It's honestly insane. Half of regular travels in the world is done using huge machines 10-20X the weight of humans inside.
People get to carry a giant piece of metal around and they think it's okay.
this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
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Fuck Cars
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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.
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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Amen, Driving is dependance.
I’d argue it’s both freedom and dependence.
If you live in a rural area it really does feel like you are trapped there without a motorized vehicle. Especially late at night or in an emergency, even an ambulance can be 20+ minutes away in many places.
You can see this with the popularity of over powered e-bikes with teens. Basically silent dirt bikes at this point. They let kids go much farther from home and reduce the speed differential on road sides.
Public transit would be nice of course, but lots of people live 20-50km from any stores, and plenty live further. And have long cold winters.
I commuted by bike and subway for 18 years in Boston, but then moved home to care for dementia parents, now my son is biking (just pedals), and we’re forced to ride on paths or one town over where they have wide sidewalks and crossings (there aren’t either in our 2 stoplight town). Btw my commute took twice as long by public transport than by bike, but that’s another issue.
Like everything else, it’s a gray area, I think the US could realistically reduce vehicle use to the 40%s, but to go much lower would require the elimination of sprawl, building denser housing and a ton more local shopping, doctors, and grocery stores. Not just more trains and buses.
/end rant, sorry it got long, nuance is tricky.
If you live in a rural area... in the USA
Rural areas where I lived in Mexico are walkable/bikable and most people get to the city an hour or so away with a shuttle that goes back and forth to the village. Our rural model is different and better where all the people live close in a small town or village area that has all the stuff to do and grocery stores and the crop fields, ranches, and orchards spread out radially from there.
The USA was built over the past century for the profit of oil companies. Most USians probably don't realize that it's possible to do things differently, and at this point it's probably not possible to change without land reform, given how much of US farmland has been consolidated under corporate ownership.
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Depends how you see it. I live in the countryside and would hate living in the city. Yet one does not both live in the countryside AND eat without a car when the closest grocery store is 30km away. We used to have a local grocery store that hardly had anything and which unsurprisingly went out if business.
In my case, driving IS freedom. It’s the freedom to go where I want when I want without having to rely on anyone else.
Do I miss having the grocery store across the street when I lived in the city? For sure, but I sure am glad I’m back in the countryside now.
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An entire continent is missing.
More than one!
Three of them, though I don’t know how much biking people are doing in Antarctica.
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.
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.
For the glory of A, Europe shall now be renamed to Aurope!
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North America, only place with higher than 50% by car, brings the world average to 51%?!
Southern Africa has 65%, and Australia and New Zeland has 75.9% (from the source on ScienceDirect)
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The Spiders Georg of car dependence
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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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
I think they're trying to tell a story about the way cities in the US and Canada are brutally malformed for moving people around in them. Mexico is much more like Central America in its modality, and so adding their stats in obscures the abnormalities that are the US and Canada.
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How did they get an average of 51% for cars, when all but one bar is below that?
weighted averages.
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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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!
I'm no mapologist, but I believe Austria is included in one of the Europe sections.
I didn't know Hitler was from the land down under
Where women snore and men chunder?
he is strange and makes me nervous
I see you speak my language
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Australia
Austria
lmao
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What about Africa ?
Everything is within walking distance for them due to Mercator contraction.
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.
Germany is in the western half of Europe
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