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Comment by riversflow | Hacker News Reader

> average annual ownership cost of $12000

Lots of people buy luxury cars, driving up that figure, so it hardly matters when we are talking about marginal utility for someone, shall we say, disadvantaged. Which I’m guessing you’ve never been?

My annual cost of ownership on my car is like $2500. I can sleep in my car too, and store clothes and food securely in it. Oh and get on demand heat & A/C access.

If you don’t have much, having a car is a lot.

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>Which I’m guessing you’ve never been?

i've been poor enough that i couldn't afford a car, so any "poor people need cars, not bikes and transit" argument feels a bit hollow to me.

and the immediate assumption that i'm talking from a place of privilege rather than experience is pretty rude, tbh.

In "tell me you're American without telling me you're American" we have "building urban sprawl and car dependency is great because you might lose your job to at-will employment and your home to medical bills and have no social safety nets and resort to living in your car and /then/ wouldn't it be shitty if you didn't have one?". Like, maybe there's a different ... way things could be?

It can go with the thread on Signal where $338k/year was not much money, but the cost of SMS messages and cellular phonecalls was outrageously expensive.

I never said urban sprawl was good, get outta here with that. Things could be different, but they aren’t. And it’s not like any of those things you mentioned are likely to change rapidly either. I speak to the present day reality, which is that cars serve a lot of people as a capital asset and they don’t have to cost 12k/year.

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