Blame marketing (propaganda.) Our government has given control of our information networks to corporations and corporations use those channels to blast us with consumerist propaganda 24/7. People are taught that the type of car they drive defines who they are as a person so they do what they were taught and they buy a giant tank of a vehicle so that people will see them as dependable, manly, successful, outdoorsy, etc.

yeah just because you're not riding a bus doesn't mean you should get around with a Gigantus Pollutinator 9000 or a private jet, obviously.

An SUV in NYC is especially egregious. They could have taken the train from Yonkers, and used the bus/subway. You guys are the one city in the US that actually has decent mass transit.

If you actually live in the city, and own an SUV you are an idiot spending way too much on parking.

Yea, these are some of the hardest things we need to address to make non-driving more popular in North America - overseas the increased density lends itself a lot more naturally to public transit.

Where I recently moved to, everything is a 10-20 min drive away, but buses can be over an hour because how poorly they're done. Apparently they used to be quite bad, but recent changes made them awful and no one understands how the new routes and timetables managed to be approved and implemented.

Wow, that's a bummer :-/ For me it's 15-20 min by car assuming a few minutes walk to where I've parked. 25 min by bike (20 min by road but I take a safer 'scenic route') and about 40 min by bus and about 10 minutes of that is walking to/from the bus stop. And the bus fare gets capped at 8 trips per week so every trip thereafter is free meaning if you commute to work every day, Friday and all weekend will be unlimited free trips.

This is a massive part of the problem here in the UK too.

I just checked with Google Maps how long it would take my wife to get to work tomorrow morning. In the car it would take between 45 minutes and an hour, but public transport would take an hour and 52 minutes, with 29 minutes of that taken up by walking to bus and train stops. She would have to leave the house before 5:30 am, whereas the car would give her another hour in bed.

At the moment we're under a yellow warning for rain too, so she would need to take waterproof clothes and probably a change of clothes too.

Until things like this are improved, it's easy to see why lots of people still take the car :(

I lived in a European capital until 28 and never got a driver's license because public transport was faster than driving through horrible traffic.

Moved to the US and in less than a year had to buy a car because it was impossible to do anything without one. And that was in am area with considerably better public transport than usual for the US. It was just my wife driving, but after a few years I had to get a driver's license too and buy a second car. I like walking, I prefer good public transit to driving, but it's simply not an option in most of the US.

Oh, and another story. In my hometown I absolutely loved the subway as THE way to get around. It was cool in the summer, warm in the winter, and average wait was 2-3 minutes. I visited New York one summer and as per habit I went to take the subway to my destination. It was sweltering hot and I waited 20 minutes for a train. Up to that point I considered NYC to be the closest US city to what I'm used to, but that would have been a deal breaker.

Majestic, isn’t it? I don’t send dick pics because they just can’t capture its grandeur.

I visited India 30 years ago and (in the southern part of the country at least) the major highways between cities had a single paved lane in the middle and then just dirt and gravel on the steeply-sloped sides. So on bus trips the drivers would stick to the middle until the last possible second and then veer off so that just the right wheels were on the pavement as they passed each other while tipping crazily to each side. I made the huge mistake on my first trip of sitting in the front seat; I later corrected my mistake by always taking the fucking train, which didn't have this problem.