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[–] 148 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (16 children)

People who say driving is freedom have never lived within walking distance of the amenities they need. You think driving to Costco/Walmart is convenient? I've left the house 5 minutes before the grocery store closes. When I want to make a recipe, I don't check the fridge for what I have until literally right before I need to start making it because forgetting something adds at most 15 minutes to the prep time. I've never had to haul ten grocery bags from my car because I never need to buy that much at one time and then watch half of it go bad in the fridge. I can go get snacks when I'm high as a kite on weed without killing someone on the road. True freedom for me is never needing to drive or own a car.

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  • [–] 24 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    Carbrains don't understand the true freedom that is taking transit on a night out. I never have to worry about a Designated Driver or dragging my hungover ass back to wherever I left my (hypothetical) car. As long as my drunk ass can find my way to the train station I can get home no problem

    Same with living close to a grocery store, I basically never check what I actually have on hand since it's less than a block away. I can easily pick up whatever I'm making for supper on the way home or dash out if I forgot something. I can think about what I want to eat on the train home, pick up any ingredients I need on the walk to my place, maybe stop by a liquor store for a bottle of wine for supper, it's wonderful. I'd really struggle with planning meals if going to the store involved packing up a vehicle

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    I think that USians live in a state of constant, subconscious anxiety due to how incredibly atomized they are. There will need to be major cultural shifts before we'll ever have the wherewithal to build needed public transportation infrastructure.

    Things will have to get a lot worse before they get better. I am hoping that gas prices will rise enough to provoke some changes; the next six months will be telling.

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    [–] 55 points 4 months ago (24 children)

    An entire continent is missing.

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  • [–] 35 points 4 months ago (12 children)
  • [–] 22 points 4 months ago (11 children)

    Three of them, though I don’t know how much biking people are doing in Antarctica.

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  • [–] 12 points 4 months ago (8 children)

    Fun fact: there's no universally-accepted definition of "continent!" Depending on how you define it there could be as many as 8 or as few as 4. Sometimes Africa, Europe, and Asia are counted as one continent, and sometimes Antarctica isn't (notably in the Olympic flag). Sometimes Zealandia is added as the 8th continent. All the definitions I've seen count Australia as its own, though; and as noted that one's missing.

    All of that to say, the original commenter might have an Afro-Eurasian non-Antarctic model in mind when they say that one entire continent is missing. The second one might have a non-Antarctic six-continent model in mind, and you have the traditional (English-speaking) seven-continent model in mind. But you might very reasonably (well, okay, slightly reasonably) say that this infographic is missing four continents: Africa, Australia, Antarctica, and Zealandia.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Side note, I just realized that the continents alphabetize really strangely, if you combine the Americas:

    Africa Americas Antarctica Asia Australia Europe

    The letter A is way overrepresented in the names of our continents.

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  • [–] 17 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    Also excluding Mexico for some reason.

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  • [–] 30 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    North America, only place with higher than 50% by car, brings the world average to 51%?!

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  • [–] 22 points 4 months ago (12 children)

    The North America stat is fine if you're only talking about the US and Canada... but since they left Mexico out it's not really accurate

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    [–] 12 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    So Africa/Mexico/Oceania must have a very high proportion of drivers to skew the world average, as from the graph alone there's no way the average is 51%

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    [–] 11 points 4 months ago (10 children)

    Hello! Australia is a thing! We get around just as much as everyone else does, thank you very much! I've got the emu feathers to prove it!

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  • [–] 13 points 4 months ago (8 children)

    I'm no mapologist, but I believe Austria is included in one of the Europe sections.

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    [–] 11 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    How did they get an average of 51% for cars, when all but one bar is below that?

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    First off "Africa" (22.2% cars) and "Australia and New Zeland" (75.9% cars) are not shown. But probably more important: The paper where the data is taken from used the traffic data from 794 cities, "weighted by the population of each observation". Most probably there were more cities from regions with high car usage in the data.
    Interesting side fact: "The 794 cities in the data are not representative samples of cities worldwide or different regions".

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    [–] 9 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    How is Europe split? Germany is rather central. Does it Count as north or west europe? South? Probably nor east. Or is Germany divided again for this analysis? Resembling post-WWII times.

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    [–] 9 points 4 months ago (1 child)
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    [–] 6 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Now do urban, suburban, exurban, rural splits.

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  • [–] 10 points 4 months ago

    I looked at it and the study is only considering cities. I wonder why whoever made the chart omitted Mexico since it is included in the original study?

    The researchers for this study put together a neat data explorer at citiesmoving.com

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