What are you talking about? I live in Stockholm, it's Saturday, 23:00, and I can be in the next city over, Uppsala, 70km away, at 0:04, using public transport.

I takes 28 minutes to a random spot I just picked on the other end of the city, 10km away.

Stockholm has 100 subway stations alone, and probably over 1000 bus stops. I have no idea why you should say that is "a handful".

I can also bike everywhere, of course. Usually way faster than the car over medium distances.

When I was living in Tokyo, it was theoretically possible to get from where I lived to the center of the most popular downtown hangout spot in 20 minutes by train. In reality, though, you had to tack on between 5 and 30 minutes of random delays depending on the train schedules and what time it was.

If you're sitting in your living room, and decide "I want to go to $place, it's a 45 minute trip if I leave now and a 20 minute trip if I leave in an hour" I think you could make an argument either way.

Within downtown Tokyo, you can often beat the train by just walking briskly from point to point, and almost always beat it by riding a bike.

Maybe the guy above you is focusing entirely on those worst case walking/schedule-based delays and you're focusing entirely on the best case.

You must live in the suburbs. Even in slow transit San Francisco, taking the bus is always faster, never mind Paris.that’s not counting we’ll never meet our climate goals with suburbs.

> that’s not counting we’ll never meet our climate goals with suburbs.

Nonsense. It's perfectly possible for us to achieve clean energy and clean transport.

“RMI analysis indicates that the United States must reduce VMT by 20 percent before the end of the decade to limit warming to 1.5°C—and this remains true even under ambitious EV adoption scenarios.”

https://rmi.org/our-driving-habits-must-be-part-of-the-clima...

Nonsense.

The source article is discussing, without sharing their supporting evidence, the transition to EVs. If 100% of vehicle miles were driven by EVs charged with clean energy there would be no need to reduce mileage. We're talking about city design for the next hundred years. Not the transition to EVs over the next 5 to 20 years.

Clean energy and clean transportation is possible. Some might even say it's inevitable. Once achieved there is no existential requirement to reduce vehicle miles.

Have you ever driven in London? Have you used public transport in London? Moving around is much more efficient using public transport. The underground + a couple of buses take you around everywhere faster than a car.

You know you can just rent a car, right? If you don't use it 5 days out of 7, it's much, much cheaper to rent one.

Renting a car (in the US) can cost $40/day.[a] That’s how much gas costs me in a week or so. It’s not cheaper to rent.

[a]: Don’t forget the $150-300 deposit (that takes a week to disappear). And also being pressured to pay for their $15/day insurance. Rental companies are expensive

The cost of a car isn't just gas, you have to amortize the cost of the car depreciating, the maintenance, registration, etc. For a quick example, https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/total-co... has a monthly cost of 690 using average (used) values and 0 dollars for gas. So you can drive 17 days a month and still come out ahead renting. There are services like zipcar, or [hourcar](https://hourcar.org/individual/) that make renting significantly more convenient, though the costs are marginally higher if all of your trips are full day.

I've done this calculation multiple times in my life, and because I mostly get around via bike (perks of living in college towns which have to invest in non-car infrastructure), its never been worth buying a car.

I spent $4205 on car expenses last year, not including fuel (since I'd pay fuel separately on a rental car as well). That's for two cars (spouse & I), so I'll say $2100 per car.

The cheapest rental car I could find (searched kayak.com) is $72/day.

So, renting could only be cheaper if I used a car less than 2100/72 = 29 days per year.

But that's not counting cost or inconvenience/time of getting and returning that rental car. The few times I'd had to rent a car I've had to get an Uber ride to get to the rental place and then back home, so that adds another $20 or so to the rental.

> Renting a car (in the US) can cost $40/day.

I just looked up (on kayak.com) the cheapest rental car I could get tomorrow and it is $72/day.

> it's much, much cheaper to rent one

It’s much, much more convenient to be able to go where I want when I want.

Hiking, skiing, my friend’s cabin, the lake house, my friends in the suburbs, Costco, that speciality root beer store I like. I don’t even need to plan my trip. I can go whenever I want.

Yes you can rent a car to do those things. But it is indisputably friction. My experience is that my friends who don’t have cars are subsidized by those who do. Either that or you don’t see that friend because public transit makes it too inconvenient.

Public transit is not slow and shitty in The Netherlands.

You mean on days other than those days when no trains run whatsoever?[1]

[1] Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today (ns.nl)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30901009