I meant personal automobiles. Bicycles aren’t anywhere near as dangerous so I thought it kinda went without saying but I understand why you might think of them lol

And when I said “anyone” I meant like, absent the influence of cars. Like if we took a person and presented them societies with different organizations of travel, weighing their costs, efficiencies, threat to life, etc, I don’t think anyone who didn’t grow up in this culture would pick this shit on an objective basis. Which is why I said “we’re just used to it.”

The problem is that nobody's making an informed, apples-to-apples choice when it comes to cars or transit. People like the drive anywhere, anytime access they get when they spend five figures a year on their cars. They wouldn't trade it for the transit where they live because the transit where they live sucks. They wouldn't trade it for NYC transit because even that is full of suck (bad connectivity outside of Manhattan and filthy-ass stations that are going to feel like saunas in a few weeks if not right now). Thing is, MTA's budget is $19B and even if you restrict it to NYC proper, serves 8M people. That's under $2500 per person. As such, the proper comparison should be either:

Whatever godawful clunker you can get off craigslist and somehow keep running for $2500 a year versus MTA levels of service

OR

Current car versus what MTA could do with a quintupled budget -- Manhattan levels of service in all boroughs with clean, cool stations and rental car reimbursement for when people need to go somewhere backwards.

a bicycle is an individual vehicle

unironically a good way of thinking about it

A bicycle is an appropriately individual vehicle in that is a 1 Human power vehicle to carry 1 human rather than 100 horsepower vehicle to carry uh 1 human