@Nelenese @tk

>they are if you're talking about pure distance by time, perhaps. but that's not including other factors. The biggest is traffic.

And public transportation has its own problems with delays and bad weather.

>There's also the fact that cars are completely unnecessary for most in most places as the world, as most cities are built to be walked around.

Most cities developed when all you could do is walk around. How many purely "walkable" cities have actually been designed and built from scratch?

Most planned communities in the U.S. are designed for how most people there want to actually live, not now some "walkability" obsessive wants them to live.

>Oh, your car can get you across town in just a few minutes? Well, the nearest grocery store, pub and work is just a stroll down a few blocks and that's all I need for a month

What if you don't want to limit yourself to grocery stores a few minutes walk, or to jobs within a few minutes walk? The care allows you to go to so many more stores and in bulk with children in tow in a way a "walkable" city can't, and expands job options that don't require you uproot your entire family constantly.

>And even then I, I could just simply use the tram If I need to go a longer distance. Most people aren't going to spend grands to get a vehicle that they'll only need a few times a year.

Plenty do because even if you discount the advantages of traveling long distances quickly, a car allows you privacy from strangers, allows you to buy in bulk to transport more than you can carry in your arms, which is practically nothing when you have multiple children with you, and also frees you from dependency on public transportation.

>false in almost every metric. the cost of buying a car, registering it, insuring it, maintaining, inspecting it, fueling it and paying tolls/fines that will inevitably occur.

It's honestly not that much, certainly for most people a small faction of their income. Once you've paid it off your only costs are insurance, gas, a modicum of maintenance (e.g. oil change), and a small registration fee. But you are forgetting that driving has benefits that public transportation can't replicate, including the freedom to travel where and when you want, the freedom to not be held to public transportation schedules, to deal with a large family, to transport stuff easily, the freedom to not be limited to where public transportation goes, and also privacy.

>Also, most of this stuff is subsided.

Oh and making car ownership prohibitively pricey and forcing people to use public transportation doesn't "subsidize" said public transportation? The only "subsidy" for cars is the freakin' road, and that only requires an initial build and light maintenance, mostly paid for by drivers via gas taxes.