That's just not true, cars are extremely useful in every single city and people only choose to forgo them when the city makes them too expensive or difficult to keep and use. If you have a pros vs cons list, it's not a lack of pros that causes people to stop using cars it's an overabundance of cons in every single case I know of.
> people only choose to forgo them when the city makes them too expensive or difficult to keep and use
I have friends who chose to move into cities and sold their cars in the process. The pros of the cities outweighed the pros of car ownership for them. They also don't have to spend money on car maintenance, insurance, or gas. They can move around the city fine with public transit and ride sharing. They rent cars to make long trips.
Absolute statements rarely are absolute, particularly when the motivations and preferences of individuals are in the mix.
I don't think this is true, cars truly only make sense in places where every single detail is built to accommodate cars. In an absolute sense, public transit is wildly more efficient.
The reason we don't really see this is that in the US 99% of cities are built exclusively for cars. Of those that have transit, those are very obviously an afterthought.
For NYC, it's not that having a car sucks. It's that the city isn't built for them. So you're going to be stuck in traffic.
Prior to congestion pricing, a lot of people were driving because they're, well, stupid. Often it's faster to literally walk alongside the cars than be in them, because that's how severe the traffic was/is in lower Manhattan. But they didn't want to take the train for whatever reason, so they drove instead. And wasted time and money.
At the end of the day, cars take up way more space, and they're wildly expensive. Many of the cost of cars are actually subsidized, not the other way around. Consider free parking - that parking spot actually costs thousands of dollars a year. But drivers aren't paying it.
In regards to congestion, that costs money. It's not free to have thousands of cars essentially idling for hours of the day. But that's a cost everyone pays - even though most people commute by subway. That's a problem. That's going to break a lot of incentives.
> cars are extremely useful in every single city and people only choose to forgo them when the city makes them too expensive or difficult to keep and use
I happily take the train and ferry in New York over a car. For some journeys, e.g. into Long Island with a group, renting a car would actually be cheaper.
If you haven’t spent any time not driving, it’s hard to imagine the luxury going car-free brings. Not the least of which is the ridiculous amount of privacy and law-enforcement interference we tolerate for drivers.
It is genuinely such a luxury to spend zero minutes of your day looking for parking, remembering where you parked, memorizing parking regulations, planning out the parking situation around a place you might want to go… All of that feels so silly when you have to go back to it after living without a car for a while.
The math doesn't math when the city grows around car-centric design. All the extra space taken up to separate people from unpleasant high-speed roadways, all the huge parking lots, the extremely-wide roads, it pushes travel times up so much that between the extra distance between everything, and the time spent earning money to pay hundreds a month to have a car (insurance, depreciation, maintenance, gas) ends up significantly exceeding the benefits of car ownership.
They're wildly nice if only a few people have them. The more do, and the more parts of a city cater to cars, the worse they get, even as they also become totally necessary (so, not having them also gets far, far worse, even untenable).
I was introduced to this notion reading an analysis from some French social-philosopher and was initially like "that... can't be right, surely?" so ran conservative numbers on my own situation, with an average-or-better commute distance for my city, a cheap paid-off car, and nearly double median individual income for my city, and... yep, dude was right, living in a city designed around cars was costing me time, not saving it. It'd be a ton worse for people with worse commutes and lower-earning jobs. They were getting totally screwed on the deal.
was it Jacques Ellul? He made a real impact on me, his analysis that people adapt to the machine rather than the other way around, even will internalize its value system. In modern society, "efficiency" remains the sole aspiration, which is a technological value, not a human one. fwiw - don't recall if he wrote a lot about cars though.
i suppose cars are “extremely useful” in suburbs and rural neighborhoods. And if public transportation is lacking (if driving is faster).
In a city, a carshare is much more practical in my opinion. No need to stress about street parking and getting tickets on days that they clean the street. Or wasting 10 minutes finding parking. Or worrying about car maintenance. Or spending a few grand annually on car insurance, maintenance, and gas.
All this worry for what? A weekend getaway twice a month? Buying in bulk once a month?
