Just Buy Everyone a Car

Love how busses are expected to be packed while I can count on one hand the amount of cars I see daily with more than one person in them

Do these “Buy everyone a car?” sophists ever also offer to pay for all the gas, the maintenance, the licensing and permitting and sticker fees, the parking costs, and all the property damage and hospital bills accruing from accidents, arising from distributing all of these cars?

I died inside when that woman said that traditional public transit options are becoming outdated. Automobile realism at its finest.

Hearing the words "Micro-Transit" always triggers me into a fight response. Great video thats useful for a rebuttal against common talking points

"This train cant drive right up to your house, but that wouldn't be a problem if you could walk here without dying." is probably the most succinct way of explaining how any discussion of transit is incomplete without talking about urban design/zoning

"it would be cheaper to just buy everyone a car" Funny how they never factor in the extra cost of road maintenance, extra cost to build more parking spaces, cost of adding more lanes, and every other aspect needed to add more cars to already over crowded roads and freeways. As well as the added cost to the person now with a car; vehicle maintenance, insurance, gas, parking, etc.

I was an early tester in one of these 'give everyone a car!' programmes in southern California. It was an utter nightmare, First you had to be in poverty-low income to qualify, the grant was 5,000$- the catch was you had to get the dealerships to agree to the government program- which none of them wanted to do because apparently (unknown to us, who had to go to every dealership in the local counties) they had to pay a fee to get accepted to the program... Then, once we had gone through a year+ of getting accepted to the program (hours upon hours of speaking with government offices, providing papers and proof we were in poverty, had no good car, improved our credit score etc.) we spent another half a year getting various dealerships to hear us out(spending hundreds of dollars driving out to dealerships, spending the whole day negotiating and convincing them etc.) The car had to also be an EV, Hybrid or Plug-in hybrid... So finally after ALL that and searching for cars in our budget (Something incredibly difficult when the requirement is an EV or Hybrid and our budget was like 10K~) We... lost the grant because it expired before we could use it- with no ability to appeal for more time... very cool!

Man tech bros will go to wildly comedic lengths to just reinvent a bus that you don't need to sit next to other people in

Americans and canadians will try every techno futuristic idea sold to them before doing public transport. Is like a brain disease.

I seriously am impressed with the amount of effort it must have taken to get to places in the middle of nowhere just to take a five second clip of it

We should really start calling these schemes what they really are. "Buy the auto industry more customers."

Americans will do anything to avoid building trains.

This is one of those “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” situations. You rarely see solutions like these in transit havens such as Denmark, Switzerland or the Netherlands but because Americans drive cars and have next to no concept of what good transit is actually like the try to propose solutions from a car-centric point of view instead of consulting urbanists or transit advocates to create a solution from their point of view. Fixed route transit is fine, we just need more of it in the form of higher frequency, more subways, more LRT/BRT, etc. Not solutions proposed be people who may have never taken transit in their lives.

As a student, I could either: A. Set a timer for 8:40 to catch the 8:45 bus every day on the way to campus, or B. Book a ride at 8:20 for a van to arrive sometime between 8:30 and 8:50 to take me to campus I think that I'd take the more reliable option.

My impression is that the people who really have contempt for public transit also hate dense cities and would rather somehow eliminate them. So the argument that replacing transit with cars doesn't work for dense cities probably won't convince them of much.

The idea of everyone owning a car in a city is just geometrical madness. It can't fit. You'd need a 15 story basement to give everyone in a 30 story high rise apartment block a parking space, and that's assuming we're just saying one car per household.

This channel has some of the greatest storytelling about transit. Truly quality before quantity!

As a bus driver, I scoff whenever people say "transit ridership is decreasing." These people have obviously never rode the buses I drive. During the morning rush, the bus is so packed, people are literally hanging out in my thinking space. I've had to tell people, "I need to fit everyone behind the yellow line" and "you can't stand there; I need to be able to see that mirror." The bus is so full at times, it makes it ride lower, causing it to hit the pavement at certain intersections. It gets so full that sometimes people have to get out to let others out, then get back on. I've had to tell people, "the bus is too full, I can't legally take anymore riders." Even during off-peak hours, this bus is usually half-full. Also, I roll my eyes into the back of my skull every time I hear "autonomous" or "pods." They're literally saying "car" without saying "car."

Another benefit to big buses: bike racks. A few days ago, I was out riding my bike, and got a flat. Sure, I had a replacement tube and mini pump with me, but I could pay CA$3.60 for a one seat service from where I got a flat to a dropoff point a 20 minute walk away from home (would have been a 2+ hour walk from where I got the flat if I didn't have a spare tube and pump) where I could change out the tube much easier and quicker than on the side of the road. The bus service was running every 22 minutes at the time...pretty good for a very suburban route! If the government were to theoretically buy me a car, I'd still be S.O.L in this scenario. Cars are a huge burden logistically; buses aren't!

Giving everyone a car is genuinely the dumbest policy position I've heard. And our country spent billions on nuclear submarines.