Comments by "TheSuperappelflap" (@TheSuperappelflap) on "Things Americans Get Wrong About Europe" video.

The thing was having a car in the city is, not only will you not be able to get anywhere, you also will not have anywhere to park unless you want to pay ridiculous prices per hour for a paid parking garage. So its usually cheaper and faster to just walk, ride a bike or take public transport, even if it is crowded.
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@methatis3013 You can rent a car to go on vacation. Dont need to own one. Also, lots of people go on family trips without car. You can, for example, fly where you're going, travel by international train, or go on a bike tour with a tent in your bags and camp in your own country. I havent been on vacation in a car in years. Im also curious, can you give me one example of a city in Europe that has easy free parking options and no traffic jams? because I dont know any.
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@methatis3013 i have a very different experience, every city in the netherlands has constant traffic on all major roads, even though car use is discouraged and the parking is very expensive. also, i can book a return flight from amsterdam to london or paris for 30 euro, driving back and forth to paris would cost more than that in gas. airline fuel is untaxed.
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@methatis3013 i dont like cars because i dont like being stuck in traffic, having to constantly avoid accidents from other bad drivers. driving in my country involves three near death experiences per day. also, its very expensive. if you add up the write off on the purchase cost, maintenance, road tax, insurance and gas, owning a car would cost me at least 500 euro per month. my employer fully pays for my commute by public transport and my personal travel is about 50-100 euro per month. so i am saving about 5000 a year not having a car. add that up for ten years and you have a nice investment fund. cars are also an extrenely wasteful and inefficient way to move people. imagine if a society invested all the money spent on asphalt and buying cars, on public transport and other useful things, it would be much better. everyone would get to work on time, no one stuck in traffic, people would have more free time, there would be much less traffic accidents, and then you would still have 80% of the money left.
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@methatis3013 cars are only a good option if you have no other option that's actually good. trains and buses and airplanes are cheaper because of scale size. moving 50 people in one bus is much cheaper than 50 people buying their own car. they are generally faster as well. modern trains can easily do 150-200km/h. not high speed trains, just regular trains. they also take up much less space than all the cars, all the highway lanes and all the parking spaces. for what a car costs to own each year, you can afford to buy a lot of train and airplane tickets. you apparently live in a country with very bad public transport, that doesnt make cars good, it makes your public transport bad.
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@methatis3013 just try to imagine the cost of building, maintaining and fueling millions of cars, laying, repairing and resurfacing all those multi lane roads and highways, the cost of all the time people spend in traffic jams instead of working or relaxing, the cost of all the traffic accidents, hospital visits and premature exits from life. thats not even mentioning the huge environmental cost of the air pollution from exhausts and the pollution from building cars and the pollution from electric car batteries. you could have much better quality of life in a world that isnt centered around cars but around people.
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@methatis3013 no. a car is less reliable than a train. more likely to be stuck in a traffic jam than to have a train delay. more likely to have a car accident than a train accident. more likely for a car to break down than a train. it basically never happens. if your trains have a lot of delay that means your country has bad public transport. the netherlands has the best road infrastructure in the world. the safest, best maintained and best designed roads anywhere. it is also the most densely populated country in europe. there is not enough space to build enough highways for everyone to drive where they want to go. public transport is the only solution. it is also the only way to achieve carbon neutral. no country that allows personal ownership of cars can ever meet climate targets. it works here and it would work for you. only reason public transport is a bad option is if you live on a farm 30km away from the nearest town of a few thousand people.
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