Other than making sure to be wearing your glasses if you are near sighted enough that your local licence requires it, glasses are an irrelevant factor. It's not like you are going into active combat duty...
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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I don't think people are "refusing", it's not like it's mandatory or anything. Nobody's trying to force you to drive a car.
I know I'll never be able to afford a car, they're incredibly expensive to buy and operate, and most of my travel is already covered by our excellent Trams, Buses and Trains, which can get me basically anywhere comfortably and quickly.
For the times I need something special I can ask someone for a lift, but that happens only a handful of times a year. A car would be a big, expensive, risky piece of equipment to just leave sat around for someone to steal...
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I drive but I hate it and try to do it as little as possible. I have never liked them. The exhaust and danger. Walking and riding a bike is enjoyable. Public transit allows you to do enjoyable things (suduko, play a video or video game). Its not till the last few decades that the environment came into thought around it for me and I realized how incredibly bad the direction of society went around it. I had biked and walked through high school but was traveling by car a lot after that but mostly as a passenger until I started working. Then in the 2000's I started biking and I had no idea why I had not been doing it before. Then I realized the infrastructure to make it safer and easier to do had not really been there before then for my city and its gotten way better since. Its like biking in the winter. I do more transit then and I thought I was the weather but I eventually realized I actually more just don't like biking in the dark which got me to do it more in terms of weekend day activities. That being said everyone should learn if they have the opportunity because there are still to many jobs where you might need it and its not hard to get. Should pick up a cdl if someone like work will cover the cost. Driving actually would not bother me as much if for a job as presumably there would be benefit (both my pay and whatever is getting accomplished for society) but just to get myself around when there are so many better options. Yuck.
Cars are expensive to buy and maintain. Also I don't think finding a parking spot and then parking is a fun activity. Also the metro can in many cases be faster, and I can use my phone while I'm in it.
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So, whatβs your reason to not drive a car
I simply don't need to, nor do I want to. I live in a country with good public transport - in a city with comparably well working public transport. There simply is no need for me. There never was.
I can get around the city either by train ("normal" trains and subways) or by bus. On weekends there is a 24 service for all trains and subways every 8-20 minutes (depending on line). There are also night busses connecting party areas with the nearest train stations and the inner city with the outskirts.
In the mornings and afternoons on weekdays there are additional commuter busses and trains and subways on most lines so the service is scheduled on a minute basis on some lines for some time during rush hours. The "worst" it gets is every 30 minutes in the middle of the night.
And if I don't want to take public transport I can always use my bike or my electric scooter. The bike lanes are not Netherlands quality, but they're okay. It's also fun to drive by traffic jam having my inner monologue making fun of alle the people waiting hours over hours on the streets π
The great thing is: Some time ago the government and the individual public transport providers of the cities and areas made a country-wide ticket for all public transport. So I can just hop on a bus in my city, drive to the train station, enter a regional train that goes to another city in another federal state, come out the train station and take the nearest bus I want without having to pay anything except the monthly fee for the ticket or checking if the ticket is valid in that area.
When I want to take longer trips further away I'll likely take a train on our highspeed railway network covering basically the whole country (not covered by the ticket I mentioned). It's notorious for being delayed or having issues, but my individual experience is much better than in the memes that exist.
I'm not allowed to learn to drive. Where I live, people drive like crazy and they follow some sort of "law of the jungle". Having ADHD doesn't help either.
I have a license. I enjoy driving as a leisure activity.
But I hate driving to work. I just take the shuttle and enjoy listening to my podcasts. We have a decent public transport system as well, so it helps.
A bit unrelated, but where I live the price of car school doubled in the past few years. It's the reason my girlfriend still hasn't started driving school yet. I could see that as an important factor. If I had to get my driving license for the current price, I might also reconsider. Cars are generally ludicrously expensive compared to everything else. Here you could pay roughly (converted) 120 bucks a year for public transit, or pay 80 monthly AT LEAST to drive (just gass and ensurance).
In Germany it's roughly >400β¬ per month to own and drive a car, with all costs included, and 50β¬ per month for nationwide public transit and regional trains
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Both public traffic and driving sounds pretty cheap to me. Insurance, road tax and fuel gets me on 200 bucks a month.. Public traffic takes way longer and is more expensive somehow... (Netherlands BTW)
Ey! I studied there for 2 years, awesome corner of the world :)
200/month that's 2400/year, now to me that sounds insane... That's twice my car expenses and even that's like double of what I pay for transit and food.
Here in Prague a yearly public transit ticket is 3650kΔ which is actually closer to 160$ (my bad) or roughly 150β¬ a year. Either way it's an order of magnitude less and then some. The kind of money I'll happily just throw out there. And inside Prague it is most definitely faster than by car. I dread driving here.
In rural areas the story is a little different, 9385kΔ (~380β¬) a year including Prague and the surrounding area, so I can visit my ma. I used to have this pass before my car. Still MUCH cheaper, but I admit, it's like twice as slow to go by rural busses compared to driving your own car.
