My heart goes out to all you who don't have any other choice but to drive

Ironically, I'm a driving instructor, and pretty much the only time I really use my car is when I'm at work.
- Driver in the streets, public transportation and pedestrian advocate in the sheets
- The enemy!!1!
- Wait, your car? You're instructing learners in your own car? How does this work, doesn't your car need pedals for the passenger seat?
  
  Yep. You can get them installed on basically all cars. The next car I'm looking at is a Lexus. By the looks of it I'll have to get my dual controls made bespoke for that which could easily cost upwards of £600.
  I honestly much prefer doing it in my own car as opposed to having to hire.
  
  That's pretty standard in the UK

Fun fact: Robert Moses, the man who almost single-handedly fucked New York City beyond repair by building bridges and parkways while actively working against public transportation options like trains, buses and subways beginning in the 1930s, never learned to drive himself.
Robert Moses really deserves to be the patron demon of this sub.
- Most recent 99pi episode or power broker?
  
  The Power Broker. I've never heard of 99pi - for that matter, I'd never heard of Robert Moses before stumbling on the book.
  
  There are also two episodes on behind the bastards
- Didn't really affect most people though. Wait until you hear about Thomas Midgely!

I traded in my car a couple of weeks ago and the guy at the dealer was so shocked that I only drove 11k miles in 4 years. He was like, do you even buy groceries? Well, working from home and strategically living close to all the places I regularly need to go to makes me drive less. As for me getting a new car after just 4 years, that’s another story.
- Farmers <-- (hand hold meme) --> city dwellers: "Being able to get eggs at any time of day"
  
  Don't the farmers have to wait on the chickens to lay some tho?
- Wfh and strategic home location are privilege.
  Disclaimer, I do this too.
  But this is the "if your state/country is conservative/bad/repressive just move" of commuting.
  
  I get what you mean, but I'm in a conservative state. But yes, just being able to work from home and afford to live close to the city is a privilege, and I'm aware of that.
- Google had sent me an update of my usage for November and was all, "You drove 35 miles this month!"
  
  It usually tells me things like 150 km, and then I go though and it's another misclassified train trip
  
  I walk double that per month if I believe Google maps stats.

I decided to only work at overseas startups so there's no chance of a "oopsie we retracted WFH". I'll be selling my car this year, I already have the electric bike to replace it.
- Any tips for overseas job hunting and how do timezone hours work?
  
  I found my job on Reddit somehow, but there are plenty of overseas jobs on LinkedIn and the other major job exchanges. I work in a customer facing role so I look for jobs that need someone to handle customers in X timezones. For example, my company is based in Berlin but they wanted someone to manage the US customers.
  NGL the timezone stuff is HARD at first. I am six hours behind almost all of my coworkers so I sometimes get completely excluded from discussions and meetings. I occasionally have to wake up early for things (4am product launch...) and there isn't the technical help available after noon my time, so I have had to develop my own troubleshooting and coding skills. And of course it can get lonely when there's no one else about.
  But they fly me out to HQ every year and also offsites in Rome, Spain, and Portugal. So it's an alright tradeoff.

I have now no other option but to drive because my country is phasing out one if not the most used public transportation vehicles here in the Philippines :(
- Hadn't heard about this before - sounds like a debacle.... https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2024/01/16/2326247/jeepney-drivers-protest-over-phase-out-plan

I was considering and was considering for another job, but in the end they went with another candidate. The major downside with it would be the 6+ months of car commuting until the trial employment ended and I was stable enough there to make a move. 6+ months of 35minutes in the car each way... Would have been an awesome job though.
- One thing I've learned from 25 years of work experience is to never get paid in promises. Sure, they maybe backed up the offer in writing, but six months is a long time for you to make good on a commitment for them to have a 'restructure' that somehow prevents them from making good on theirs.
  I hope you found something else more awesome since then!
  
  Not op but at least in Sweden we often get 6 months trial employment and after that they are honestly kind of stuck with us (cannot really fire us unless very specific things happen). So you can actually get some better conditions as they do want you to do the job and can not just replace you. If all fails you can also get help from the union.
- I'm guessing you're not from the US?

Gotta say I'm pleasantly surprised by the vibe in here, it's a lot more true to the stated purpose than its r*ddit namesake which seems to be just an aggressive, literal take on the name.
I enjoy driving and love tinkering with cars and bikes. I don't enjoy effectively being forced to use them for mundane commuting.

As a car guy who lives in the middle of nowhere country side sometimes I bike to town just because I feel like biking 50 miles.

