This is seemingly changing in UK - younger generations increasingly don't own a private vehicle, due to a whole host of factors including the fact there simply isn't nearly as many affordable cars on the UK market as there was say 20 years ago, as well as the cost of fuel/insurance. It will be interesting to see if trends reverse once cheap EVs inevitably become a thing over the next decade - even entry level EVs are generally significantly more expensive than entry level gas cars used to be in the UK for the time being.
We are tiny though, mostly high density and had a great rail inhertence. Given where we could be, I think we are car obsessed.
Note also that car use and the right to use residential streets as commuter rat runs
is becoming bound up with stupid culture war politics.
For all the chatter on HN, Europeans in general drive quite a lot. It's fascinating to hear people rail against cars here, and then step back out into meatspace. I just chuckle at the contrast between the dreamers on Reddit/HN and folks in the real world.
I just got back from a road trip in France and the UK and it's funny how much of the reddit-tier discourse is correct yet simultaneously so wrong. There are plenty of rural towns where everyone owns cars. There are highways, strip malls, large shopping centers with massive parking lots, and populated areas with bus service at best. The difference is the scale and the US lands embarrassingly far on one side of it. Even in the smallest rural towns in France we visited, we could hop on regional rail to the nearest large metro area.
>> President Eisenhower is widely regarded as the catalyst for the IHS. His motivations for a highway network stemmed from three events: his assignment as a military observer to the First Transcontinental Motor Convoy, his experience in World War II where he observed the efficiencies of the German autobahn, and the Soviet Union's 1953 detonation of the hydrogen bomb, which instigated a fear that insufficient roads would keep Americans from being able to escape a nuclear disaster.
