this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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The man in the car has to be at work at 8AM. He has a 15-minute commute, so he can leave at 7:40 to give himself a bit of extra time to get there. At 12:30, he gets a call that his mother is in critical condition in the hospital. He leaves immediately, drives 30 minutes to the hospital the next town over, and is there to say his last goodbye before she passes away.
A man on the bus has to be at work at 8AM. The bus runs hourly with the scheduled pickup being x:20. Normally, it takes 30 minutes to reach his stop and another 10 minutes to walk, but sometimes the bus runs 10-15 minutes late, so he has to take the 6:20 bus to make sure he can get there on time. At 12:30, he gets a call that his mother is in critical condition in the hospital. The man pulls up Google Maps to find the quickest bus route to the hospital, runs to the bus stop in 5 minutes, and waits another 10 minutes for the bus to arrive. Unfortunately, this stop does not have a direct route to the hospital, so he must ride the bus for 10 minutes and make a connection to another bus at a different stop. On the way there, the first bus stops in front of a retirement community, and 10 elderly passengers spend a good 5 minutes fumbling through pocketbooks for bus fare because they don't understand how to use the newfangled reloadable transit cards. One elderly man gets violent because he has no change and the bus driver won't take a check, so he has to be removed from the bus. The man gets off at his first stop and sprints across the block to his next bus stop, but he realizes that he has unfortunately arrived late, and the second bus he had to catch just left. The bus runs hourly and this city is too small for there to be an abundance of taxis, so his options are either to wait an hour for the next bus or to call an Uber. The man opens his Uber app and, after 5 minutes, it matches him to a driver. The man waits around, watching the map as the Uber driver circles around the city for a bit, before eventually that driver drops and he is connected to a different driver. Another 5 minutes pass, the Uber driver arrives, and the man is now in a car on the way to the hospital. A 20-minute drive later, the man is now at the hospital, but his mother has just passed away before he had the chance to say goodbye.
This is why people drive.
Since we're making up stories...
A man in a place with bad public transit gets the call that his mother has been in a car accident and is being rushed to the hospital at 8AM. Since it's rush hour, he spends the next two hours stuck in gridlock traffic (bad traffic today, something about a big car accident...). He doesn't make it in time for her last goodbyes.
In contrast:
A man in a city with a good public transport goes to work easily and there is minimal traffic. His mom doesn't get hospitalized because there are fewer cars on the road and the streets are designed for pedestrian safety.
or
His mom gets to the hospital more quickly because there is less traffic. She survives.
or
He runs (or bikes) to the hospital within 20 minutes because he lives close to it in a dense neighborhood without endless sprawl caused by parking lots and cars.
or
He gets to the hospital quickly via an efficient transit route since there are many routes going to a hospital because... it's a hospital!
or
He calls a taxi that arrives quickly and gets him to the hospital in 1 hour because there is less traffic.
Also, in all these scenarios everyone in the society is wealthier and healthier due to spending less money on their cars and breathing less pollution. They all get to work quicker because of less traffic congestion.
This is why people want better public transit.
Way to miss the point.
Nowhere in my post did I mention traffic. Traffic is not a concern in my area.
Emissions are a non-problem as EVs become more common.
The scenario involves a need to get out of your city and into another ASAP. How dense your city is irrelevant if the place you need to go is somewhere else.
The point of the scenario is about balance of time in life, and how to immediately get somewhere in an emergency. Regardless of whether the mother lives or dies in this scenario, is a loved one in the hospital ever not an emergency? Would anyone in the real world ever think "Well I'm sure the ambulance got there quick enough, no need to rush"?
Point 2: actually a very significant portion of pollution from cars are micropollutants from tires and not related to emissions Point 3: trains. Point 4: if we're considering random scenarios: "oh no my car broke down" is... much more common than "my loved one is in the hospital". Good public transport is only marginally slower, and is a more pleasant experience as a whole.
Most of these are from you never having had actually good public transport, it seems to me.
I lived in China, which supposedly has good public transport. I've spent a bit in Japan as well, which supposedly has god-tier public transport. Leagues above the rest of the world I've visited, but still less than ideal in a number of ways.
I've never felt more trapped than I did during the years I spent not owning a car. You're stuck to transit schedules. You can't stay out too late or all of the lines stop running and you end up having to walk home in the dark for miles or sleep on a park bench until dawn. There's a severe lack of options to visit anywhere interesting outside of the city using public transit, so your entire world may as well be nothing but bleak urban sprawl. And it's one thing to deal with trains and buses when you're living on schedule, but when unexpected scenarios happen, you just get fucked.
Except you don't "just get fucked" in those unexpected scenarios because taxis and ubers still exist. Most car owners pay over $1000/month in total cost of ownership, so you'd have plenty of budget for emergency taxis/ubers if you stop owning a car.
The thing is, you're technically correct in your claim that transit time and convenience are the reasons "why people drive". Those are the pros of driving, from the perspective of the individual making the decision to drive rather than use transit. However, in order to understand why we should de-prioritize cars in favor of other forms of transit, we must also consider the cons of driving for the individual (excessive cost, mental fatigue of focusing on driving, elevated risk of bodily harm, etc.) as well as the harms that driving causes to others (pedestrian fatalities, urban sprawl, marginalization of public transport, etc.)
After all, flying a helicopter would be even faster than driving a car, but nobody is going around implying that we should all fly helicopters everywhere just in case we need to rush to our mother's side when she's on her deathbed.
edit: I noticed in another comment you said that taxis don't exist in your city and you avoid using uber out of principle due to their questionable ethics. I would hope that since you are concerned about ethics you would see that car-centric infrastructure has marginalized many people and neighbourhoods, far more than an occasional uber ride ever has. Buying a car and using it daily to avoid the ethical implications of an emergency uber ride once in a while is cutting off your nose to spite your face.