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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

I only somewhat agree.

First of all, it depends if you have to commute to an office in some industrial park (even if it's only one or two days a week).

Then there's the question of where your friends live, whether you regularly do activities outside the city, etc. Zipcar and Uber definitely make it easier not to own a car. But my observation of people I know in SF who don't own a car is that they make ample use of both Uber and regular/short-term rentals. People can definitely get by but it's often by adjusting their lifestyles and activities in that you just don't do things that are hard to do.

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If you live in Japan without a car you will probably end up taking a taxi from time to time. They are lined up outside the major train stations. Overall, relying on mass-transit probably is more pleasant there, and takes less lifestyle-modifications, but you still have less freedom than owning a car. And probably take longer to get around usually. Also in plenty of Japan, by the way, you definitely need a car to get by reasonably. It's not like countries in Europe where half the population lives in the capital city.

If your goal is to avoid any sort of exercise (and the "forced" exercise is one of the biggest reasons to go carless in my opinion) then yes large sections of US cities may seem inacccessible without a car. But if you like walking like I do (at least up to a half-mile or so) then you can live just fine in US cities without a car, in my experience. I've done it all over.

I live well outside Boston but have lived in Cambridge. I'd mostly be fine with walking and taking transit around the city itself--which I've done. And probably mostly wouldn't want to drive. But I'd regularly want to get out of the city for hiking and other activities and I wouldn't want to deal with rentals every time. (People I know who do live in the city and do similar activities generally own cars.)

Even given a decent commuter rail system it doesn't help for those sorts of activities.

So it's not really getting around the city but getting anywhere outside the city that isn't on convenient mass transit.

Public transit in Tokyo is faster than cars for the vast majority of trips. The only exception is if there's no lines connecting where you want to go, and you need to transfer a couple times. Nobody complains about "lack of freedom". When people want to go on trips, they rent a car, but even then, they usually take the train to their destination, and then rent a car there.

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