Shockingly, residents of a city with extensive, reliable, and affordable public transit, choose to use it.

Except the people in Queens for some reason. It’s not even geographically isolated the way Staten Island is, I wonder what’s up with that.

While I'm certainly in favour of transit, I think this shows the opposite: households with the money for a vehicle have a vehicle; households without do not.

Queens is perhaps less dense, making ownership of a vehicle (parking etc) more feasible.

I've lived here for most of my adult life and never felt like I needed a car.

Having one is a huge pain. Parking. Insurance. Gas. Maintenance. Getting home when you're drunk.

It's easier to just get on the train.

I'd like if transit was cheaper and more reliable outside the city. Visiting family in the suburbs via transit is slower and more expensive.

In Queens and Staten Island there is substantially more parking available for free, they're neighbourhoods with more standard American detached homes and driveways.

In NYC itself, owning a car is pointless as you can get anywhere faster by either walking, cycling or metro, and you won't need to play the "drive around for an hour game" to find a parking spot. The richest New Yorkers will tend to live in newer buildings which have underground carparks and a space associated with them, or the option to rent one.

I’m very surprised by these household incomes where are these people living?

US Census Bureau, 2015

Manhattan is obviously the richest borough but people largely don't drive there because it's expensive and annoying to find parking, and there's the congestion charge, and there's always a subway station within a five minute walk.

Staten Island 🤣

in the past

Busses suck. They are inconsistent and rarely go where you need. Usually it is just easier to drive, as much as I hate to admit it.

lol you’re right the stats are from 2015 why are we even sharing data from then, surely there is more up to date information?

Busses themselves don't suck. Busses are fantastic when they are planned properly and have the infrastructure built to support them.

If your local bus system sucks, then it's a poorly implemented system that needs to be fixed.

its car free because its impossible to get anywhere in NYC with a car.

There are a lot of households without income. The average income per worker is probably higher.

There might be several reasons for that connection. For example, if you rarely need or use a car it is natural that only those with fuck toy-money would prioritize buying one. They buy it because they might as well, not because they have to.

If public transport was insufficient, or it was easier to use a car, those numbers might look very different.

From the car centric US point of view,yes. However, being able to get everywhere anytime by car and be able to park anywhere is fundamentally incompatible with having a non-car centric city. It is two sides of the same coin. NYC is pretty much the only major city in the US where a large area is actually not totally car-centric.

Busses don't suck, if busses are stuck, traffic planning sucks. Busses have higher capacity in a well working system than cars. If you have capacity issues on the road, you needed bus only lanes. That would not reduce but actually increase street capacity, while removing the brakes from the busses.

@Crankenstein @xelareko And if they are noisy, full of vibrations and stinky, that too has been fixed.Electric buses are available.

I just got back to the US from two weeks in Rome and Milan.

Buses are fucking great! Run everywhere, take you anywhere you want to go, skip traffic jams with the bus-only lanes and especially much faster than finding a parking spot.

It’s my first time having a completely car-free vacation and I loved it. Too bad I had to come home to bad civic planning and drive everywhere again