Why would you bring up my (actually quit cushy) salary in a thread about transit choices, unless you are trying to prove that the choices of non-drivers are invalid?
I don’t knock the lifestyle choices of drivers. All I ask is that they respect that my choices represent rational choices, not laziness or dependence or whatever other character flaw.
[quote=“even_sven, post:141, topic:615469”]
Why would you bring up my (actually quit cushy) salary in a thread about transit choices, unless you are trying to prove that the choices of non-drivers are invalid?
Nice sneak brag there.
But I actually never brought up your salary. I brought up your job and how it relates to your ability not to have a car. I pointed out that the “default” car culture does not allow most of the population to make the same choices. Salary had nothing to do with it. So I guess you fail at sneak bragging.
Has anyone said anything about laziness or dependence about you?
It’s a point for American teenagers, and one that becomes lost as better public transportation becomes available. What I was saying is that it isn’t a point for everybody.
I lived in a town which now has three, count them, three bus lines. All of them go to the out-of-town hospital, from different parts of town; the hospital which is 5km away from City Hall - the path to it is one of the local power walker hot spots; before that hospital was built, there was no public transportation because it simply wasn’t needed; we walked. Yes, I realize that for many Americans the idea of walking is unbelievable, I realize that the kind of construction and scales you have make it absurd. But it’s not absurd in Places Elsewhere, or in many of your cities and towns.
When we went to places nearby for Fiestas, we walked there and hitched or took the [del]intercity[/del] intervillage bus back. Now there’s special buses for Fiestas.
My cousin has lived in Barcelona all her life. I’m now in Barcelona; there’s parts of town where a rental on a parking spot can cost as much as one on a flat (a parking garage next door to the main train station advertises large spaces for 1400€/month - you can get a 3B1b flat for 650€ in the same area), so with a perfectly fine subway, train and bus system, the question becomes “why would anybody want a car?” Unless you go out of town to places with no public transportation, you don’t. I’m bringing mine when I go home for Easter, but I won’t be living in Barcelona itself so I’ll be able to park on the street, and I want it to be able to take day- and weekend trips to the surrounding countryside. If we were heading towards winter, the car would stay back home.
You are now making a distinction between “knowing how to drive” and “owning a car”, I assume because of the fixed costs of the later. However,
Oh thanks for your gracious allowance! I’m so relieved that I don’t have to feel ashamed any longer, I’m only being classed as immature and not grown up by you people.
Shouldn’t it be car drivers who should feel ashamed for contributing to the climate problem?
You don’t want to introduce mandatory driving lessons so people can continue living a car-friendly lifestyle instead of improving public transport and changing infrastructure? Oh I’m so relieved.
Traffic accidents and carbon emissions aren’t hurting people? Teens who delay getting their drivers license don’t do it because they can’t afford it? Wow, it’s amazing how you know all this.
Because by accepting it as the default state that everybody needs a car and drivers license, you are cementing the current state of bad transit and infrastructure, instead of working to improve it.
Because most posters are making value and moral judgments about those who choose not to learn it as teens, calling them immature, relucant to grow up, freeloading on their (indulgent) parents or friends, limited in their job choices, etc.
Nobody is accepting that teens who delay getting their license are showing fiscal responsibility. No, the only way to grow up is getting a license at 16 and fleeing the house of your parents.
Not really. Driving a car is like riding a bicycle or a horse; the initial learning’s much harder than the relearning. A lot of it is about developing the proper spacial sense and reflexes, and that comes back quick.
(Any time a driver drives a different car, he/she has to “relearn” driving as well. But it generally takes little time to adapt.)
All the other things in your sentence are value or moral judgments, but “limited in their job choices” is simply factual. If you can’t drive, you can’t accept a job in places with limited or no public transportation. By definition, that limits your job choices.
(And as Nava pointed out in her post above, you also can’t visit areas that aren’t served by public transportation unless you can team up with a driver to get there. Not a problem if the only places you like to visit are cities, but a big headache if you’re interested in seeing wild nature. Most national parks, for example, simply can’t be visited without a car. Even if you’re planning to spend extended time deep in the roadless wilds, you generally need a car to reach the trailhead in the first place.)
But everyone is “limited in their job choices” by something or another.
To begin with, everyone has to live somewhere. If you live in a suburb, you probably have a smaller commuting radius than if you live smack in the center of town. Boom, you’ve limited your jobs. And of course someone in Bakersfield probably isn’t going to have as many job options as someone in New York City. If we all lived by maximizing possible job offers, we’d have to live in Manhattan. Nobody lives by the principle of maximizing their exposure to every possible job. Instead, you maximize your exposure to your job and your industry. In some, that means you need a car. In other industries, a car doesn’t increase your options at all.
