The above is sadly serious. It is almost impossible to find a job and a house you can afford in walking distance of each other, demanding there be things like grocery shopping as well make it not feasible for most people. Taking away someone's car is cruel and usual punishment that cannot be accepted.
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.
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.
I live in the UK (hardly a bastion of public transport) in a town of under 10k, and have a car. The main requirement for a car is to take my youngest to Drama club in the next town where it finishes at 9pm, well after buses have stopped. There is a drama club in the town, but as we only just moved we didn't want to move him. Likewise we're driving him to his old school until the end of July as he'll move school then.
I used to live in a village of 300 people, and sure you need a car there.
Sure it was nice to drive the 4 miles to the garden centre at the weekend rather than take the hourly bus, but it's not a requirement.
For a town of 10,000 people, let alone 50,000, to say you can't live car free is nonsense.
Of course America is different. Their towns are far less dense, they don't even have "sidewalks", they are consciously built so you have to drive everywhere, but that's unique to the time American towns were built.
So again, what towns in Europe with a population of 50,000 have no public transport.
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.
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.
This is exactly what the parent meant by designing the country in a 'car-brained' fashion. It's not true in many/most other countries.
Europe may not drive as much as America, but it's still about half. Cars are popular worldwide for a reason, and it is not American corporations magically convincing everyone how useful they are.
It's also entirely moot, as we're not redesigning the country in the short term to cut down on DUIs.
This seemed implausible, so I ran the numbers for my situation at the time that involved car costs and a commute distance that were both below median for my city, plus well above-median household income.
Sure enough! It worked out just the way they claimed, if only barely. For the median worker in my city though, it was very true.
When I hear people suggest that, I wonder if they live somewhere fairly flat, with mild mostly dry weather and high population density. Maybe this is why there is so much disagreement on the topic.