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Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that American cities also generally don't have functioning mass transit systems. And even in those that do (New York), they don't always go where you need them to go, so mass transit trips can be 2-3x longer than a car trip.

Want to do a big shopping trip? Have more than 1 child you need to move around the city? Want to do more than 1 specific errand in the same afternoon? Without a car, all of this becomes a huge pain in the ass even in New York or Boston, which have extensive networks of subways and buses, let alone anywhere else.

And now let's say you want to get out of the city for the weekend. Do you rent a car? That's way more expensive in the long run compared to owning.

We would need to fundamentally redesign our cities/towns and transit systems for Americans to be able to give up their cars.

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I lived in the Boston area for five years and it was a great experience overall, it's quite walkable. The one thing I could never quite get used to was public transit taking longer than walking! You often had a choice of walking for 20 minutes or waiting 15 minutes for a 6 minute bus ride. (Tip: in winter, walking isn't just faster, it feels much warmer too.)

This really confused my Mexico City brain. Here in Mexico City public transit is horribly crowded but faster than walking. The subway is usually faster even than driving, which makes sense because you're not in our terrible traffic.

I guess part of the problem in Boston is that there just aren't enough riders: after waiting 10 minutes for a bus it wasn't even full! Here in Mexico City a more typical waiting period is 5 minutes and the bus is usually packed. I bet in Boston it's just not economically viable to run transit more frequently. Although maybe more people would opt for public transit if it were more frequent?

Anyway, I do recommend living Boston for a few years even with its wonky public transit. It's very pretty and has plenty of character.

Apparently 12 minutes of waiting is the critical point where you start to lose riders of public transit. If you want people to really use your system, you need to keep wait times consistently under that.

> And now let's say you want to get out of the city for the weekend. Do you rent a car? That's way more expensive in the long run compared to owning.

Are you doing it every weekend? Renting a car for just the odd weekend away would be way cheaper than owning. The initial cost / capital depreciation aside even.

I live in London and don't have a car, a £50+ train out to my parents' seems a bit absurd next to the cost of a train to Paris, Ryanair flights, or my Netflix subscription. But I could do it every other weekend just for the cost of insuring a (basic, sensible) car.

I could probably go more often than I do, take taxis there and back (>2h each way) and still come out ahead vs. car ownership.

Really need a 'day to day' (or specialised, such as needing capacity for something, or disabled access) use to make it worthwhile IMO, too many people I think see it as just a 'standard' thing which must be had.

Cars are unfortunately too cheap. My last car was a basic VW polo, and the insurance was £350/year, road tax £99 and probably £200 a year amortized over the 5 years on servicing/wear and year, with a 400 mile range on ~£50 worth of fuel. The break even point on that is ~5-6 trips per year, and much lower if you use the car for basically anything else. I can fly to eastern Europe for £15, but the transit to the airport is more expensive than that in my city.

What about parking? In major cities that’s is frequently the biggest expense at ~£100/month it really adds up.

In major US cities, it's largely free. Whether you see that as a benefit or a negative probably depends on your side of the argument.

And it's even worse when you consider you can add people for almost no extra costs, whereas with public transportation it mostly multiplies.

Arguably they aren't cheap... they're just able to externalize their greatest cost: roads. If the cost of building and maintaining the US road system were baked into say the cost of gas or registration... you would be looking at an entirely different cost of ownership.

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