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Comment by em-bee | Hacker News Reader

i grew up in europe without a car. when i moved to san diego i thought, that's it, i'll finally have to learn how to drive.

but i didn't. i made sure that i lived somewhere with a direct bus to work and it turned out to be fine. same in los angeles later. also auckland, nz.

with that experience i concluded that i won't need a car, ever. it is all about arranging how you live.

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Let's inform the other few billions of humans on Earth to move closer to bus stops.

Some people act so entitled... Not everyone has the same circumstances and infrastructure around them. Go to a poor part of eastern Europe. My mother has 2 buses to the nearest city in an entire day... (Not mentioning it takes like 5-6x more time.)

Cars aren’t exactly cheap either. Why should we force every human to own a $1000 asset, and feed it with oil every week, just to participate is basic society?

Why is building more bus stops, more metro stops, more train stops, more bike lanes, so terrible? And how is forcing car ownership better?

An annual London travel card is £2,568, and that only lets you travel around London. So why should be instead force people to buy something more expensive and less useful than a car?

An annual Berlin travel card is about 720€, I believe it's about the same in Paris. An annual Vienna travel card is 365€. At least in Berlin car ownership correlates very strongly with household income. The majority of poor households don't have access to a car, whereas rich households have multiple cars.

> An annual Berlin travel card is about 720€

Or 480€ if you get it trough your employer, which amounts to 40€ a month.

Average cost of owning a car in the UK is more than that, especially in London where there is limited land

And very few people have a travelcard for the entire city, just you payg on your phone/watch/card for what you use. Unless you literally are crossing London 10 times a week an annual travel card is meaningless.

Ackshually, an annual Z1-3 travel card (other zones are available) costs the same as 40 weeks at the weekly cap (£43.50 vs £1740).

If your weekly travel sees you routinely hitting the cap then a travel card may represent better value.

Very few people travel zone 1-3 enough to hit a weekly cap, even before covid, hence very few annual travelcards were sold in London.

I used to spend close to £3k a year on petrol commuting, I then need to pay insurance, MOT and road tax on top of that to run a car. All of that is ignoring the £14/day congestion charge (that’s another £3.5k/year for those in the back).

The annual london travel card is much cheaper than operating a car. Not to mention public transport is london is an order of magnitude faster than car for most intra-city journeys.

Of course improving infrastructure to support better public transport would be a good thing. But I also think urbanization in itself is a big part of the problem. Most of the hate on cars comes from people living in big cities (my own observation).

Alternative option is to build more frequent bus stops.

Also, poor Eastern Europe people use more public transport, vause cars are more expensive.

You're commenting in a discussion about changing the infrastructure to be less car centric so that more people can live without having a car.

I was directly replying to a specific comment. My comment is not really about the article.

There's only 1.4 billion cars in the world, with 300 million of them in the US, so "billions" is a somewhat odd statement.

i have travelled eastern europe extensively and lived there too. public transport in most places is better than the US.

a similar location in the US would have no busses at all.

remote places exist. if you live there you may need a car. but that doesn't translate to needing a car everywhere.

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