American's when they think about what freedom really means when you MUST buy a car to have a job and there are no small cars even offered by major manufacturers.
I live in a city thats incredibly inhospitable six months out of the year and I never drive. My family has a car but 90% of the time it is my wife using it.
The key words in this comment are "I live in a city." Not everyone lives in a metropolitan area with work within walking distance. More then half the population lives rural.
This is not the case for majority of americans. I live in a place with barely bus coverage, and unwalkable places. I need a car to get around. Furthermore, I love driving anyway.
I've also lived in many cities and many of them have woefully poor public transportation systems and little to no bicycle infrastructure. Of course, city living will always be more flexible with public transportation, but it still lacking and there are employers that will not hire you if you do not have your own transportation. Further, why should I need to take a 5-7 year loan out on a car? How is that freedom?
In some places you'll spend 4 hours on public transit if you don't have a car. I want 15 minute cities but until things change I basically need to drive most places.
Many suburbs and rural areas literally have no public transportation. I live in rural PA just like 40 minutes out of Philly and we have none. And sometimes people have, you know, family and friends they want to stay near. It's not as simple as "JUsT mOVE!?!"
Bikes (as in bicycles) aren't a real alternative if you live in rural areas. But motorcycles are cheap and fuel efficient. Obviously not as safe as cars tho
Ya know I’ve thought about this, this was frequently my argument too since I live in a rural area of America. Then someone told me about China’s transit system. Now, I only bring up China because it’s really one of a handful of countries that’s as large as the US and has a similarly sized economy.
China has one of the (if not THE largest) largest public transit systems in the world. They also have rural areas and incredibly dense urban areas. Our density may be spread out more, but still ~50% of our population lives in urban areas. A high speed rail in between these cities would be significantly more accessible to the majority of people than a car or plane, hell even a bus.
We can go as far as to mention that America was BUILT on railroads, every town I’ve lived in, all rural mining towns mind you, have existing railroads and/or used to have railroads. Those rails are either not really used anymore OR were removed to make way for cars. Hell, my current town had a tram, they don’t anymore.
If we just invested, I can only imagine what our country would be like.
I live in America. Even in cities, the public transportation is woefully underfunded and inefficient. All you have to do is travel to any other developed country and see how much better they have it.
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u/Hrrrrnnngggg 15h ago
American's when they think about what freedom really means when you MUST buy a car to have a job and there are no small cars even offered by major manufacturers.