Sadly don't know the transit pass prices in the Netherlands, cus I just biked everywhere (didn't have a car as a student and sure as hell wasn't gonna pay more than I had to at the time). But it's hard to imagine they'd be much more expensive.
You gotta include maintanance, repairs and depreciation too
I get sick in cars and busses, my parents have driver's licenses but they hate to drive so they avoid it, and I don't have the time, the money, or the need to get one. I live in a big city too so I can safely rely on trains.
Btw even if I'd get one, it's usually on the off chance that I need it and I'd still try to actively avoid driving whenever possible.
I don't want to get a license only to forget everything because I won't drive.
I see having a car as a necessity only. For me, it's only acceptable if public transport/bicycle is not an option. Unfortunately, the latter is almost never an option due to how everything is built car-centric, but the former very often is.
Also, I don't know anything about cars, I don't have to think where to park that huge piece of shit, I don't need to be my own driver, I don't need to do any maintenance, it's more ecological and even cheaper than just gas.
We have good public transport and I believe reading something on the way to be a better use of that time.
But you can read while behind the wheel of a Tesla π
You don't need an overpriced piece of junk for that. That's why american cars are plastered with useless safety instructions
You can technically read behind the wheel of any car ...
Whoa. Eye-opening.
hits and kills kid crossing the road because Tesla is a lying piece of shit and their "self driving" doesn't actually work
Oops.
At least you got a few pages in, right?
Depressed, broke, unemployed.
I do have a license but refuse to drive. I guess the main reasons would be:
- I get lost very easily and navigating while driving is much harder (no stopping, turning around etc)
- You can't entirely zone out or use that time to do something else like reading so if it's a daily commute this is just lost time
- Road infrastructure here is terrible. I actually find it much safer to drive at night because at least you can see the headlights of cars coming out of blind intersections
- Just like there are (many) places you can't go without a car, there are also places you can't go with a car because there is no parking, mainly the city center, which is the place I visit the most
You also can't drive drunk and I kinda like drinking.
Not wanting to learn or not wanting to drive?
Knowing how to drive is a useful skill that can come in handy (vacations, emergency) even if you don't do it regularly.
Refusing to drive daily - absolutely, for political, social and economic end ecological reasons. Everyone living in range of an acceptable public transport should refuse to drive. And those who are not should not stop pressuring and voting local politicians to implement one. It's 2024, there's no reason to depend on cars for everyday transportation.
Unless your rural. Public transport in my area could never work. Even in 2024
OK to the person that down voted me please tell me the most rural place you've visited and a plan to implement public transit? In my area house can be separated by up to 9 miles. It takes a school bus 3.5 hours to pick up and drop off before and after school. So how could public transit be implemented in any meaningful way? Let's say I worked in the city which is a 42 mile drive, now first I would need a minimum 2 hour ride from my house to the small town. Then after that I have to wait in some bus station, then its at least 1 hour before I get into the city so at a minimum I would have a 3 hour trip to and from work everyday. Now to make it worse it isn't a perfect world because lets say my bus from home to the station and the bus into the city are off from each other, now its 4-5 hours or transport one way everyday (8-10 total)........ Do you see how that couldn't work in any meaning full way? Now if you want to say bullet trains, or trains, that is ridiculously expensive to implement and grand scale, and just like in China would end up being mostly traveled only by elites so it wouldn't even be accessible to me.
Not to mention with only 800 people in a 50 mile radius the amount of taxes that each person would have to pay to build a public transit here would be insane.
Now if you want to go county wide, my county has a population density of 10 residents per square mile compared to the entirety of New York City which is 29,000 people per square mile.
Or even worse the country of Korea and my state are similarly sized, my entire state has a population density of 67 people per square mile, Korea has a population density of 1,000 people per square mile.
More populated areas make public transit plausible but, the US is mostly rural space and that is different from pretty much every other country.
I like to think of the people who downvote, but don't comment, just had a small accident in the user interface. They misclicked! Or swiped to hard!
Because obviously, if they had something to contribute that contradicted you, they'd leave a comment!
But, I want the discussion lol I woke up combative this morning
Ok.... Let me try.
Cars suck. Rural people who don't work on a farm should move to a city where they don't need a car. If they won't move, then they better get used to biking or walking.
Horses would be better for the environment because they are a sustainable solar organic ecosystem
Cars are better for the environment than horses (I say this as so.done who's family has a lot of horses lol)
If cow farts are bad then horse farts are bad, also it takes a lot of diesel to harvest the feed necessary for horses scale that up to the size needed for modern day populations and horses are way worse for the environment than cars.
Ps. I appreciate you humoring me lol
The USA sustained a huge horse population pre-engine. While quality of life was lower, the horse energy cycle was totally renewable.
The issue of industrial farming using oil, is a separate problem, and one that eventually will have to get addressed. Either through some innovative battery technology, or alternative fuel like hydrogen.
But even in pre-engine United States, horses weren't one for every person, they're relatively rare, because they're expensive to maintain, they eat a lot of food right, they require daily upkeep, veterinary care etc huge capital investment.
