No Stupid Questions

I dislike other people and would prefer to not interact with them if I don't have to.

In the US, public transit is almost universally unavailable. If it is available, it's a massive luxury (or strictly necessary, like NYC).

A) I have ADHD, so timing is an issue.

B) If I have to go far enough to drive instead of walk, I am probably going out to get a significant amount of stuff. I can't shove a Costco shopping trip onto a bus, nor carry it to/from the bus.

C) The other reason for traveling far means that I am probably traveling a far bit away. There is no way the bus is faster when it's an hour drive without traffic.

D) I hate dealing with random people all the time. I get in my car, I put on my music or podcast, and/or talk with my wife, and just go.

My 45min drive would take 3 hours though five towns and would still need to drive the first quarter of the trip. Not mentioning getting dropped in to the homeless bedrooms, also known as the transportation center.

The biggest reason is my local public transportation. I live near a large city in northern West Virginia. The only bus that comes close to my address runs twice a day. Once at 7am and then again at 5pm. On top of that it would be a 20 minute walk, 10 minute bike ride, or 5 minute car ride to the bus stop. If I had to I could make it work but I can't get groceries after work because I would miss the last bus by the time I got off work and finished my shopping. This means I would have to go out on Saturday at 7am and do my shopping and then catch the bus back at 5. Add on top of that having two kids and it's just impossible. Unfortunately a lot of the US is like this. I wouldn't mind if I had to pay more and my local government put more effort into public transit but that seems to be low on their list of priorities.

I will say that electric bikes and self driving cars in the future may change everything for the better.

There is a substantial YouTube library of breakdowns on why we (usually North Americans) continually choose cars.

https://youtu.be/-cjfTG8DbwA

https://youtu.be/j4s9WDDRE2A

https://youtu.be/V3yXSD2O95E

https://youtu.be/n94-_yE4IeU

There are so many.

A car is superior in almost every way where I live.

-Cars are faster. They don't have to stop to pick up and drop off other passengers.

-Cars operate on your schedule. They leave when you leave.

-Cars take you directly to your final destination. No transfers.

-Cars can take you anywhere. Want to take a road trip, you can.

-Cars take cargo. On transit, you can only take what you can carry or can fit in a cart (if a cart is accepted and will fit).

-Cars allow you to set up for your comfort. You control climate control, you control the radio. You can even adjust the seat for comfort.

I live in a city with excellent public transport and use it a lot, but a car is total freedom. You can go exactly where you want, and stop anywhere on the way. Even with great public transport you can't beat it.

Public transit is so slow where I am. A trip in a car that would take an hour takes 2.5 hours with the bus/train.

I'm 23 and I really don't want to drive but I have to eventually. Public transit where I'm at is absolutely terrible and its holding me back from basically any typenof decent career.

If you live in a city with great transit, thats great for you. The sad reality is that in most places, public transit sucks donkey balls.

From a guy who takes the bus all the time.

Yes I prefer cars over buses, why? More freedom For getting around

If I take public transportation from my home to my job: I have to get on a train where it will stop several times due to the ‘TRaiN DisPatcHer’, then when I get off, I have to switch over to a bus…but hold up. Sometimes the bus SKIPS the stop so I have to wait another 15+ minutes and IF when I get in the bus, the traffic will be horrible. The bus will go 4 mph and I will have to endure elderly people with there bulky carts, children screaming, homeless people, people talking loudly through there phones, vaping, or obnoxious music. When I finally get out, an hour and a half will pass. I’m more tired, angry and my back hurts (because did I mention the chairs aren’t made for humans.) and I have to do this again when I return home.

So essentially, I think I’ll stick with my car.

Sometimes there's no direct public transportation route. I'm in NYC and to get to Queens I have to go through another borough. Or I could do a half hour drive.

Sometimes you just don't want to deal with the crowds. I have an invisible health issue which can make it hard to stand on a bus or train.

I take public transport whenever possible. But I'm not going to say it would be easy to give up cars.

Well it depends on where you live... Someone in Los Angeles can't rely on public transportation.

We can't sensibly talk about people's preferences without talking about the environment in which those preferences arise.

