Driving anywhere in the world is probably my favourite thing to do while on vacation. Spend a few days in the city, then grab a rental car and start driving. You can take the smaller roads, stop at random villages for coffee, stop by the side of the road next to a fruit tree, an overlook, a plaque or just some scenery you like. There's a dizzying array of things you can see and do which are completely inaccessible to users of mass transit.
The vastness of North America certainly has it's own charm and driving the vast distances can put you in a very relaxed, calm, meditative state, which is very different than say, slowly winding your way through the narrow dirt roads Costa Rica's Nicoya Peninsula. But they're both great and a great way to really understand a place.
The anti-car crowd has missed this, somehow, in their lust to convert all of us to lemmings that can only get around with mass transport. There's an incredible sense of freedom that comes with a car: you can go where you choose, when you choose, without filing a flight plan or getting a ticket or anything other than fueling the thing up.
When you're dealing with something on the scale of North America, it's hard to imagine going without. As a Canadian, there are places here that mass transit can never dream of taking me. Am I to never go to these places?
As a member of that anti-car crowd, I think most of us would be happy with just banishing cars from city and most residential centers. We want to make cars an option, not a requirement.
Having too many cars also starts to encroach on other peoples freedoms via noise pollution, smog, less open space, etc.
Also, keep in mind we are talking about something that kills and injures a large number of people a year.
As someone who switched sides from the car to the anti-car crowd, I believe that in most ways you're less free with vehicle ownership, as you wind up more locked into "the system" than as a public transportation user.
The system being insurance, parking tickets, revenue grabbing speeding tickets and tolls, fluctuating gas prices, frivolous lawsuits, fender benders and body shops, and so on. People behave at their worst given the psychological distance that their metal box provides them. Not to mention just having to drive the damn thing when you could spend your time focused on something else!
The one big exception that I see is - dun dun dun - global pandemic time. Temporarily, I appreciate the barrier between myself and my fellow citizen. But I just went out and rented a cheap one, and will rid myself of it once the risk of contagion subsides.
Re-reading the end of the "Lemmings" guy's comment more closely, there's one other point that I would like to speak to - After traveling around the world extensively for 100% of the last two years, I definitely prefer public transit in almost every form over driving.
However, one good thing about the U.S. that is true of few other places, is the ability to go on super long road trips, seeing tons of the countryside, and getting far away from other people. This is truly a benefit and a joy.
However, it also comprises 5% of the driving that I wind up doing, the other 95% being shitty commutes and errands fees and tolls and road rage. And finding parking! No need to find parking when using public transit.
Pools kill many people a year, mostly children, but we don't close them because the risk is severly outweighed by their utility. I think your argument is overall sound, but you need to find some better examples that apply. If we really were so outraged about auto deatus we would be clamoring for anti-screen enforcement, which has a larger effect on deaths than drunk driving, street racing, and all gun crime combined.
To be fair, states are starting to ban using non-hands-free phones.
One curious point is that, in a neighboring state, the fine is extremely small. However, insurance companies are treating such citations as a similar risk to having a DWI/DUI citation; construction workers and other drivers are already having a hard time getting hired because their record of having been pulled over for usinga phone makes them too expensive for employers to insure for company vehicles.
> However, insurance companies are treating such citations as a similar risk to having a DWI/DUI citation;
Insurers have a strong financial incentive to have "mass market" infractions that don't really tell you anything about someone's risk in the highest category in any state that uses a points system because the points system provides a "we're all gonna charge these people more" pact with the other insurers and they can get the actual violation data they use for risk assessment in other ways (usually straight from the DMV's api).
I'm not defending phone usage but I think anyone with an IQ above freezing can see that the average instance of it (which around here is people texting at red lights) is not as big of a risk indicator as a DUI citation.
in this case I am just relaying what I heard from some owners of construction / remodelling companies; drivers / workers with a citation for phone use had to pay either 50 or $125 or something along those lines, but were finding out that employers could not or would not hire them due to the insurance costs as a result. Just an anecdote, but I have not known my source to make such stories up (and it would have been strange to do so in the context of the conversation anyway).
I don't miss having a car. Sure, your "freedom to". "Just Hop In And Go Right Now On A Whimsical Fancy". All in that 1950s Golden Glory afterglow.
Here's the other side of the coin: You are missing "freedom from". The stress of driving in traffic. The stress of Those Other Drivers. Parking: finding, paying for, &c. Gas prices. Vehicle maintenance.
Those awesome places one can't get to without a car? This is partly why the car rental business exists; it's not just for Business-Person Just Off The Tarmac.
Different people have different lifestyles, especially when in living in different places.
You realize you can have a lot more enjoyable driving experiences if you enable all the people who only drive for instrumental reasons to get off the roads right? Nobody is "anti-car." People are anti-city-planning-that-requires-you-to-use-a-car-every-day-in-order-to-be-a-functioning-member-of-society.
There are actual policies (the easiest one is stopping mandates for huge amounts of free/discounted parking at all new homes & businesses) that make it possible for people who would rather not drive to not drive, and many 'pro-car' people come out to oppose their implementation.
It's freeing, but it can also be a trap. Countless people just drive through beautiful places, watching idly out the window, and as quickly as they came, leave it in their rear-view. Or maybe they hop out at an easy overlook, spend three minutes, and get back in the car.
I've begun advocating for more focused road trips. Go to one place. Stay there. Find things to do. Camp, hike, run, bike, etc. The popular "let's hit as many places as we can" mode results in never really experiencing any of the places you visit.
The vastness of North America certainly has it's own charm and driving the vast distances can put you in a very relaxed, calm, meditative state, which is very different than say, slowly winding your way through the narrow dirt roads Costa Rica's Nicoya Peninsula. But they're both great and a great way to really understand a place.