[ErroneousBosh]

> We're talking about cities, of course; in rural areas, nothing beats cars.

Where I grew up in NW Scotland, it's a five hour round trip to go to the supermarket. You pretty much need a car for that.

Where I live right now it's a five minute walk to the supermarket, but I still need a car because the things I work on are a long way from where I live, often up steep muddy mountain tracks.

When I lived in the middle of Glasgow people used to come up and have a go at me about driving a massive V8 4x4 in the middle of a city. What am I supposed to do with it? Bike to the suburbs and then go and drive up a mountain?

"But why not get a job where you don't need to drive hundreds of miles in a massive 4x4?"

Because then the things on the tops of mountains don't get fixed when they break, and the radios don't work properly, and then people like you die in a fire.

Sometimes it's hard for people to grasp that just because their not-really-a-job tapping numbers into an Excel spreadsheet all day can be done from home or from an easily walkable city centre location, it doesn't mean that everyone's job looks like that.

I do wish I could usefully use a cargo bike. Those things are awesome.

[sensanaty]

What people really misunderstand in these discussions is that no one is talking about completely killing off driving as an option, and no one says that public transportation works in literally 100% of circumstances.

We just want there to be viable public transportation options for situations where it makes sense. This even makes it easier for the people who do have to drive, like you, as there will be less congestion because a single bus can replace literally dozens of cars, combine that with a single tram and a single metro car and you're replacing literally hundreds of cars that would otherwise be on the roads instead.

[ErroneousBosh]

Exactly. It would be awesome if we had viable public transport options in rural areas too, although necessarily they would not be as frequent of flexible as in cities. There wouldn't be the requirement for them so much, because of the lower population density and the different patterns of vehicle use.

But growing up in a rural area where there are two buses a day none of which are useful for anything other than high school pupils (although they're not school buses) it does tend to limit everyone's options.

[cyberax]

> What people really misunderstand in these discussions is that no one is talking about completely killing off driving as an option

I find this statement utterly hypocritical. Sure, we're not killing off driving. We are just choking off the roads with bike lanes, forcing extra-high density ("just build more"), removing parking, forcing the drivers to pay for transit that they don't use, and just to pay in general.

But no, we're not preventing driving. Not at all.

Urbanists want to stop people from using cars as much as they can force that.