Here are some things that are true for most car drivers:

• The road starts right at your house. You don't have to go anywhere to get on it.
• Your car is right at your house whenever you want to use it. You never have to wait for it.
• Public transit requires that you pay up-front; the costs of using your car only bother you occasionally (e.g. fueling, maintenance, taxes that pay for roads).
• Businesses you want to visit are often required by law to provide parking for cars as part of commercial zoning.
• Cars are the dominant vehicle on the road; other vehicles such as bicycles, motorcycles, and scooters are in many ways treated as second-class citizens.
• Your employer didn't choose to locate close to transit, but they did build a parking lot.

1. Public transport is being actively sabotaged.
2. Car culture. It's a status symbol, a symbol of freedom, a masculinity enhancer, etc.
3. Lots of places are built around cars.

My dad drove a car to work everyday for the last 35 years while he could have driven the same distance with bicycle in 10 minutes. I have not been behind the wheel since I got my driver's license. I guess some people just love cars

In my current case, because my local public transport service is not the most convenient.

I live in a medium sized city were we only have bus service. We have many lines covering "almost" all the city, but each of the lines only has a relatively small number of buses available. This causes long delays between arrivals and makes combinations very difficult when needing to use more than one line. Waiting times of 40 minutes in the bus stops are not uncommon. By car, it takes me 15 minutes to go anywhere.

Another issue is with pricing: in our case buying individual tickets VS a monthly pass only makes sense when you do more than 40 trips every month. It literally costs me more to use the bus than to pay for gas.

In the past I lived in much bigger cities with underground service and plenty of buses available, and I barely used the car, and didn't even considered the pricing.

I'd guess because for a lot of us in the USA, public transportation is insufficient to meet our needs. I'd love to take a train from home to work, but there's no train line that's anywhere near my house. They're building one that'll go near my work, but it's not done yet. Busses are available, I suppose...but the time it'd take to get from home to work or back would be a lot longer than driving takes, even in heavy traffic, given that I'd have to transfer several times.

For longer trips, again, the infrastructure just isn't there. To visit my sister, for instance, requires taking a bus if I want to take the public transportation option. My (step)son takes the bus to go see his dad (who lives in the same city as my sister) since he doesn't like driving, and it takes a good 2 extra hours compared to driving. We should have train service, but no...Scott Fucking Walker killed the project back in 2010 when he got elected governor of Wisconsin.

If you live anywhere outside of the inner city, public transport gets slow really quick.

I live in San Francisco, so decent public transportation. But even then, it doesn't run 24 hours. If you want late night fast food, unless you live in NYC, you either need a car or get to pay absurd prices for door dash to deliver cold food.

I live 5 miles out from the city im WV. I would need to walk/bike up and down hills for 2 miles at a minimum just to get to a local transit stop.

Speaking from a US standpoint, the public transit sucks. The main issue where I'm at is lack of bus stops, and the bus is never on time. I'd have to walk down a highway (not interstate) to get to the bus stop, then it might not even arrive on time.

Cars are faster, most of the time. However, they still suck. Traffic in dense areas is heavy at almost all times of day where anyone is active. It's really a failure on the US government why people dont take public transit as much.

I think most covered it all why they use a car.

I just want to add that it all depends on where you live. I don't know what you mean by "most". I would say most in cities with good bike lanes like Paris and Amsterdam would say most take the bike, or cities with great public transport like Tokyo would say most take public transport. If you live in a place like USA where it is dangerous to walk and the public transport is almost none existing then most would take the car. I think New York has ok public transport. But I don't know, when I was there were sandy coming in so all of the subways were closed off.

Answer in Progress did a video on this yesterday

In the US, the state of public transit outside of a handful of (very expensive) cities is significantly slower and less reliable than taking a car. I would pin the reason for this on the shift of people outside of urban areas into suburban ones, and the lobbying power of the automotive industry to convince the government and citizens alike that cars were the right choice.

If public transit is the fastest option in the area, people do choose to take it! That's the case for me too in the past couple of cities I've lived in. But most cities have a long way to go before they get there.

