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Comment by avianlyric | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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).

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.

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