> If your car isn't packed to capacity on every single trip, it is less efficient and worse than public transit.

Cost is a great proxy for costs versus benefits. People choose cars because they are efficient for them.

In theory public transit is efficient. In practice, only if you live in a very high density area, or you value your time at $0.

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bluGill 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

There are a few low density places around the world where public transit is efficient for the average person.

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eldaisfish 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

cars are barely efficient in terms of time. In cost terms, cars are incredibly expensive once you add in infrastructure costs, insurance, fuel, the cost of land use, etc.

Public transit is efficient even outside areas of high density - see suburban Europe or India. Why are so many people here utterly car-brained?

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nradov 3 days ago | parent [-]

Have you ever actually been to Europe? Public transit is pretty good in first-tier cities like Vienna / Stockholm / London where tourists spend most of their time. But out in the smaller cities and rural areas where regular people live there's very little public transit except for slow and inconvenient buses. So everyone drives. Or if they're too poor to afford a car then they just don't go anywhere.

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SoftTalker 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

This is my observation as well, it's also true in the USA. Places like Chicago and NYC have good public transit. You can easily live there without a car, in fact it's easier and certainly cheaper to not have to deal with owning a car. If you visted NYC and formed your impression of public transit in the USA based on that, it would be very wrong. Likewise you cannot assume that because Copenhagen has great public transit and bicycle infrastructure that all of Europe is like that. Get out to the smaller cities and towns and you'll find that many more people own cars and drive everywhere.

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eldaisfish 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

are you familiar with population distributions and the fact that more of the word lives in urban areas than rural?

>So everyone drives

Citation needed, because this is obviously false.

>Or if they're too poor to afford a car then they just don't go anywhere

What a horrible thing to say.

	▲	nradov 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Horrible how? I'm telling you that's the reality, not that it's a good thing. Unlike you I've actually been to those places and talked to the locals.