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?
I got my license at 18 before I moved out, but my parents made the entire ordeal a nightmare. It was more anxiety than it was worth to get my required miles in with them as the instructor. People living in large cities often never get the opportunity, it’s high stress and taxis are readily available. Car ownership is expensive and public transportation is available, as well as biking. In uni I taught several Asian students how to drive because countries like Japan often have expensive training programs, and insurance is painful for testers. European cities are often designed for micro mobility and bikes and smart cars are preferred just because of size.
Aren’t taxis incredibly expensive where you live? They are here.
They typically are quite expensive, but if you don’t use them daily, only use them when absolutely needed (which is when other options are not available), it will be cheaper than maintaining a car.
As an experienced driver, highway driving is much easier, and relaxing, then street driving.
Familiarity breeds contempt of course. But genuinely, on the highway there are less variables to account for so it’s easier mentally
I love driving, I find it very relaxing, opens your perspective to see the world. I grew up driving, my family always drove, everybody I know drove, got my license as soon as possible. That’s what everybody around me was doing too.
I think parts of the world were you see driving as being more luxurious, or difficult to have, or just unaffordable, then driving becomes a status symbol, it’s not as universal, but also the infrastructure is less universal because most people are on foot or motorbikes. In those contexts driving can be more stressful than using the other methods.
Depends on where the highway is. If it’s rural and away from big cities, it can be relaxing. If you’re trying to drive to / through Toronto, it’s a fucking nightmare. People will drive up your ass and cut you off then brake immediately, not let you into your exit lane which starts and ends with little notice, and the signage leading up to it was blocked by bumper to bumper traffic and big trucks. Yes, I am bitter about it.
I used to live somewhere where I needed a car, and I didn’t think much of it.
But after moving somewhere where I hardly ever needed a car, I ended up selling mine within a few years because I simply stopped using it. I realized that alternative forms of transportation were far less stressful and way less expensive than driving, and I never turned back.
If you live somewhere that requires a car to get around, you’re stuck. If you don’t, I highly recommend switching to public transit and dumping your car. We underestimate how much stress driving adds to our lives because we never get a good chance to take a break from it.
I just don’t need one, so never bothered with it.
Same here. I grew up in a big city, moved around to different big cities, always been on foot, biking or communal traffic. Never felt the need for a car. I’m in the upper middle ages now so I doubt it’s going to change.
You time traveled to the Middle Ages to avoid cars? That’s dedication!
Indeed. While you were learning how to reverse the car I was studying how to reverse the time.
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
I had no access to or use of a car until I was around 23. Up to that point I lived in a country where you could cycle for most of your daily routine, take the bus a couple of times a month and the train sporadically.
I moved to a country where cycling was for the poor and foolhardy, me for several years, and public transport was atrocious.
Public transport has marginally improved, my bicycle hasn’t been used for 20+ years and our household has one car.
Learning to drive is a process. It takes time. Just like learning to fly a plane takes time. If you have a need to drive, learning how is step one. In my country even when you pass your test, you are required to keep a logbook for at least two years and drive in a variety of conditions before you can actually upgrade your probationary licence.
Wow which country did you go from and to where?
It seems like a downgrade, but there must have been an economical / life quality reason that you had moved.
I was born in Australia, moved to the Netherlands as a child and as an an adult moved back to Australia where I am now.
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.
I don’t like driving…
I don’t need to drive
Owning a car is stupidly expensive. And its an expense I don’t need to pay.
Cars make people lazy and entitled and create divisions between them. When you’re driving you’re not around other people like you would be on public transit. They’re bothered.
My coworker has the same reasons except he has another coworker drive him to/from work so his reasoning is kinda sloppy there.
That’s a very narrow view. It depends a lot on where you live and what interest you have.
You realize there are a lot of people that live and work and do stuff where it is practically impossible to cope without a car?
Driving does not automatically mean you want to avoid other people.
I don’t need to drive
They literally explained their reason. There’s no need to bring up other circumstances. Them not liking to drive will also lead to them avoid moving to places that they must drive. An activity that will take a significant amount of your life is going to be an important factor to decide where you move to.
Cars automatic make people disjointed from the people who live around them.
I rode the 16 bus in Denver for a while as my commute to work, and believe me I am so happy to be separated from those people.
99% of them were fine but the other ones … let’s just say they aren’t ever guests in my car.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
You gotta include maintanance, repairs and depreciation too
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.
I have a license. I enjoy driving as a leisure activity.
But I hate driving to work. I just take the shuttle and enjoy listening to my podcasts. We have a decent public transport system as well, so it helps.
