this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
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Fuck Cars
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A grand a month for a car? Only if you can afford to blow money. I bought my car used 6 years ago for $4,000. Between repairs and maintenance, tires, oil, repairs, etc I've spent about another $4,500. Plus $1,000 a year fuel (Prius). And $800 a year on insurance. So my all in cost is like $280 a month and dropping the longer I keep it. Plus what I can get from selling it.
I spend under $70/mo on my metro pass, and they’re normally “expensive”* at $104/mo. There are zero added costs, ever, except for if I didn’t also own a car I would need to use a carshare service probably once a month, but it’s hard to gauge since sometimes I use my car just to make sure it actually gets used. Without a car there are no parking fees, no gas, no maintenance, and not even any need to shovel snow or anything else that you likely don’t even realize you do simply to keep owning a vehicle.
$280/mo is a pretty bum deal to not even get other benefits like being driven around or never having to deal with the concept of rush hour.
Plus you can travel as drunk as you want as long as you're not a problem.
Also true! I don’t drink much, but it’s still a huge benefit, and it also means that I don’t need to think about the timing or anything when I do have a glass.
What I dislike about the fuckcars instance. Ignorant people who just think people only live in big cities with public transport and that all of their families and friends and relatives they want to see are all there a mere bus ride or train trip away. Just ignorant to 90% of the land people live on. Most of the country requires a vehicle.
Yeah, but this post is about moving into an area with such infrastructure...
The post is claiming you can afford such a neighborhood by saving $1,000 a month by not owning a car.
Well, yeah... That's the whole point. If you move into such an area, you don't need a car. I feel your issue, I live relatively rural and we definitely need a car and I sometimes get upset with this mindset here too. But it doesn't fit into this post.
You missed my point. It's trying to state you can offset the higher cost of living in one of those areas because your saving $1000 a month by not owning a car. That $1000 a month figure is bullshit. So is the cost difference between living in a walkable city vs outside of one only being $1000 in many places. Like a small home in the walkable area of Kansas City is around $400,000, while a similar home 10 miles away is $200,000. That's a lot more than a grand a month difference if you're getting a mortgage. Like twice as much.
First, the post is literally about moving into a city.
Secondly, we all know that rural places exist and you’re not being smart for bringing it up as if we don’t. This sub is based almost entirely on making cities, which are inherently worse off with car-centrism, into better places.
Lastly, there is zero reason why rural communities need to be that spread out. You 1000% can have mid-density, walkable towns and many older villages in North America have town centers that are built closer to that ideal. Those places were then surrounded by sprawl and suffer greatly for it.
The ignorance is your own.
The post is also about cars costing you a thousand dollars a month that you could be saving. That number is just silly. You can have a car for significantly less.
Also, you're talking like you can just eliminate all of the small towns and housings and redo them to group them up. Any small places like that would still need to own vehicles in order to leave those small towns when needed. Not owning a vehicle is only a possibility in larger cities. Especially if you have to work outside of your town.
Saving the money by how, buddy? What other action comes along with that to make it so that one could be not needing the car?
And no, I am not saying that. I am saying that it does not need to be that way, and that we can build better when we build new things.
I genuinely can’t tell if you’re illiterate or simply stupid, but either way I’m going to go now because you are draining what little remaining hope for humanity I have from my body and I’d like to hang onto that.
I have 2 cars in a rural "city" cars are absolutely required here. We used to have a trolley, but it got killed in the GM/Firestone conspiracy. Things could have been so much better and as much as I love my MX-5, overall I totally get fuck cars. I wish I had the option to opt out of ownership. But since I don't have that option, I chose to maximize the fun, and minimize the damage. It's honestly the best I can do in the Midwest. If the winters continue to get warmer I can get rid of the Wrangler entirely, which ... Fuck that's not good either. It'd be nice to live in a world without cars, and I want that. I'd absolutely give up both for a bus pass or light rail but logistically, I can't. And it's bullshit that that was once an option, but our lives were made worse by capitalism and forces outside of our control.