this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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Trains only travel along previously laid rails, at specific times. Plus, you'll need to rent a car at the other end to get anywhere. Better to take your own car and have personalized comfort the whole way. Also, yes, it does sound miserable. But if you're in a car, turn up the heater, turn on the radio or your favorite music, and just vibe while driving safely.
But if the cities were built for people rather than cars, you wouldn't need to rent a car at your destination. And trains run often if they haven't been critically underfunded for decades. And you can't really drive safely, even if you're a perfect driver, someone can run you off the road. Trains are orders of magnitude safer.
Not everyone lives in cities in the US and even then they are really spread out. It's the one thing I think the world doesn't comprehend about the US; we're spread way out.
It isnt like the rest of the world doesnt have rural areas, unless one lives in like singapore or something. Something like 80% of the US population lives in urban areas, and most trips arent trips between cities except perhaps for those that are close to one another anyways. So even if one accepts that rural areas are car centric by nature, that still leaves the vast majority of the population that isnt affected by that. The buildings within cities being spread out over a wide space making transit less efficient is a failure of city design rather than something fundamental and unchangeable about the US, we have a fairly serious housing shortage anyways, if we really wanted to decrease car dependence we could absolutely build up denser housing in urban cores to shift the population over time into areas that allow for more efficient transportation.
Sounds like prison
No, it really doesn't, unless one simply does not know what "prison" means. Improving access to transportation is entirely counter to the point of a prison, given that the primary characteristic of a prison is being hard to leave.
Having someone live below, above, and on either side within a couple of feet absolutely sounds like prison conditions. As far as hard to leave, unless you're walking or biking, you don't have that much freedom of movement, at least in comparison to a car or a motorcycle which becomes much more of a hassle of owning in cities. I'm also not saying cities should cater more to cars either.
I'm in an apartment in a city right now, I really do not notice the neighbors. Apartments are absolutely not as small as cells, unless you're living somewhere with an extreme land shortage like Hong Kong or something (and even then, the conditions will be more comfortable than a literal prison), or somewhere with some extremely progressive prisons.
For that matter, saying you don't have much freedom of movement unless you're walking or biking is a bit like saying you can't communicate with people unless you talk to them; being able to just leave your front door and walk to places you want to go, to include to stuff like train or bus stations for longer trips (which in turn can reach stuff like airports or car rentals for even longer ones), is freedom of movement.
If anything, having a car as the only good option is much less free, since one is required to acquire a license from the government to use it at all, which they can at any moment revoke and leave you with the choice of resorting to crime, relying on others to move you, or being stuck in one's own home.
Or you know, just how cities work...
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