There is a big difference between buying a car and doing literally every trip in a car because the only connection from the place you sleep to anywhere is six lane road with speeds exceeding 40mph.
Of course cars are convenient for some things. I live in a city where the majority of households has access to a car, but only a quarter of the trips (accounting for 40% of the traveled distance) are made by car. I still consider the city to be built very car-centric, but it's a wholly different world from what I experienced when visiting the US.
>There is a big difference between buying a car and doing literally every trip in a car because the only connection from the place you sleep to anywhere is six lane road with speeds exceeding 40mph.
This is a massive over-generalization that pretty much only applies to the suburbs that were built out in the 1950s and 1960s mostly in the southern half of the country. As those suburbs have densified over the decades (where allowed by law, so not the southwest) some of them have become pretty darn walk-able.
There is plenty of space for cars if you stack them. That's a rather successful model in Japanese cities. Free surface parking has an outsized negative impact on cities.
BTW, it's already kind of true that only the rich own cars, car ownership correlates very strongly with household income.
>BTW, it's already kind of true that only the rich own cars, car ownership correlates very strongly with household income.
Of course it correlates. Rich households can afford more cars per person and can indulge in specialized vehicles (e.g commuter car).
Rich families have a sedan for each commuting parent and maybe another less specialized car (e.g. minivan or 3-row SUV) that only sees weekend use. Poor families pile into a Saturn.
That the ability of the poor family to own and operate that Saturn confers a far greater standard of living jump than cars 2-N do for the rich family. It also has a much greater impact on the health of the broader economy.
To intentionally place monetary constraints on vehicle ownership would be unwise because you have to price out all the poor before you start making meaningful dents in the (relatively) wealthy professionals who commute across the inner suburbs and into urban environments.
I have a car, and was excited to get one when I moved out of NYC a couple years back.
But I hate using it for day-to-day tasks. For me, it's a machine that lets me take fun trips on the weekend, or go see family in their car-dependent towns and cities. If I want to go to a brewery, or stop by the post office, or shop for a few small items, or just go to a park, I would literally always rather do it on my bike or on foot. Driving around cities is miserable.
I have a car too. But when the opportunity exists, I will always prefer to go by bike. My kids ride bikes too, and my 7-year old son prefers to ride to his swimming lessons on his own bike. The car is only really for when we leave the city, or occasionally when we quickly need to go to the complete opposite end of the city and it's close to the motorway.
When given the choice between bad bike/walking infrastructure and cars, people prefer cars. But when you give them good infrastructure, many prefer bikes.
If I had a car, my yearly distance might have been similar. But that's because a car would give me most utility in areas that aren't handled by the "shared" car systems, i.e. longer trips outside of public transport system, especially with cargo that can't be reliably transported on a personal trip on train and the like.
And I'd probably still keep to taxis in the city, can't be arsed to drive :D
I find this is true nearly anywhere you go in the world, even in countries with excellent public transit (e.g. Korea, Japan, Taiwan). The moment people have the money to afford a car, they buy one. The only places I've seen that this is not the case are isolated, hyper-dense city states (Hong Kong and Singapore).
