this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
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What is supposed to be surprising about this?
Everywhere I have lived, and everyone I have ever met had to take a car.
There are like maybe 15 places in the US with a functioning public transportation system.
Jobs are downtown but nobody make enough money to live downtown. Last time I tried it would have been > 75% my wages in rent only just to live in shit hole. I literally would not be able to feed myself.
The map actually does a good job of highlighting how population dense places exist without a lot of cars per person. New York and San Francisco are both shown and have green or yellow patches. Mass transit works so damn good but, like election maps, the actual region highlighted is empty space with a few people all doing the same things.
Not everybody lives in the US and in a lot of countries being able to go to work without a car is normal.
This is a map of the us
The real alternative to cars isn't public transit; it's walking and biking (with zoning density that facilitates that). Public transit is a 'nice to have' layer built on top afterward.
You're not going to live your life within biking distance.
And I say that as someone who's lived their entire life without owning a car, in one of the most densely-populated areas of Germany.
Public transit is an absolutely essential part of life, not a "nice to have".
Even in the most walkable of all cities, you're going to want to get to a lake for swimming, meet friends who live two towns over, transit to the airport, or simply have a reliable option to commute during a thunderstorm or when it's freezing.
In my household, we:
And that's in Atlanta, a city not exactly known for its bike network, let alone for its public transit.
That's called "wearing appropriate clothes." I have bike-commuted through rain so hard that I had to re-grease the bottom bracket afterward because that's how deep the puddles were. We had an "arctic blast" last week with -10 to -15 C wind chill (not that it matters on a bike -- there's always wind chill riding at speed); my wife and I were commuting and taking the kids to school by bike anyway. IDGAF.
In practice, the only thing that causes me not to bike is mechanical failure, and frankly, my bikes are more reliable than my cars.
You drive a couple times a month.
To live car-free, you'd need another option for those trips.
And telling people that visiting their parents or shopping at specialty stores are "wants", not "needs" is a non-starter.
The fact remains that the local bike infrastructure is much more valuable to me than a transit system with shitty last-mile connections is. The reason I can't get to Costco via MARTA, for instance, is that the nearest station dumps you out on a six-lane highway with no bike lane. (The bike infrastructure is decent near my house, but not out in the suburbs where the Costcos are.)
Transit is almost entirely useless unless you can walk or bike from the station to your actual destination. That makes ped/bike infrastructure a prerequisite for transit, not the other way around.
Absolutely not, having good rail infrastructure is an absolute bear necessity especially for the young, the elderly, and the disabled. But also people don't want to walk and bike everywhere, people (myself included) want to just jump on a train and relax.
How are you gonna get your stroller, walker, or wheelchair from the train station to your actual destination without a sidewalk?
I literally never said sidewalks aren't needed, you called public transport meanwhile a nice to have almost as if its a luxury and not a nesscesity. As if anyone could just walk everywhere or even want to.
I mean there are a lot of people that do go without cars. I went without a car for 8 years because I lived on a bus line and I worked on a bus or a train line depending on how far I had to go. The commute sucked sometimes was over 2 hours. There are times where I had to be on the bus at 4:30 in the morning to be to work at 6:30. And when you go 4 to 5 hours a day just commuting a car is very nice because that same drive was maybe 45 minutes between morning and afternoon. That gives you so much more time to do everything else. Having a functioning system doesn't mean much when you have to go so far.
I am not sure what your point is.
So you went without a car and spent 2 entire months of your year commuting in hours.
And that's...?
My point is if you're spending that much time commuting it's not really efficient nor does it work for most people's lives. Which is why most people opt to drive their car to and from work and pretty much anywhere else. I don't know what you're asking and I don't know how to explain that better than that to you. I thought it was pretty evident with making a statement that oftentimes commuting over mass transit is not the best option. No matter how efficient or get the bus system or chain system is. Hell the bus system in my area comes every 15 minutes and the train is usually every 5 to 10 minutes even on weekends. We have a large commuter train that comes anywhere from 15 minutes to 45 minutes depending on the time of day and whether or not it's a weekend. But when you're having to travel so many miles it's still takes time no matter what.