M. 34
I’m currently studying for the theory and then the practice for the license and I hate it… But since I’m unemployed for like half a year now maybe it will give me more chances to get hired. Still I will avoid driving as much as possible, being on a highway scares me and I’m afraid of having an accident. Plus I wear glasses and I’m not sure if my reflexes or peripheral view are good enough…
So, what’s your reason to not drive a car… money? For the environment? Are you afraid? You really don’t need to?
A bit unrelated, but where I live the price of car school doubled in the past few years. It’s the reason my girlfriend still hasn’t started driving school yet. I could see that as an important factor. If I had to get my driving license for the current price, I might also reconsider. Cars are generally ludicrously expensive compared to everything else. Here you could pay roughly (converted) 120 bucks a year for public transit, or pay 80 monthly AT LEAST to drive (just gass and ensurance).
In Germany it’s roughly >400€ per month to own and drive a car, with all costs included, and 50€ per month for nationwide public transit and regional trains
Nation wide? Fuck yea! :D
Both public traffic and driving sounds pretty cheap to me. Insurance, road tax and fuel gets me on 200 bucks a month… Public traffic takes way longer and is more expensive somehow… (Netherlands BTW)
Ey! I studied there for 2 years, awesome corner of the world :)
200/month that’s 2400/year, now to me that sounds insane… That’s twice my car expenses and even that’s like double of what I pay for transit and food.
Here in Prague a yearly public transit ticket is 3650kč which is actually closer to 160$ (my bad) or roughly 150€ a year. Either way it’s an order of magnitude less and then some. The kind of money I’ll happily just throw out there. And inside Prague it is most definitely faster than by car. I dread driving here.
In rural areas the story is a little different, 9385kč (~380€) a year including Prague and the surrounding area, so I can visit my ma. I used to have this pass before my car. Still MUCH cheaper, but I admit, it’s like twice as slow to go by rural busses compared to driving your own car.
Sadly don’t know the transit pass prices in the Netherlands, cus I just biked everywhere (didn’t have a car as a student and sure as hell wasn’t gonna pay more than I had to at the time). But it’s hard to imagine they’d be much more expensive.
You gotta include maintanance, repairs and depreciation too
We have good public transport and I believe reading something on the way to be a better use of that time.
But you can read while behind the wheel of a Tesla 🙃
You can technically read behind the wheel of any car …
Whoa. Eye-opening.
hits and kills kid crossing the road because Tesla is a lying piece of shit and their “self driving” doesn’t actually work
Oops.
At least you got a few pages in, right?
You don’t need an overpriced piece of junk for that. That’s why american cars are plastered with useless safety instructions
Cars are expensive to buy and maintain. Also I don’t think finding a parking spot and then parking is a fun activity. Also the metro can in many cases be faster, and I can use my phone while I’m in it.
Trust me, you could absolutely follow the example of other drivers and use your phone while driving.
Not my priority
Driving used to stress me out, but you honestly just get used to it. Your brain just autopilots 90% of it once you’ve been driving over a year or so.
The 90% autopilot frees up your brain to focus on the big picture of what’s happening. You’ve just gotta be careful you don’t slip to like 95% autopilot where you’re not paying attention anymore.
I do have a license but refuse to drive. I guess the main reasons would be:
- I get lost very easily and navigating while driving is much harder (no stopping, turning around etc)
- You can’t entirely zone out or use that time to do something else like reading so if it’s a daily commute this is just lost time
- Road infrastructure here is terrible. I actually find it much safer to drive at night because at least you can see the headlights of cars coming out of blind intersections
- Just like there are (many) places you can’t go without a car, there are also places you can’t go with a car because there is no parking, mainly the city center, which is the place I visit the most
You also can’t drive drunk and I kinda like drinking.
People with ADHD, Dyspraxia (a motor disability), and some type of insomnia disorder have significantly higher rates of car accidents – around 4x more likely for ADHD and 3x more likely for insomnia disorders (driving while sleepy is around as dangerous as driving while drunk). At minimum 25% of all car crashes involve people with ADHD or insomnia disorders (which is why your car insurance rates might skyrocket in some states if you get diagnosed)… I have all of those. Yet, somehow, they still allowed me to get my driver’s license, and I got it with single-digit hours of driving experience at the time… very American to give licenses that allow you to drive 13-ton vehicles to people who shouldn’t even qualify to drive on public roads.
