Comment by Fradow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fradow | Hacker News Reader

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Agree on most parts, though a few nitpicking:

> Even in Paris, something like a third of all commuters drive a personal car.

See [1]: to get to their work place, 72% of Parisians and 75% of Franciliens (residents of Ile-de-France, excluding Paris) use public transit. It's at most 1/4 using a car (number not quoted in the study). The "a third" number is quoted for people going from Paris to suburbs during the week by car (which I think includes off-peak trips)

> Out of those who ride public transit, many if not most would prefer to drive, they just can’t afford it

Sorry but that's just an opinion. I'm not aware on a study of that, but I and a lot of people I know would rather not drive. Driving in Paris is a terrible, slow and costly experience.

[1] https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/fichier/1293788/alap368...

Thanks for that link, seems like I wasn’t careful enough while digging through the data. Your link does say that a third of the trips of Franciliens (who outnumber Parisians by a lot) are by car, but you are correct that when you restrict consideration from all trips to commutes only, car usage goes down.

And yes, driving in transit-heavy places like Paris or London is in fact often quite miserable. I probably overstated my case suggesting that maybe even most public transit users would prefer driving. However, in places outside of top metros like Paris or London, driving is relatively less painful, and public transit relatively more so (due to lower density of stops and lower frequency of schedule).

I grew up in an exurb of Warsaw, which is quite transit-heavy city, and a lot of people I knew commuted from the exurb to the suburb, which was halfway to the core of the whole metro. There was train line available, but driving was much preferable, because it was faster than commuter train, and was door-to-door, unlike the train. However, most people still took the train because driving every day was too expensive.

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