I'm shocked its only 60% if I'm being honest.
this post was submitted on 28 May 2026
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It's advertising: they think they are "free" and really wanted to have a car
No? Forced means something is unwanted. My interpretation is that there is not enough public transport and they wish there was.
yes?
40% don't feel forced.
'they [the 40%] think they [the 40%] are “free” and really wanted to have a car'
Yeah, I would have guessed much higher.
Carbrain is a bugger. It took much less than a century for people to go from protesting cars to "yes please, can I have another."
North America went from having a sprawling ubiquitous continental rail system to saying that rail would never work here because we're a sprawling continent.
And how do we get around the country? Yea I could rent a vehicle every time I want to leave the city. But that wouldn't be preactucle since I live outside of the city.
As the other person said, rail is the way. Look up China's high speed rail. Why would we want to do 110km/h on beat up roads when we could do 350km/h on smooth rail? Road rage or read a book? I'd much rather read a book.
Could possibly be that their population is almost entirely concentrated in a few cities where there is sufficient public transport infrastructure.
I doubt it. Canadian cities are not known for their transit. Plus in Ontario the premier made building bike lanes illegal.
Canadian transit inefficiency is why the famous urbanist channel NotJustBikes started his work and moved away from there.
Quick look says it's not much different from US urban population numbers, so that must not be it.
And they have the same 60% also.
Meanwhile, roughly 58% of car-owning adults express a strong interest in living car-free or are completely open to ditching their vehicles if viable infrastructure existed.
Have you seen how far and wide the country is and how far apart every municipality is?
We ain't got enough train lines to get us anywhere other than the major metropolitan areas.
That trains can't do that every bit as well as cars (Much better, quite frankly) is a myth. You can look at both North American history and massive spread-out continental countries overseas for plentiful evidence otherwise. The car monoinfrastructure is simply an intentional policy choice. Reversing it involves confronting that fact.
What you said supports the argument of the person you're trying to refute. There aren't enough train lines.
I'm not sure about that, I think the real issue here is that there just aren't enough train lines
Heh you're right. I come across the far-apartness meme and I see red, and need to inform on the myth above all else.
Buddy. We're on the same page.
East Asia and Europe proves its doable.
The automobile lobby has been blocking all development here for ages.
Yeah my bad, see the other reply to my comment by Drusas.
I'm a 20 minute drive to a town with more than one grocery store. I'm a 3 hour drive to the hospital you get sent to if there's anything seriously wrong. There is zero public transit.
Yeah were fuckin forced
I have an appointment in Toronto and I live in Kitchener. I can drive for 1.5hrs to get there, or lets take 4hrs out of my day to take 5 different buses to get there. Thats also ignoring the trip to Waterloo international airport because my work is nearby and thats where the bus leaves from.
Then I have to turn around and spend another 4hrs getting back? Or if its after 8pm im fucked theres apparently no way to even get back all the way, id have to take a taxi or uber accross kitchener
Also this will cost me probably $100 round trip too
So yeah were pretty forced into driving
We wouldn't have that type of option where I live. It's Uber or drive your own car.
I don't drive a car and my commute to work is like 1hr20 with transit (one way), I try to work remotely as much as possible but it's against company policy.
Every time I bring up the fact that I live far I get a "why don't you own a car?"
Because they know I can afford one, and it is "obvious" to them I should own one. So yes, this survey is real. The entire way I go to work is a miracle, transit just happens to cover the far regions of my city.
It is fkn far, and I considered moving there but it's a Carville.
The same people that hound you about not having a car will complain about gas prices. And also drive a gas guzzler.
Having lived in Montreal for a couple years that's completely unsurprising to me.
You can get by without a car inside the city, but as soon as you need to travel outside even a short distance you'll need a car.
Plus people look at you like you're some kind of apparition if you mention walking somewhere, even if it's only a block or two away.
I assume the situation is similar in other Canadian cities.
Well obviously?
You need your infrastructure to support the option of no car or car-less, and they don't have anything close to that
I'm mostly forced to by my job but also where I live.
My job requires lots of travel as well as moving stuff around the province. One day I might need to drive 8 hours to a city and carry with me 4-5 bins of stuff and a bag of equipment. Not terribly feasible with a bus, especially if I need to leave at 4-5am to get there before 3-4pm.
But even without my job I live just outside city limits so there's no bus service. I suppose I could bike the 5kms to the nearest bus stop and then hop on there but that's just too much of a pain in the arse when I need to get 1-2 weeks worth of groceries.
op is probably not north american. we have really shit infrastructure here. if you live in a major city with good transit you could be fine, but probably 90% of the places you could live make it very difficult to not drive.
i bike, but i dont go more than a mile from my house. buses are awful here. when my kid is born in november i will absolutely need a car to take her to her doctors appointments etc. im not happy about it, but its the reality of not living in a major metropolitan area.
Where I previously lived, I would have said 'agree', or at least it would be a serious quality-of-life determent to not drive, due to spending over an hour to make a trip that a car could in 20 minutes. It also helps that I don't want to hire drive-share or taxis constantly, but this also wasn't a reliable option.
I'm Canadian and own a car but I was finally able to move to an urban part of my city around 5 years ago and it's been so great.
Like, my car broke nearly two months ago and I haven't had the money to fix it, but it hasn't been a problem at all. I own a bike and an escooter so I've just been walking and using those. If it wasn't for visiting family who live in places only accessible by car I'd get rid of mine entirely
Make them visit you instead 😈
My car needed a clutch and throw-out bearing and I only changed them last weekend. It sat for a month and half before I could get back to Ottawa to fix it in my parents’ driveway but until then it didn’t really matter. I don’t even drive it much when it does work!
Everything is in pursuit of burning more oil and selling more GDPness. The only kind of sense anything has to make is financial sense.
Look where that's got us...