I still have no reason to waste tens of thousands of dollars over the course of a few years on a car though.
Apologies in advance, I’m not exactly your target audience:
I can drive just about anything short of a semi-truck (when I have to drive a car, it’s usually an old manual Subaru), but I still refuse to drive whenever possible: Partly for environmental reasons, partly for financial reasons, and partly because I would much rather ride my ebike or my bicycle instead.
Basically, confidence. I don’t have enough confidence to drive a car. Heck even riding a bike gives me anxiety that I’m going to collide with somebody or get hit by someone.
Just wait until you try canoe.
I have, didn’t get far. lol
The river literally pushes you bro
I was on a beach.
i think a unicycle is more your style
I drive but I hate it and try to do it as little as possible. I have never liked them. The exhaust and danger. Walking and riding a bike is enjoyable. Public transit allows you to do enjoyable things (suduko, play a video or video game). Its not till the last few decades that the environment came into thought around it for me and I realized how incredibly bad the direction of society went around it. I had biked and walked through high school but was traveling by car a lot after that but mostly as a passenger until I started working. Then in the 2000’s I started biking and I had no idea why I had not been doing it before. Then I realized the infrastructure to make it safer and easier to do had not really been there before then for my city and its gotten way better since. Its like biking in the winter. I do more transit then and I thought I was the weather but I eventually realized I actually more just don’t like biking in the dark which got me to do it more in terms of weekend day activities. That being said everyone should learn if they have the opportunity because there are still to many jobs where you might need it and its not hard to get. Should pick up a cdl if someone like work will cover the cost. Driving actually would not bother me as much if for a job as presumably there would be benefit (both my pay and whatever is getting accomplished for society) but just to get myself around when there are so many better options. Yuck.
Simple: I fucking hate driving. I hate the smell, I hate the noise, and I hate the stress. Thr environmental impact isnt exactly a plus point either. You could say that I’m lucky to live in a place with good public transport, but I actively sought out a place with public transport because I didn’t want to rely on a car.
Final nail on the coffin: I developed Menieres disease, so I am prone to intense vertigo attacks at short notice - I couldn’t get a license even if I wanted one.
Not wanting to learn or not wanting to drive?
Knowing how to drive is a useful skill that can come in handy (vacations, emergency) even if you don’t do it regularly.
Refusing to drive daily - absolutely, for political, social and economic end ecological reasons. Everyone living in range of an acceptable public transport should refuse to drive. And those who are not should not stop pressuring and voting local politicians to implement one. It’s 2024, there’s no reason to depend on cars for everyday transportation.
Unless your rural. Public transport in my area could never work. Even in 2024
OK to the person that down voted me please tell me the most rural place you’ve visited and a plan to implement public transit? In my area house can be separated by up to 9 miles. It takes a school bus 3.5 hours to pick up and drop off before and after school. So how could public transit be implemented in any meaningful way? Let’s say I worked in the city which is a 42 mile drive, now first I would need a minimum 2 hour ride from my house to the small town. Then after that I have to wait in some bus station, then its at least 1 hour before I get into the city so at a minimum I would have a 3 hour trip to and from work everyday. Now to make it worse it isn’t a perfect world because lets say my bus from home to the station and the bus into the city are off from each other, now its 4-5 hours or transport one way everyday (8-10 total)… Do you see how that couldn’t work in any meaning full way? Now if you want to say bullet trains, or trains, that is ridiculously expensive to implement and grand scale, and just like in China would end up being mostly traveled only by elites so it wouldn’t even be accessible to me.
Not to mention with only 800 people in a 50 mile radius the amount of taxes that each person would have to pay to build a public transit here would be insane.
Now if you want to go county wide, my county has a population density of 10 residents per square mile compared to the entirety of New York City which is 29,000 people per square mile.
Or even worse the country of Korea and my state are similarly sized, my entire state has a population density of 67 people per square mile, Korea has a population density of 1,000 people per square mile.
