Yet another reason to ditch cars. The car is an engineering disaster and it's time has past. I know this will be a shock to some people.
I can get into the nearest city and town just fine on public transport, and that's what I do. But public transport here is spoke-hub. If you want to go somewhere that is moderately far away from a hub, it becomes incredibly difficult (and expensive).
If you live in a city, and you never leave that city other than to go to other cities, then you absolutely do not need a car. Most other people do.
- Camping overnight is both illegal, and less comfortable than the hotel I was basing my hikes out of
I drove there, stayed at a hotel, and hiked out from that hotel every day. It was a very memorable trip. I then drove home.
The alternative would have been to get a bus to the train station (40 minutes), a train to the south of the park (2 hours), get a bus from the train station to another town (only 2 buses a day, morning and night, so we'd have had to leave home much earlier or lose a day), get another bus from that town to another town, then get another bus from that town to another town. All whilst lugging a large suitcase, camera bag & gear, and another backpack between us. The buses would have taken another 3 hours. Then if I needed to get home in an emergency, or otherwise leave quickly, I'd have to redo it all backwards, and hope I could make that twice a day bus.
No thanks, I'll just stick with my 1.5 hour drive from my front door to the hotel.
It fulfils the desire to go from point A to point B in relative comfort at relative speed, at reasonable cost that scales to the local economy. US market cars tend to have lots of extraneous features and not be suitable for rugged roads; less developed economies get models with fewer comfort features, but a more robust suspension for use where roads are more aspirational. Autorickshaws are common in some places and unknown elsewhere, etc.
Walking, biking, and public transit in a livable community is the only rational way forward.
I've noticed that the arrogant and condescending people who are most opposed to cars tend to be childless young urbanites with very limited life experience. The rest of the country operates in a completely different way, and votes accordingly.
My observed injury rate per vehicle mile, per trip, or per time spent, in a car is much lower than the same rates on a bicycle. Incidentally, my largest injury on a bike was due to street car rails, so thanks public transit for making the roads less safe for bicycling. I can't count the number of times I've tripped while walking, resulting in mostly minor injuries, but nevertheless more injuries than I've sustained in automobiles (not counting violence from siblings). Lack of safety restraints on public transit mean more minor injuries from sudden stops as well.
> Cars are too big and too heavy
Autorickshaws are much smaller, lighter, and more fuel efficient. Plus they're cute!
> Infrastructure demands are too great
Infrastructure demands for cars scale. You can use cars if you can get fuel to enough fueling stations and have cleared trees and other obstacles from paths. Pavement is optional but encouraged. Parking lots are nice to have, but any cleared space works. You don't get a lot of speed, and probably not much fuel efficiency, but it works. Paved roads are nicer, and they get built because they're useful. Of course, busses and bicycles like paved roads too (paving for bikes requires a lot lower standard too).
If you can't get fuel to fueling stations, there's things like wood gasifiers[1], although gasoline and diesel are much more scalable if the infrastructure is present.
> Walking, biking, and public transit in a livable community is the only rational way forward.
This would severely limit the scope of livable communities. Or at least significantly increase transit time for many to most activities. Those are all great options, when available and appropriate, but a lot of times it's not the best mode of transportation and often it's not even appropriate. The diversity of origin/destination pairs in most metropolitan areas of a certain size makes it very hard for most users to be served by direct public transit routes, and hub and spoke routing makes a lot of trips turn into first go 30 minutes in the wrong direction, then 30 minutes in the right direction, when a point to point automobile trip would be much less time.
I can't imagine some of my recent trips working well with public transit. Especially those trips where I'm carrying sports equipment for multiple people not traveling with me. How do you take three or four sets of hockey gear on a bicycle, or walking the half mile uphill from the bus stop to my home?
[1] https://www.amusingplanet.com/2022/02/wood-gas-vehicles-cars...