The whole “seeing nature” thing isn’t a strong argument for me. It’s important to get to nature, but it’s not important (for me) to get to any particular piece of nature. If you have perfectly fine parks and reserves near you, why do you need to go to some far-flung place to see trees? If you are a kayaker or rock climber, you probably feel differently, but not everyone cares. We all go to nature, it’s just different nature.
And I guess this gets to the point. Options are good, but options that are not relevent to you don’t improve your life. Being able to get to jobs outside my industry and go to nature areas I don’t have any desire to visit doesn’t improve my life, but not paying for a car and walking regularly often does. It all boils down to personal priorities.
Yep. It’s interesting that people are defending NOT having a very useful and common skill.
I’ve only personally known 2 people that did not have their licenses. One was my Grandmother, born in 1899. The other was a girl in college that constantly asked for rides. She now has her license. I guess that’s coloring my opinion on the issue.
Even after reading the reasons brought up in this thread, that only 65% of teens today don’t get their license is VERY strange to me. That an adult doesn’t get one is even weirder. It’s just a good thing to have.
Disagree. Having additional skills will always increase your options.
This is the last thing I thought I would have heard from a world traveler.
I didn’t get my licence till I was in my late 30s. I never needed to drive, I either walked or used public transport, or [if they were in a mind to do so] my parents would drive me.
I only started driving because my father’s eyesight started to go and my mother was such a hopelessly bad driver he refused to get into a car with her LOL
Not only did I not have a need to drive [when I was a teen] I would never have been able to afford to buy a car, put petrol in it, much less tax and insure it.
um… your math’s a little wonky there, bro.
A. 65% is LESS than 80%, but 1 in 3 is MORE than 1 in 5. I think you are trying to say that when licensed drivers go from 80% to 65%, then the number of people who LACK their license goes from 1 in 5 to 1.75 in 5.
B. 80% licensed = 4 in 5; 65% licensed = 3.25 in 5
C. It is not clear to me that this percentage change is all that different from the percent change in the urbanized population of the US. The idea that America is mostly a rural nation is a myth. More than 58% of working Americans live inside a metropolitan area larger than 1 million people, compared with 44% in 1960. Cite (scroll down to “Trends in Worker Characteristics”)
No - because I can move if necessary. People move more often that not when they change jobs. But if you accept a job that requires you to be able to drive, it’s not likely that you’ll be able to learn that skill before you have to start the new job. That’s why not being able to drive is a job-limiting problem (while merely not owning a car isn’t - it doesn’t take a long time to buy a car, while it does take a long time to learn to drive well).
I can agree with that. I just doesn’t see how (apart from the ore-time cost of driving lessons, which I will agree isn’t trivial) having a driver’s license would change your current life in a negative way. It WOULD give you the option of borrowing or renting a vehicle should you ever need one, which is an option that is unavailable to you right now.
OT but amusing to me, as this is the diametrically opposite view of the one I have. I haven’t got the slightest interest in traveling to cheap countries to experience different cultures, as you do. Hairless monkey are hairless monkeys; people are pretty much the same the world over (despite superficial cultural differences), and I can see plenty of people right here where I am. Why go off to far-flung places just to eat funny food and look at people wearing strange clothing? What kind of vacation is that?
But the Rocky Mountains are nothing like the southwestern deserts of Utah and Arizona, which in turn is nothing like the Maine seaside or the Alaskan rainforest. I wouldn’t trade my travels to various wild places in the US (many of which have involved renting a car) for anything. And when I think of trips abroad, it’s places like the Galapagos islands and Antarctica which really excite me.
People sure are different! 
yeah, but have you checked out the graduated restrictions on an Antarctic driver’s license?
Why does everyone in this thread equate “knowing how to drive” with “having a license”? They’re not the same thing at all. You can know how to drive just fine without having a license, and judging by some of the folks I’ve ridden with over the years, you can get a license just fine without really knowing how to drive. I knew how to drive for years before I got my license, because for a long time the logistics of not having a license were far outweighed by the massive increase in our insurance premiums if I had a license instead of a learner’s permit.
No, you just said your lifestyle made you better able to save for retirement than hers, which of course couldn’t possibly be interpreted by a reasonable person as a slam on her income and/or ability to manage money. :dubious: She wasn’t sneak bragging, she was responding to your insults, so don’t try making her out to be the asshole in this particular exchange.