Aside from just talking about this from a convenience angle, a message that might help explain the issues with car dependency is how much more it costs! People that are more hesitant about public services might be easier to convince with a cost-based argument. This is a great video explaining the actual cost of car ownership.

Speaking as someone who lives in the US, the reason why people “prefer” it is because it’s embedded into the culture that public transportation is for poor people- temporarily embarrassed millionaires and all that. And the reason for that cultural programming is because auto manufacturers and airlines have consistently lobbied against any improvements to public transportation from the very beginning, and even had a hand in specifically designing cities to require cars. China has bullet trains that could get us safely and comfortably from one side of the country to the other in 4 hours. Most EU countries have safe, cheap, accessible public transportation that EVERYONE uses.

At the end of the day, it’s just another capitalist ploy.

Where I live, if I took transit my twenty-ish minute commute would become an hour and thirteen minute commute according to Google maps.

Freedom: I can pick up my car and go where I want to go, when I want to go without worrying about time.

Subsistence: They demaded I have car and driver license, and a lot of jobs here ask for that.

1. Even if I sold my house and moved to a part of town where the bus runs, the bus would still take much longer than driving, resulting in even more wasted time out of my day
2. My job is in this city so I don’t want to move and find a new, probably less secure, job
3. Cities where one can reasonably go carless aren’t viable for me to live in because (a) too expensive, and (b) I’ve gotten too old to fall asleep among the banging and thumping and barking and stomping melody of apartment life
4. I don’t like having strangers coughing and sneezing on me.

For me it is easy choice. By car i need 10 minutes from home to work, by bus i need about 60 minutes. So in one day i save about 100 minutes.

I live near Atlanta, in a spot where taking a train anywhere means I have to drive at least 80% of the way to my destination, then park and buy a train ticket to ride the last 20%.

The nearest bus route to me also requires that I drive 15 minutes away, and it runs infrequently and only directly to midtown, with few if any stops along the way (and it lacks a dedicated bus lane, so it doesn't buy me any escape from the same traffic I'd hit while driving, except that I could read on the bus or something). When I still commuted for work, I didn't need to go to midtown. I needed to go to Buckhead, which would've required that I walk a considerable ways from the bus terminal (if I'm remembering right), then get on a train that would take another 30 minutes. Total one-way trip time would've been over 2 hours. Driving early in the morning got me there in 45 minutes.

Most of that is due to hardcore NIMBYism around me, with just a touch of racism tossed in (of the sort where majority-white suburbs that have Confederate memorabilia shops always shoot down any transit expansion or funding by saying "we don't want urban crime, that'll make us just like Atlanta"...which just so happens to be one of the more majority-black major cities in the US).

Still, what it means for me is that public transit is totally unfeasible for getting around the Atlanta area.

It also doesn't exist at all between metro areas. There's only Amtrak, a private company, which has routes so limited that to get from Atlanta to Savannah (both in the same state) by train I'd first have to route up through North Carolina and Virginia and then catch a different train back around. Atlanta and Savannah are 3ish hours away from each other by car. They're around 30hours apart by train. (This is not an exaggeration; you can plug this all into Amtrak's "Plan Your Trip" tool yourself).

I went to Boston recently for a work trip. Their public transit actually goes places, and Boston's particular form of sprawl seems to be the sort where there are smallish neighborhoods a few train stops away from their midtown. In that sort.of environment, I think I'd be riding the train more often for work commuting or "I don't need to carry anything around" purposes, but use-cases like grocery store trips still seem like something where the car as a "stuff transporter" still retains a lot of value.

My main mode of transportation is by bike (I’m Dutch so that’s not surprising). For most trips a bicycle is much faster than a car. I only use my car if need to go a long distance or if I need to transport something too big to transport by bike. I only need to fill up my car with gas once or twice a year.

We have very good public transport where I live, but it's so much easier to simply drive where you need to go instead of waiting at a bus stop for 15 minutes and then still need to walk for another 10 minutes to get where you needed to go. Yes, it's dumb and really bad for the environment, but it's easy. And more often than not, people prioritise stuff being easy rather than environmentally friendly.