When I lived in New York I did have a commute where transit was faster than driving. But it was like Mad Men—I went from my fancy high rise right next to the train station to my fancy law firm right next to another train station. That was a lovely commute, even compared to driving in the suburbs. But most people in New York (or Tokyo) cannot afford to live so close to popular transit lines.
> With that in mind I find the argumentation that poor people have a worse time to be disingenuous- owning a car is the second largest expense most people have.
That’s what we call “penny wise and pound foolish.” Cars is capital equipment, and get handed down through families. Like any capital equipment, they depreciate and require maintenance. But they also enable people to earn money. I have relatively poor in laws: my wife’s grandmother raised four kids as a waitress, and her husband did hunting and odd jobs. Cars, which they carefully pass down through families, enable them to move around for better jobs and housing. When my father in law lost his job, he moved in with his mom and found various jobs in a 60 mile radius. If you look at the places in the U.S. with good transit, the poor there are structurally poor. They can’t just go to where the jobs are—they are stuck going to where the train lines go. It becomes a trap that creates generational poverty.
