alt Hacker News> Take away the car and people cannot live. [...] It is almost impossible to find a job and a house you can afford in walking distance of each other,
As a Brazilian, that statement feels bizarre. Yeah, my job and my home are not in walking distance of each other. I simply take the bus. Sure, some jobs are not within reach of the bus (or the ferry, or the metro, or the light tram, etc), and some jobs need a car (for instance, it would be hard for a HVAC technician to take all their equipment on a bus), but saying it's "almost impossible" to find a job?
> demanding there be things like grocery shopping as well make it not feasible for most people.
That also sounds bizarre to my ears. Most places I've known have small grocery shopping places on nearly every corner. You just have to walk.
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45% of Americans have zero access to any public transport of any kind.
And the other 55% may have access but often it doesn't meet people's needs (it may not go when/where they need to go)
Only 11% of Americans use public transit at all on a weekly basis.
3.5% of Americans use public transit to commute.
Where I live I would half to walk about a half day to get to the nearest place that sells any kind of food and back, which is a 7/11 gas station. To get to a real grocery store and return would require a full day's travel on foot (just checked google maps, 4.5 hours one-way to the closest one). There is no public transportation option at all, the only buses are school buses until you get much closer to a major city. Driving is a necessity in such places.
I live in a well populated East Coast state, so it's not like I'm even really far out in the sticks too, there are many places which are even worse off in these regards.
There are no buses to take here, and the distances are looooong. Your job or grocery store could be 15 miles away, and that's in an urban-ish area. Rural, it's much worse.
Unfortunately that just isn't true in large parts of the US. Many cities have no public transit, and no accessible grocery stores.
Being able to live car free is pretty much limited to (expensive) major cities and some (expensive) mid-sized college towns.
The city of about 50,000 I'm from not only has no public transit and limited sidewalks, it doesn't even have crosswalks across the two main 6-lane roads that divide the city, so you can't safely walk more than about a mile even if you wanted to.