this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2026
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Car culture is actually making it an obligation.
This is highly variable depending on your country, area, town. I have lived car free all my life in Canada, in some small towns, and moved to a big city. It's entirely possible to live in a small town without a car depending on what you do and the size of the town, even with deficient public transit.
Most people live in urbanized areas and towns are just clusters of houses and people that could be served by transit. According to statista, more than 80% of Canada's population lives in an urban area. In fact, some of those towns were even created by transit, or already had transit, and now cars are an "obligation".
And if we are to compare with old numbers from 2012 for commuting distances in Canada, most people will drive less than 10-15 km to go to work, with the vast majority being less than 10 km. So the vast majority seems to gravitate within their town or urban cluster. The "obligation" is mostly made up by car culture, and people will happily defend it so they can justify having their own car. Nobody will be demanding transit and it will die.
There is however a spike for people commuting more than 30 km. And those can have a real obligation to use a car. They should switch to electric when it's going to be possible. Nobody wants to force them to give up their car, but they are in the minority, meaning cities, and even towns, should not be choking with cars.
In fact, nobody wants to force anybody to give up their car if they truly think it's an obligation. Just be aware that electric cars will obviously not solve congestion issues, will continue to pollute in certain other ways, will still be deadly, and are not an easy works for all fix.
Everyone benefits from having less cars on the roads and them being electric will not achieve that goal. It's not because a minority of people want or really need a car, that we can justify building whole towns, cities, and infrastructure for those cars.