rexxit

Yes, some light planes have fuel economy similar to efficient cars (which is very impressive considering how fast they are relative to cars). If you consider the advantages of direct, straight line routing, it's not hard for planes to do better on fuel economy.

We're not talking about jets here, though some of those do very well in mpg on a per passenger basis.

I gave up kids to have flying!

Worth noting that the amount of aviation fuel burned annually should make it a negligible contributer to environmental lead contamination compared to widespread automotive use (although I'm sure it contributes on airport grounds).

Edit: All the pilots I know want to use unleaded, and it was recently approved after being stuck in a bureaucratic nightmare process, but market forces may make it hard to adopt.

It was caught in FAA-Bureauctatic hell for 15+ years and just approved last year. It will be still be slow to become available and adopt for reasons that are complicated, but amount to bureaucracy, economics, and an insane degree of risk aversion. The vast majority of pilots want unleaded and it's also much better for the engines.

Have you seen the unbelievably entitled, self-centered assholes who play music on trails because they're too cool for headphones and fuck what anyone else wants?

Maybe you happen to be on a route that runs well from home to work without lots of stops and no need to change lines. Can you find a destination in your city that would require a change of bus or train and incur a larger time penalty? What if your job was located there instead?

I think most people buy sensible vehicles but there are certainly people who have a truck fetish that is not justified. Unfortunately it creates an arms race where all cars get larger because there are very real risks of a collision with a larger vehicle.

phallacy

Nice.

Your argument parallels the no true Scotsman fallacy much closer than you realize.

You: no Scotsman would commit such a crime

Me: but it says here that a Scotsman committed the crime

You: No true Scotsman would commit such a crime...

Compare:

You: buses are great!

Me: I take buses and they suck!

You: good buses are great, you just aren't taking the good ones...

It's exactly the same. You get to decide who is a true Scotsman for the purpose of argument, and what constitutes a good bus service. You can simply declare that the bus service isn't a good one and therefore doesn't reflect badly on bus services, just as you can decide the criminal wasn't a true Scotsman, and therefore you're always right.

you now admit that you yourself have used buses that run frequently, which undermines your original argument, even if they had other flaws in your view

I have used buses which run frequently for buses, but which are still too infrequent and thus add lots of unnecessary time.

I think NYC is an excellent representative of transit done well. It may not be world-best, but there aren't many places that are as dense or more dense and that creates a best case scenario for running at all hours and with maximum frequency. Also, most people don't own cars and don't drive there. There are few places with so many built-in advantages for transit as NYC.

It sounds like you just don't like cities or being around too many other people.

No argument there.

It's hard to tell the intent of any poster, and there is a vehement anti-car movement here (and on Reddit) that allows for no exceptions to the idea that living should be done at high density, and without personal vehicles. It's hard to read your intent and beliefs because the things you said before are very similar to what I've heard from the zealots.

I'm trying to make the point that public transit easily misses on serving every origin, destination, and timing efficiently. Usually it misses badly, and my average experience with specific commutes is a 3x time penalty for transit vs driving. The penalty gets worse if done at especially early or late hours. Maybe this is exacerbated by car infrastructure and lower density, but the anti car crowd would have you believe it's intrinsic and not a function of history and preference. At any rate I usually disagree with them on almost every premise.

You're off by a factor of 4 on the grocery distance for the last 3 places I've lived, and those stores were CLOSE. It's like 100cc of petrol to go that far, 200cc round trip, in lieu of 40+ minutes of fast walking (in which you can only carry limited groceries). I know all about it because I've done the walk many times when I didn't have a car, and it fucking sucks.

I'd say freaking out about 200ccs of petrol to get groceries is an insane degree of austerity, and the fact that people like you are proposing that is evidence of either an irrational need to control impact, or (if justified) evidence that the world is grotesquely overpopulated.

Nobody owns 3 ton cars around here. Mine isn't even 2 tons. In fact it's pretty close in weight to a Fiat 500, while being generally more useful in every way. Everything you're presenting is a strawman/caricature of what you imagine typical suburban car owners to live like. And yes, we should all be driving electric cars, but it's not going to happen overnight.

Edit: damn near nobody on earth would drive to get groceries if the store was 300m/1000ft away. Most people will never be able to live that close to the grocery store, work, or any other place that they routinely need to visit. That's why your example is insane.

I swear this is a no-true-Scotsman argument: "you don't hate buses/apartments/transit, you just have never lived anywhere that has the good stuff".

I've lived many places and traveled plenty, and I'm convinced there's no good stuff. To have transit that works, you need density that's oppressive. I did it in NYC, which is a best-case scenario for transit facilitated by high density. NYC has transit that runs frequently, and 24/7/365. Buses, subway, trains, and even ferries. It's so dense most people don't own a car (I certainly didn't). Everyone lives in apartments. Walking and biking is the norm. Even pizza delivery is done by bike instead of car. Catching an Uber was still much faster for many point-to-point trips, because transit necessarily can't go direct from everywhere, to everywhere.

Now that I'm back in suburbia, a trip to the grocery store takes 1/4 as long by car (same distance). I don't have to spend a ton of time waiting to catch a connecting train or bus that I missed by 30 seconds. I don't have to ride though stop after stop, packed in with other people. I can just go direct from origin to destination in quiet comfort, without the headaches

Are you going to be first in line to give up your computer? Your phone? Antibiotics? Vaccines? Electricity?

Innovation is real, even if you don't personally like it. Motor vehicles are a legitimately good invention, arguably only becoming problematic due to increasing population and urbanization.

Not allowing the overcrowded parts of the world to invade the less crowded parts of the world is a policy choice.