In some cases, it's the hobby horse of people with barriers to driving who have studied the space and wish the US was more like it used to be and more like some other countries still are.
Sweden. I've never needed a car and live 50km from a city. The only people that need cars are those that literally live in the middle of the forest or need them for work.
Has never been a problem in either Blekinge or Kalmar... almost every village has a bus line. I specifically excluded "literally living in the woods" though.
A bus comes by my house every hour, sometimes more often. Why would you need more granularity than that? And if you really did, you could still rent a car, truck, hire a taxi or rideshare, or whatever...
You have an appointment at 10:00am, it’s 20mins away by car, 30mins away by bus and 90 minutes long.
To take the bus you get ready and wait by 9am. Get to the place at 9:30am, wait until 10:00am for the appointment, and hopefully it doesn’t run late and let’s you take the 12:00pm bus to get home by 12:30. There goes 4 hours for a 90 minute appointment. With a car this same round trip could be done in 2.5hours ish, and you could make other stops along the way.
Granularity is important, and some places are coincidentally structured to be more difficult to survive in, the poorer you are.
This is very contrived. I've never in 20 years had such a problem. Don't make appointments for yourself that are extremely inconvenient... and of course you could do other things while you're in town.
I have had such problems, and I live in a village 10 km from Prague. Gaps in bus schedules can be very uncomfortable, and you often get no choice scheduling the important appointments such as a CT scan; you will be happy to get any at all.
What? When you make an appointment for something you need to have done you cannot control the time you are going to be given for the appointment... It is unavoidable, and even more, the lower in the food chain you are the less control you have over it: you cannot call a more expensive but more convenient service, you cannot choose to be diagnosed by a private doctor instead of accepting the time given by the subsidized service, and so on, moving out is not possible because you can't pay to move your stuff. Poverty traps you in ways you will only understand once you experience it.
> When you make an appointment for something you need to have done you cannot control the time you are going to be given for the appointment...
I can. I'm not sure why you can't. Maybe because you're not in Sweden? If it's not an emergency, you have a choice of times. If it's an emergency, you can just go now. The only difficult case is with rare specialists which have a first-come-first-serve queue system, but you can still either let them know when you're available or just wait longer. It's trivial and free to reschedule.
> you cannot choose to be diagnosed by a private doctor instead of accepting the time given by the subsidized service, and so on, moving out is not possible because you can't pay to move your stuff
I've never needed a private doctor for anything, but this was never a problem for the private dentist or optometrist that I use. It's pretty affordable and flexible here, even for the poorest. If you really cant't afford it and could prove that, the kommun ("county") would just give you money to cover it anyway, including your moving expensive if you need to move for some reason.
> Poverty traps you in ways you will only understand once you experience it.
Grew up poor in the US and am currently in the second to lowest income bracket here due to disability.
Maybe you just aren't aware of how much better things can be.
I was talking of a bracket of poverty you only need 300km south of Sweden to experience. That is, still, not real poverty. And I mean countries with a good safety net and infrastructure even if not as good as in Sweden
Well in New York people commute this much distance. And even I lived about 25-30 miles from Washington DC without car. Is it applicable to whole USA that's the point.
I don't use public transit much -- I mostly walk everywhere -- and the OP only said The fact someone needs a car is itself a failure. There's no mention of public transit as a proposed solution.
Well anything could be called failure if alternatives and their pros/cons not discussed.
Good that you could walk everywhere. I can't, my knees hurt walking more than a mile or so. If I have no car and can't afford cab for everything, not sure how I would be better off.
Pedestrians are fine, cyclists have to admit they are doing it for their own personal pleasure at the time and expense of everyone else 99% of the time. I commuted by bicycle for many years because I lived somewhere that it was convenient and appropriate. I didn't impede traffic and delay other people.
Cheap motorbikes need to be more widely available and utilized by any one who is cycling out of necessity in areas not intended for it.
Bicycles should absolute be relegated to specialized infrastructure of which we should build more, but cyclists within regular vehicle traffic is mostly done for enjoyment and only inspires hatred and annoyance at bicycles in general which creates a feedback loop resulting in less support for bicycle infrastructure.
Having to slow down traffic and wait to pass a bicycle only to have them filter back to the front at the next red light and make everyone slow down and pass them again repeatedly is a real contributor to gridlock.
A bicycle takes up a lot less road space than a car, especially when it can smoothly filter through lanes. You know what contributes to gridlock? Too many cars on the road, that's what. Bicycles are not making traffic any worse.
Poor people historically were worse off in myriad ways. Wanting options for people is trying to throw out the bathwater, not the baby.
I'm not looking to take cars away from anyone. I'm just looking to restore access to some essentials that I grew up with and that I know can be real, even with cars remaining popular and common.
I'm not some extremist looking to eliminate cars. I'm not trying to insist that anyone who can drive and prefers to drive be denied that possibility.