What? And what insults? If you have a job where you’re able to take off two months on a whim, I find it highly unlikely that that job will continue to pay you for the two months you’re gone. So during that time, sven’s not making any money, nor is she able to save money for the future, but someone with a “regular” job can.
That’s called a tradeoff, something we were talking about quite rationally before sven starting telling me how loaded she is.
Right, and I understand that. I’m addressing the thought from a North American perspective. I took the bus everywhere until I was 25, it’s a pain in the butt if you have to go anywhere not downtown (and even then it has to be the immediate core) but it didn’t bother me though I thought about getting my license and a car off and on for various reasons. The final impetus for me was I had a 3 hour daily commute (minimum) and saw my son so little AND the opportunity to do with him what my Dad did with us, drive out of the city and see the province. I drive daily because it’s the easiest way for me to get to work, if I worked closer or had better bus access I’d do transit, if I worked so close walking was an option I’d do that. I find it wonderful people can do that, but not everyone can.
What I meant was the license = car thing comes about because of the whole license = freedom thing that people mentioned. A license by itself doesn’t equal freedom, if you don’t have access to a vehicle to drive even once in a blue moon it’s basically a very expensive piece of plastic in your pocket.
So from my perspective, it’s not surprising to not get a license the instant you turn 16, because there is no point in putting the $$$ into it if you can’t actually use it and get the freedoms implied by being able to drive. Of course my perspective also comes from a city that has decent enough transit and not having any access to a vehicle that I would be allowed to drive and not enough money to pay for one myself. If we still lived in a small town when I hit that milestone maybe I would have worked harder to get one and make it work, as it is my brother was heavily subsidized by our father (insurance, bro paid for car, gas and upkeep and only paid a token amount of insurance) until he got out of high school and started in construction, that was never an option for me, so it was merely an expensive piece of plastic.
Now if you take away all the obstacles I had and throw in good transit with the option to drive or not drive as needed/wanted (ie access to a car at least on occasion) then I’m as baffled as anyone why someone wouldn’t at least want to learn because despite the obstacles that I had I did WANT one!
From a practical standpoint they are. It doesn’t matter how well you know how to drive if you don’t have a currently valid driver’s license; without that license, you can’t legally drive a vehicle on the public roads. And that’s the sort of driving most people care about, not doing laps around a racetrack or taking your car for a spin around the back forty of your farm (which is about the only sort of driving you can legally do without a valid license).
And baffled in general, it’s no skin off my nose if for whatever reason people don’t have a license/don’t drive, I was one of them for a long time though I always had a vague longing to drive and I still use transit/walk though not as much as previously.
Really, you can’t think of a “regular” middle class job that allows people two months off in the summer?
You said:
Which is a ridiculous (and, as it turns out, inaccurate) assumption to make.
The only way I could take off two months and continue to get paid (which I think is Justin_Bailey’s point) is if I used a very large percentage of my paid leave in one big swoop. Which would leave me without a bank of sick days or any other time to take off during the year. I could do it, but it would be a huge sacrifice. A major trade-off. For most people, this is certainly the case.
As far as choices go, it’s great that you have everything figured out in life. But most teenagers do not. All of the jobs I’ve had in adulthood required me to drive. I’m drive a desk all day as a beaurocrat, but working for the state means I must travel throughout the state sometimes. And sometimes out of the state. When I taught at the college level, I had to drive students around to field sites. When I worked down in the 'Glades, I had to drive all up and through there to do my work (not to mention, driving to the laboratory at 5:00 in the morning, before the buses started running). When I was unemployed for a few months after graduate school, I was hired to do a short-term forestry project that was fifty miles away. Without a car, I would have continued to be depressed and unemployed. It would have been a missed opportunity, one that I would have not been able to experience in Newark, NJ. There are no opportunities open exclusively to people who take public transportation. But there are plenty of opportunities that require people to drive. If you come back here and posit otherwise, I’m going to start thinking you just want to be argumentative for the sake of it.
I’m in 100% agreement with the idea that a person does not necessarily need a car. Obviously millions of people don’t have cars and they are surviving. But I can’t understand why you keep insisting that the trade-offs to not driving are exactly equal to those associated with driving. At the scale of the individual, they can be. But on average, they aren’t.
constanze, for someone who thinks people are negatively judging your maturity, you sure are coming across as very immature. I haven’t issued any negative judgements on anyone’s character, and I don’t recall others doing so either. So all that blabbity-blah you directed at me is just that. Blabbity-blah. Not worth picking apart.