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> Or perhaps you wish to have a single family home with a yard, but work for a company with an office presence downtown, and need to take your kid to daycare on the way to work. You could do that on mass transit, but would spend less time if you could plot your own course and just go. Your ideal situation may not need a car, but it's not a universal situation.

These are definitely preferences that exist, yeah. How do you propose we account for the externalities created by executing on these preferences?

Yeah, but if you make large enough buys in a dense city, getting items delivered is a good option. It's generally much cheaper than in sprawling areas, since a single small delivery truck can probably make 3-4 stops in the same neighborhood.

> Because that scenario isn't universal, and while you can't think of a reason, others can.

Thank you very much for this island of sanity inside this topic’s sea of bewilderment. These comment sections always seem to end with someone up asking: “How could anyone like things I don’t like??” and then a bunch of commenters just shake their heads and conclude “Those poor souls, they don’t know how they are suffering.”

I’m ambivalent about cars. I could take ‘em or leave ‘em. What I won’t compromise on is I will never voluntarily live in a dense urban environment or really any structure with shared walls on shared property, including apartments, condos, townhomes, anything like that. Since affordable detached single family homes can’t really be found right next to the places I need to go, like work and shopping, I am forced to have a car. Or more accurately, my strong preference in housing type necessitates a car.

It’s not that I want my car and like to drive 15 minutes to shopping. My car is a pain in the ass that’s always broken down and driving is dangerous. My car is the price I pay to avoid living in a city.

EDIT: And to be perfectly clear: I am not against cities building themselves toward car-freeness. I support citydwellers making their cities bikeable and walkable! I just don’t want to live there.

I appreciate your comment as well! I feel like I'm off on Preference Island sometimes, so it's good to know I'm not.

I particularly appreciate the point you make about prioritization. When I left school and started working, I lived in an apartment downtown, walked to work, hung out afterward at bars and stuff, and loved it. At that point in my life, I didn't need a car, and was fine. I'm older now. I've lived in an apartment, a townhouse with shared walls, and now a single family home. I've loved every place I've lived because, at the time, it was the right place for me. I want a yard for my dog to run in and my kid to play in, and like you, I wish to prioritize my living structure above all else. Unlike you, I do like my car. The beauty is we're both adults who know how to prioritize our lives and make choices that let us do what we want, and similarly let others live their lives.

Not to be a downer, I do sympathize with all you wrote here. But its not a simple as, people have different preferences and we should let everyone do what suits them. Cars have major externalities that harm the environment and affects the well-being of others.

Also extremely rigid ideologies and a Pol-Pot-like approach to reality (as if in: "If someone does something that I don't like, he should not be allowed to do it") have huge externalities.

Well it seems like we’ve hit Godwin’s law already, so this is probably a good point to stop.

Absolutely, it's a trade-off. In many parts of the country, people cannot make this trade-off though. it's cars or nothing, even in the more "urban" zones with condos, apartments, etc...

> EDIT: And to be perfectly clear: I am not against cities building themselves toward car-freeness. I support citydwellers making their cities bikeable and walkable! I just don’t want to live there.

Are you willing to pay to account for the externalities that your preferences create? If so, I'm all for it, but let's be real: most folks aren't.