I think in the right green sustainable system, people would live close enough to where they work, where they wouldn't need to travel vast distances every day. So in the infotech economy, that means people work from home, no commute needed. Just food delivery which could be batched, buses, or even the rare horse-drawn cart for a neighborhood.
The rural population that commutes a distance to work, factories, manufacturing, those would be the hardest to adapt to a non-vehicle lifestyle. I'm not sure how you could do that without moving a lot of people.
One possible reason people don't like rural living, is if you got all the rural people to live in a city, it would raise city housing prices, and if they were invested in property that might be to their advantage.
I think the best way to solve the problem is to start offering better sustainable vehicle (this doesn't mean electric per semi) id like to see ammonia powered cars or better hydrogen cars, these are things that we generate everyday and have a clean output, also I would love to see car company's retrofitting old cars over building completely new cars as this would dramatically lower the environmental impact of car production, which is the highest envirmontal impact of cars.
The hate for the hydrogen fuel cycle in the green communities just confounds me. In my mind it combines the best of all worlds, excess solar wind capacity hydrolyzes water bam hydrogen, portable dense fuel. Solves a lot of our problems
I think it all comes down to them being lied to and told electric is the way.
Yeah. I think there are lots of vested interests making compelling rhetoric.
Rare earth metals cornered by China globally, so that battery technology is just a play by China to become an energy exporter
Oil and other historical hydrocarbons, controlled by the petro states
The one battery technology that looks kind of promising are sodium batteries, but I haven't seen enough data for me to make a real decision yet.
The engineers I talk with, more or less, agree that hydrogen is the future, if you can get production costs down. Part of the equation, is looking at market rates today, rather than future infrastructure. Right now there's more renewable capacity than can fit on the grid by two x in the US. That capacity could be used to generate hydrogen....
So when I do talk to people in the green spaces about hydrogen, I get the rhetoric about its more expensive today, so the cheapest way is to use hydrocarbons... Conveniently ignoring the vested interest, and the consumable nature of electric batteries which are net worse for the environment long term
Sorry all my points are broken up I think of them sporadically lol
Also a gas or diesel powered engk e can be converted to hydrogen meaning most current cars could be converted for less than the cost of buying a new electric car. This makes it more possible for people going forward.
And honestly batteries are too expensive today lol, I manage a farm and I couldn't imagine the electricity costs for charging all my tractors everyday, not to mention the need for more because they couldn't do the jobs as long as my diesel tractors could. We use farm diesel which is significantly cheaper than road diesel and its cheaper than charging multiple tractors
But, If I could just have a hydrogen tank and convert them all to hydrogen it would be no difference
One difference, you lose about 10% of the energy density with hydrogen, so you'd have to refuel a little bit more often. But I think that's close enough that it's good enough for most applications.
Yeah. I think most people are not aware of the energy requirements of industrial machinery. There's a huge difference between gliding a car across well maintained concrete with wheels, and moving literal tons of earth out of the way.
There is a reason we have not seen backhoes, tractors, bulldozers, moving to batteries. Batteries just are not energy dense enough
I'm confused by one thing, we should be seeing countries without domestic fossil fuels moving to hydrogen for their Air forces. Just as a domestic security issue. Unless they've been doing it really quietly, I've missed it. There is one demonstrator flight transatlantic flight from France to the USA using hydrogen fuel. But that's all I've seen. I would really expect China to be going 110% on hydrogen for their air force. Germany too for that matter. Any rich country without domestic oil, which is fair few of them
But, Russia has Domestic oil and China and Russia best buds.
This isn't co.etely inaccurate however the popation of the US has gone up dramatically and requires a different scale of horse feed production because we would have dramatically more horses for example
in 1910 which is when peak of horse population happened there where 27 million horses the works out to about 1horse per 4 people which would mean almost 100 million horses today
That is huge. But we can ignore the people living in urban areas, because they have the public transportation everybody so hot about.
So we're only looking at double the horses. I personally don't think horses are the solution here.
I've been to parts of the world where vehicles aren't common, and there is a rural population, and the way they deal with it is their life just sucks and they don't go anyplace and they just get by. Seems like a rude thing to force on people living in your own country.
end devil's advocating
I genuinely believe people are adaptable, and no matter what happens they're going to make a way to live. So if combustion engines go out of favor, we'll figure something out, if vehicles themselves are become impossible we'll figure something out. It's just going to be very painful process.
I think public transportation makes sense with high population densities, but when you're talking about very rarefied densities it actually makes sense to give the few people vehicles. I understand there's a lot of sentiment in the " f*** cars " community, but if you actually talk to them, and narrow it down, it turns out they like ambulances too. So there is a space between nobody can have a vehicle, and everybody has a vehicle.
But online, people get caught up in the rhetoric, the anger, and they just downvote without nuance.
People are crazy, but, I agree entirely, I also think that the government shouldn't make car owning illegal for anyone but, it should be up to individuals to figure out what to do with it. If a guy living downtown new York wants a car he should be able to buy it but, its up to him to figure out parking
Is both for me but I'm running out of options