis & ubers; I can take a zipcar-like rental with relatively low overhead, but one isn't always available next to me. When it is, it's sometimes not very clean. Those services have small-ish vehicles (and mostly electric ones) that are fine for city & surroundings, but if I want a weekend getaway I need to use real rental, and that's a lot more overhead (plus, if I get out 3 weekends per month, just the rentals would be more expensive than the car costs - and that, at a lower quality of the rented car; with COVID I don't get out as often, but previously, I used to).
I think living without a car definitely makes sense for some people; and definitely doesn't for others. But that depends a lot on your conditions, location and lifestyle.
Not everything needs insurance. And real insurance has costs that are pretty close to the expected average risk, while buying things just in case could be much more.
And the 1/10000 calculation was not the chance of huge trouble, it's 1/10000 to be unable to get a ride to have any trouble at all. The vast majority of those incidents are going to be worth much less than a thousand dollars. The chance of an event being that major is another factor of 1% or less.
Am I going to pay a thousand dollars a year to avoid a one in a million chance each of missing some important business meetings? Definitely not. Especially when other factors I can't change are much more likely to make me miss a meeting.
I mean, if I had odds that low of major illness I probably wouldn't pay hundreds of dollars a month for health insurance either!
As someone who had siblings that required various visits to the hospital for emergency things, using an ambulance each time would have paid for a couple of new cars.
Most healthcare isn't going to cover the use of an ambulance for a broken arm or a bunch of marbles up the nose and waiting for (and using) an Uber/Lyft in these scenarios is also pretty bad.
If it happens that often then the article wouldn't advise you against having a car.
> Most healthcare isn't going to cover the use of an ambulance for a broken arm or a bunch of marbles up the nose and waiting for (and using) an Uber/Lyft in these scenarios is also pretty bad.
If you're going to the emergency room you'll probably be waiting plenty long once you get there.