> If you've got a car payment like 35% of Americans, the average payment for a used car is around $500 [2.3], but since we're dealing with averages and vehicles whose lifespans exceed their loans, maybe we can just go ahead and cut that in half to $250/month.
Ask yourself why only 35% have payments. Also, half is pretty pessimistic since a car loan on the long end is 6 years.
> How are you supposed to own only one car if you are a dual-income household in the suburbs and work two different jobs at different locations? Owning one car per person is not a "luxury" in this country, it is just about the norm (1.88 cars per person in the USA). [3]
One person drops the other off. This isn’t a difficult problem and it’s how my parents did it for nearly 15 years way back in the 70s and 80s. Clearly car ownership is a foreign concept to you, but at least try to steelman it to get a decent argument.
> You really think NYC has a lower obesity rate as an effect rather than a cause, as in, all the people with obesity just say "well, I guess I can't live here anymore, I'll go move to the suburbs?" Do you have any information to back up that type of thinking?
Are you seriously asking for proof that obese and disabled people aren’t the biggest fans of having to walk everywhere?
>New York (due to NYC) is the most physically active state according to FitBit, and you're gonna jump on here and claim that this completely disconnected obesity rates
You’re getting confused again and assuming that the city is causing activity rather than just forcing the inactive people out by being an unfriendly environment to them.
> The 65+ commuters in NYC are actually the most active commuting segment of the population and over half walk 10 blocks or more per day. [5] I have a hunch they might still be alive and productive because they're so active!
The segment of the population who does X tends to do X! News at 10! This doesn’t say anything about the community that can’t walk.
> NYC's subway system will be 95% accessible by 2055, [6] which is really quite soon on the scale of city planning and development. About 25% of stations are currently accessible, and really a subway system 25% the size of NYC's system is still a vast transit network. This also doesn't include New York's vast bus system, which is essentially 100% accessible.
“Accessible” doesn’t mean convenient. The elevators are fucking shit in the stations that are accessible and getting to/from the stations is still shit. I took a wheelchair bound aunt to a play on broadway maybe 10 years ago, and it was awful even with me pushing her. Accessibility isn’t a checkbox.
>Tell me, how do you expect the vision impaired to get around in areas that require cars?
Non sequitur, I’m not talking about blind people. I’m talking about mobility impaired people.
> including perhaps the best city park in the entire world, Central Park
It’s an amazing park, but it’s just a park. The comparison to wilderness is laughable.
> Last point: How hard is it really to live in a small apartment
Depends on if you treat your apartment as a box to shit in and sleep in between spending all of your time elsewhere or as a place to actually live and spend huge parts of the daytime. There is a reason NYC was one of the worst places to be quarantined.
> I'm also being generous, the national average is 25MPG not 30MPG.
No you’re not, you quoted $4.50/gal for gas when that hasn’t been an average people have paid until the Ukrainian invasion.