I'm really sick of city-dwellers telling the rest of us how to live.

Yes, many city-dwellers can live without a car. But not everyone lives in a city, or has any desire to live in a city (especially during a time of decline and perpetual crisis of one form or another)

Those who wage such vitriolic war on the car rarely consider small towns and rural areas, where public transport isn't efficient/practical, where no car often means no job.

isn't it about "cities" and "urban design" though? so does not apply elsewhere. Not sure why you are feeling this way in this thread.

Living outside a city doesn't mean you get to roar through it in your SUV and park a step away from your destination. A city has a lot of important services, but it is also a place where people live, and those people get to make choices that put their community first.

But while we're on the topic of rural areas having terrible public transportation, I think that's a really important one. Switzerland has a smaller rural-urban divide (which is really where this whole "war on cars" thing comes in), in part because it is actually practical to move between rural and urban spaces on a regular basis. That isn't because the cities are more driveable, or because they build a highway through Bern: it's because they invested in public transit that actually works. This kind of talk benefits everyone.

Living in a city doesn't mean you should try to get suburban workers back in the office to sustain your city.

There are parking paces on the corners. (They cut the corners so it's not completely square)

It's 1.35m people globally per year and millions more with life altering injuries.

But how many lives are saved each year by the internal combustion engine (or it's electric successors)?

Not just emergency services - more mundane things like, getting food and care to the elderly, getting workers and tools where they need to be to maintain infrastructure, produce food, and much more.

You could say the same for the horse when the transition to cars happened. We can't just think of the advantages we have now, but what we could get in a more practical system. All of the things you describe could improve in an environment that not based on the car model, but because we live with the latter our outlook is dominated by it and we can't conceive of the alternative anymore than a regular non-Jules Verne citizen in the 1880s can visualize massive clover highway connectors

Then come up with a better way to get people where they need to go.

Making things worse for car owners isn't the right strategy.

And BTW, public transport is not good enough, not even in places like NY, you need something better.

Oh my god, is this these even serious? NY transit is bad so all public transit is bad. Holy s*t fellow Americans, LEAVE THE COUNTRY FOR A FEW DAYS.

I just freaking can NOT. Cognitive dissonance, self delusional and denial, what is it? Whatever it takes to avoid realizing how utterly stupid so many day-to-day aspects of American life are due to larger decisions about social welfare, including basic public transit.

I don't know what this guy is talking about. Subway in NYC has some annoyances but works pretty well most of the time.

It is quite slow compared to other cities with metro I visited. I think mainly due to too many stops. On some parts I got impression than metro platforms take more than 30% of the line fragment which is ridiculous.

Yeah it can depend. Especially on weekends. Sometimes it just makes sense to take get a ride.

One city, and it's not even that good.

Shout out, never seen a +13 flagged into oblivion, I'll take that as a compliment.

Uhm, Barcelona has superb public transport. I would take train and metro in Barcelona over driving in...anywhere because driving in cities sucks.

Europe figured this out a generation or two ago. Visit Barcelona or Amsterdam or Copenhagen. Also, I live in NY and public transit here is certainly good enough. Where did you get the idea it is not?

Public transport seems to be top notch in Europe.

Walking is also nice for shorter distances. Or bikes.

NY's public transit is not great. It works, but it's dirty, slow and unreliable.

I use it constantly, never notice the dirtiness (dirty compared to what?), rarely have to deal with late trains and it moves a hell of a lot faster than cars a lot of the time. There's plenty of routes where I don't even bother looking at driving directions/Uber because I know that no car can possibly beat the train.

I'd guess you've lived in NY for a long time and have forgotten (or never had to suffer through) how bad public transit is in most US cities.

NYC subway system is dirty, lol. I love it, but it's old and dirty. (I live part time in Barcelona and the rest of the time here in NYC. The BCN Metro is very clean by comparison.

> Then come up with a better way to get people where they need to go.

It's called walking, biking, transit. These things all work. If you don't wanna walk a couple blocks to your car, sorry but that's not worth killing the planet and your neighbors. Cars have SO many externalities: air pollution that affects climate change, pollution that makes the air less breathable, noise, danger to others, takes up far more space leaving less room for other modes, etc.