Right, I would strongly prefer a city designed for less/no car usage. My complaint is that this article misrepresents history and misrepresents the current situation.

Public transit 100 years ago was worse for everyone than car ownership today. Living in a car centric city with a car is an overwhelmingly better lifestyle than riding public transit in the 1910s. At the time that cars became popular, they were a huge improvement in quality of life for the vast majority of people. Today we have technology to build better transit that is an improvement on car ownership for most people, but we're not building it. I'd like the narrative to be "we can do better", not "we used to do better but secret evil forces hurt us".

Something like 22% of Mahattanites and almost half of all Brooklynites live in a household with a car. Sometimes people will say something like, "see, this proves that people don't want a car when they don't need one." But this seems exactly backwards to me. Given the truly staggering cost and difficulty of car ownership in New York, what this says to me is that people really like owning cars, even in places where they aren't necessary. Even in those places, basically everybody who feels rich enough to own one still buys one. Those are very high rates of car ownership in those places, given the costs and availability of good alternatives.

The lesson here is that you can create environments with enough constraints on ownership where people will mostly choose not to own a car (if they aren't simply priced out), but what you cannot do is create a place where most people don't want one.

Even in NYC, a car is an incredibly useful tool. People aren't stupid. They know that. So they like owning them.

Are you assuming that 78% of non-car owners living in New York want a car? Given they don't have one, there is oodles of financing available, wouldn't it be more logical to conclude that the majority not only do not own cars, but do not want them? Perhaps that 22%, a good chunk of them might hate their cars but for whatever reason keep them (travel outside of the city for work, perhaps previously owned and the economics are better to keep them, etc..)

I think one could draw an opposite conclusion from those same numbers.

> Are you assuming that 78% of non-car owners living in New York want a car?

The rate of people who are in principle uninterested or even opposed to car ownership is surely higher in NYC than anywhere else in the country, since there's both a selection effect (people who fit that description move there) and an experiential effect (people who grow up there may not be interested in something they have little exposure to).

What I believe but cannot prove is that the number is nowhere near 78%. I think that defies belief. I sincerely doubt there are more people who think, "the subway is so good there's no possible need for a car" than there are people who simply can't afford the additional costs or are unwilling to endure the unique inconvenience of car ownership in the city.

Cars are useful tools of course. If people used them only for the odd errand or a long distance trip, we wouldn’t have a problem.

Public transit for all our regular trips to work, restaurants, dentist, etc. and private or rented cars for the rest is the way to go towards a prosperous future.