More populated areas make public transit plausible but, the US is mostly rural space and that is different from pretty much every other country.
I like to think of the people who downvote, but don’t comment, just had a small accident in the user interface. They misclicked! Or swiped to hard!
Because obviously, if they had something to contribute that contradicted you, they’d leave a comment!
But, I want the discussion lol I woke up combative this morning
Ok… Let me try.
Cars suck. Rural people who don’t work on a farm should move to a city where they don’t need a car. If they won’t move, then they better get used to biking or walking.
Horses would be better for the environment because they are a sustainable solar organic ecosystem
Cars are better for the environment than horses (I say this as so.done who’s family has a lot of horses lol)
If cow farts are bad then horse farts are bad, also it takes a lot of diesel to harvest the feed necessary for horses scale that up to the size needed for modern day populations and horses are way worse for the environment than cars.
Ps. I appreciate you humoring me lol
The USA sustained a huge horse population pre-engine. While quality of life was lower, the horse energy cycle was totally renewable.
The issue of industrial farming using oil, is a separate problem, and one that eventually will have to get addressed. Either through some innovative battery technology, or alternative fuel like hydrogen.
But even in pre-engine United States, horses weren’t one for every person, they’re relatively rare, because they’re expensive to maintain, they eat a lot of food right, they require daily upkeep, veterinary care etc huge capital investment.
I think in the right green sustainable system, people would live close enough to where they work, where they wouldn’t need to travel vast distances every day. So in the infotech economy, that means people work from home, no commute needed. Just food delivery which could be batched, buses, or even the rare horse-drawn cart for a neighborhood.
The rural population that commutes a distance to work, factories, manufacturing, those would be the hardest to adapt to a non-vehicle lifestyle. I’m not sure how you could do that without moving a lot of people.
One possible reason people don’t like rural living, is if you got all the rural people to live in a city, it would raise city housing prices, and if they were invested in property that might be to their advantage.
Is both for me but I’m running out of options
Unless you experience physical pain from driving, it’s a slippery slope because every facet of modern life gets easier in car culture if you have a car.
Just look at Road Ragers: people who experience extreme emotional duress from driving, possibly endangering everyone with their angry antics and maybe giving themselves health problems from the blood pressure fluctuations, and yet they keep doing it.
And some people even drive without a license, simply because getting between places in time is nigh impossible otherwise.
As for why I decided to give up renewing my license, here’s my rant from elsewhere:
It’s not just the pollution from the exhaust, it’s not just the tons of trash/scrap that rots away in junkyards, it’s not just the rubbers and plastics from tire wear and tear getting into ecosystems, it’s not just the gigagallons of hazardous chemicals required to maintain, it’s not just the steady trend toward “Cars as a Service” while locking your premium features behind a paywall, it’s not just the carwashes draining their runoff into the local groundwater, it’s not just the needlessly large cities to accomodate every individual having a car to themselves, it’s not just the ever expanding highways in between cities that continue to have congestion but now take more space and more time to repair and do more damage to the environment, it’s not just the asphalt island effect, it’s not just the burden on local economies that is car culture, it’s not just the hostility drivers have for pedestrians and bikers, it’s not just the millions of accidents causing hundreds of millions dollars in medical damages and 40,000 deaths every year, it’s not just the blatant disregard for millions of animal and insect lives left on the roadside and windshields as warnings, it’s not just the arms race between assholes for bigger and louder and more dangerous death machines so they can feel like they’re the only one on the road who matters.
It’s all of it, and more.
I don’t want to get a license only to forget everything because I won’t drive.
I see having a car as a necessity only. For me, it’s only acceptable if public transport/bicycle is not an option. Unfortunately, the latter is almost never an option due to how everything is built car-centric, but the former very often is.
Also, I don’t know anything about cars, I don’t have to think where to park that huge piece of shit, I don’t need to be my own driver, I don’t need to do any maintenance, it’s more ecological and even cheaper than just gas.
Instead of car, people of my country usually able to drive motorcycle.
But not me. I’d rather take my bicycle. I don’t want to deal with cost of maintaining motorcycle.
