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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

This is an extremely privileged viewpoint. Even in Tokyo, people in the bottom half of the income distribution do not live close enough to popular transit lines to be as mobile as someone with a beater car in Dallas. They spend a lot more time commuting (and they can’t “just do some work on the train” because they have real jobs). Even in Tokyo, their commutes are crowded, they’re subject to the weather.

Being tied to transit lines—again, because even in Tokyo transit isn’t as convenient as point-to-point car travel—limits where people can look for jobs. That makes it a poverty trap because people can’t easily find jobs in different areas. And it makes having a family and kids much more logistically complicated. The most transit-dependent cities have abysmal birth rates.

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It's only privileged because I'm living in a city that has actively prioritised other modes of transport.

I invite you to compare Orlando and Malmo.

If you have the opportunity to visit both, I would recommend it. They have the same population size (actually, Malmo has more people in it, but, close enough) yet in one it's impossible to get across the street without a car, even to go to the grocery store, and the other has entire portions of the city where cars aren't even able to go. -- Yet everyone manages to get around, and most people would consider it very convenient to do so.

Why are you comparing the cities based on whether you can get around “without a car?” In America, even the vast majority of the poorest people have a car. 96% of occupied housing units in Osceola County (where Orlando sits) have a car. American cities are optimized for that.

It’s almost certainly more convenient to get around Orlando by driving (as long as you aren’t going to Disney) than taking transit in Malmo. There is no city in the world where transit is more convenient and flexible than driving. I visit Tokyo once or twice a year, and even in Tokyo it’s usually more convenient to take an Uber than to take the train. And you’re not going to do better than Tokyo in terms of transit.

You can see this in the statistics. The average commute time of someone in the greater Tokyo area is 1 hour and 40 minutes round trip, or about 50 minutes one way: https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/average-work-commu.... The average commute time for someone in Dallas County is under 30 minutes one way: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B080ACS048113. And the American commute is by yourself in a climate controlled car, instead of a crowded (even if clean and punctual) train.

The reason I’m talking about my city in particular is because everybody (even the poorest) can get around without a car and I’m not talking about just public transport.

It’s very liberating, even for children to be able to get around if not everything requires the use of a car.

I am aware that Orlando has optimised itself in a certain way, which makes it impossible to be any other way. That means being mildly convenient requires a complete overhaul of the whole system just for a small select group of people which is obviously unfavourable.

One of the major benefits of not being car dependent in particular is that there are more options not just public transport, you can get around by car- but there is also cycling, E-scooters, walking is more convenient, and of course there are buses trains and taxis. There’s even a bike rental scheme which covers the entire city and is so cheap as to be effectively free ($20 per year). With that in mind I find the argumentation that poor people have a worse time to be disingenuous- owning a car is the second largest expense most people have.

Malmo by the way is one of the poorest cities of the large cities in Sweden. I don’t know what the GDP per capita is compared to Orlando, but I’m not going to think that it’s much different to be perfectly honest with you.

Are you saying that it’s faster to get around Malmo on transit than in a car? I can see that being true for some route, but it’s unlikely unless you’re wealthy enough to live and work very close to transit stations.

When I lived in New York I did have a commute where transit was faster than driving. But it was like Mad Men—I went from my fancy high rise right next to the train station to my fancy law firm right next to another train station. That was a lovely commute, even compared to driving in the suburbs. But most people in New York (or Tokyo) cannot afford to live so close to popular transit lines.

> With that in mind I find the argumentation that poor people have a worse time to be disingenuous- owning a car is the second largest expense most people have.

That’s what we call “penny wise and pound foolish.” Cars is capital equipment, and get handed down through families. Like any capital equipment, they depreciate and require maintenance. But they also enable people to earn money. I have relatively poor in laws: my wife’s grandmother raised four kids as a waitress, and her husband did hunting and odd jobs. Cars, which they carefully pass down through families, enable them to move around for better jobs and housing. When my father in law lost his job, he moved in with his mom and found various jobs in a 60 mile radius. If you look at the places in the U.S. with good transit, the poor there are structurally poor. They can’t just go to where the jobs are—they are stuck going to where the train lines go. It becomes a trap that creates generational poverty.

