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?
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According to medical checkups, I am fine, but I know for a fact I am not a safe driver. I have bad attention span, sight, reaction, field of view, and tiredness issues. I am ideologically repelled by cars. And it looks feels dull to me to drive and also to study for an exam.
For me, it’s the opposite. I’m autistic, without ID (aka intellectual disability), but apparently, I have practically the same amount of rights as people with ID. I was forced to go to the psychological exam, where nothing was wrong, but I got accused of being irresponsible and have to wait another year. Great.
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.
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).
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)
You gotta include maintanance, repairs and depreciation too
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