> Are you saying that it’s faster to get around Malmo on transit than in a car?

It’s true for almost all journeys. Cycling is the fastest in almost all circumstances. Especially if you include parking.

If I need to work to earn a living and working remotely in Europe for an American company were not an option (for some strange reason) I'd rather live in Orlando.

I admit that Europe tends to be a nicer place to live for those who have enough savings that they do not need to work and for those too sick to work.

I don't speak Swedish and I'm perfectly fine living and working here. The level of English speaking in Malmö often exceeds the ability to speak English in places in the UK. Ironically.

Why would you rather live in Orlando?

I presume you've been to both places.

>I don't speak Swedish and I'm perfectly fine living and working here. The level of English speaking in Malmö often exceeds the ability to speak English in places in the UK.

That is interesting. I should explain that I edited out the part of my comment about language (because it is not relevant to my point).

I haven't been to Malmo, but I doubt that visiting a place for a short time tells a person much about what it is like to live and work there. I've read hundreds of comments from people who have lived and worked in both the US and Europe. I believe that life in Europe tends to be more orderly and pleasant than life in the US. A good example of "more orderly" is that deaths from automobile accidents are several times higher in the US than they are in most places in Europe -- and not just because Americans spend more time in cars: in the US, deaths per mile of travel in automobiles are several times higher.

>Why would you rather live in Orlando?

Because income is a massive factor in quality of life, and for any level of income, it is significantly easier to earn that level of income in the US than in Europe provided that the person in question is healthy enough to hold a job.

I'm curious whether you work remotely for a non-European organization or are self-employed at the kind of job that can be done anywhere with decent internet connectivity.

I used to work here: https://www.massive.se - Owned by Ubisoft, kinda international, 800 or so employees in Malmö

Then I worked here: https://www.sharkmob.com - Now owned by Tencent, not very international though, not really spidered into Tencent. About 350~ employees in Malmö.

After that I worked here: https://www.rennsport.gg - German company, where it was a remote company but I build an onsite office or 20 persons in Malmö. That was the largest office in the company.

Now I work for a Swedish company.

There's also a bunch of companies like ESS (European Spallation Source)[0] in Lund, Verisure and Axis communications.

[0]: https://ess.eu

The cycle of car costs, repairs, and impacts of breakdowns for under-privileged people is a pretty serious poverty trap in places that have no other options. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/04/us/trump-tariffs-used-car...

Limited mobility from public transit is a much bigger poverty trap. In Oregon, where my in laws are, you can get tons of odd jobs to scrape by within a 60-minute driving radius. Even in a place with great transit, like Tokyo, you’re pretty limited to where you can go on transit in 60 minutes.

Isn't America literally the country with longest average and median commutes to work? Like, that was always an American thing - the long commute.

Also, you cant do work in car either. You have to drive and actually pay attention. You cant (or should not) just listen to podcast or loosing yourself in the music. You dont get health benefits of walking a bit or of popping int the store on the way to buy food quickly.

My point here is that if public transport and city are semi reasonably organized, the car has to be actually seriously faster to be worth it.

>America literally the country with longest average and median commutes to work? Like, that was always an American thing - the long commute.

Miles? probably.

Time, lower than a lot of europe IIRC.

The statistics and analysis I have seen were literally about time, not miles. It was literally "americans spend more time commuting".

I hate being a filthy linkposter but I think you're wrong

https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-trans...

I just google imaged it and all the graphs say about the same thing.

From my understanding this seems to include all forms of transportation (which has value on its own I guess), but it would be more interesting to see car only.

Americans have shorter commutes: https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/comments/1bg82kg/amer...

Driving is much more comfortable than taking transit. You’re by yourself and you always have a seat. Anywhere that has transit good enough where it’s frequent and reliable is also a place where you’re probably standing during your commute.

That beater car in Dallas is also a financial millstone around its owners neck, and odds are, he's already living hand to mouth, and has zero redundancy for it.

If that weren't so often the case, people wouldn't lose their shit whenever gas goes up 50 cents/gallon.

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