The only job I've commuted to by car was, um, the summer job I had when I had my learner's permit when I was 18 or something.
I don't have a car, I've not driven a car with my full driver's permit, I think you need to renew it nowadays and I've not bothered with that for a couple of decades. We have buses here, why bother.
- I rode the bus to work for a couple summers. My city is so spread out and bus service is so limited that I had to catch the only express bus there and back. It got me to work an hour before it opened and I had to leave an hour before it closed for the day, and it took 45 minutes to an hour to by bus to do what would have been a 20 minutes commute by car.

I must say although I enjoy cars and driving I do wish public transport was better like Europe or some Asian countries.
- Cars are fun, car dependency is not
  
  I agree entirely with you here. All these nutjobs like ndrew tte who think we're coming for their hobby cars are missing the point. I couldn't care less if you like to drive cars or not. Heck, I would probably by myself lots of cool cars if I had tons of money. People don't commute by car because they like driving, they commute by car because it's the easiest mode of transport in their area. And a lot of cities would benefit immensely if that mode was instead changed to a combination of walking, biking, and tramming or similar.

is it weird that i like the concept of a motorcycle more than a car?
Like even though they're much more dangerous, i just don't really care.
- You're not alone in not caring. Consider how many people will rail against motorcycles, but ignore worse activities. Horse riding is about 25x as dangerous as riding a motorcycle. How many folks do you see who are willing to tell a random person they see on a horse how dangerous the activity is? Yet I get random dipsticks who feel they're doing the lord's work when they come up to me on my bike and tell me what they think of the dangers of motorcycles.
  
  I'm not entirely sure that horse riding is more dangerous, I'm not that experienced with motorbikes, but I ride horses all the time, I reckon you might fall from a horse more often, but it's usually a fairly simple thing, not going too fast or anything. Unless you're talking about horse racing which is quite dangerous, but most riders do other, much safer thing on horseback.
  That said, I live in rural Ireland where from what I understand, the roads are significantly more dangerous for motorbikes do that might be skewing my perspective.
  Though random fools telling you that what you're doing is dangerous are, to me, overstepping. As long as you're not putting others in excess danger you should be left alone.
  
  Maybe it's rather inconsiderate approaching people like this, but I think it's implying danger for the others too, not just yourself. I personally don't see a lot of people riding horses in dense traffic.
  
  I would never bother you about it but horses don't wake me and my family up at 1 am, and a horse didn't come out of nowhere yesterday (while it was dark) and cut me off almost causing an accident. So I imagine you can see why there is a bit of hostility.
  But hey they are fun to ride and fuel efficient. My inlaws run their whole farming operation with motorcycles and an overworked tractor. Maybe people would like them more if we went after modifications that make them too loud.
- they're much more dangerous in large part due to cars, i mean yea hitting a rock and flying off your bike at 70 mph isn't very safe, but motorcycling would be a lot less deadly without cars
- wait until you hear about redneck tonka trucks. You're gonna love those.

Me owing a car just to keep it 24/7 on street parking to keep that space used forever.
- I live on a street that's a well-known rat-run through the neighborhood. I like to park a vehicle 24/7 on the street to narrow it, and slow drivers down.
  
  The street I used to live in Rio had cars parked, some of them abandoned, at both sides of the sidewalk, forcing everyone to walk on the streets. Because of that, the street was an infacto mixed use street, never reccomended by navigation maps. A quiet street thanks to the parked cars.
- Don't you have to pay for parking?
  
  There's a lot of free on street parking.
- TBH its a really good spot.

My car is used only when other options aren't reasonable. I have to fill it up every two months. Hate driving, hate what it is doing to everything.

My plan is to use public transport, but man those Kei trucks/van are so cute! I'm probably gonna buy one later.
- Commercial failure, but ridiculously adorable.
  And the Mythic Rare electric version.
- You can do both using transit when you can and using the kei truck for truck things like hauling or working.
  
  That was my plan, I should have articulated it better.
- Neither of those things exist where I am.
  
  Not really in the Netherlands too, but you can import them. And there are companies who import them for you.
- That's what I saw the other day!! I had never seen one before and thought it was freaking adorable. Thank you for solving that mini mystery for me.

this pretty much sums up why I learned to drive

Yea, I ain't losing my car virginity unless there's a zombie apocalypse.
- There’s so many fictional apocalypses where gas is somehow plentiful, don’t really get it. Long term, a good zombie apocalypse prepper would probably rely on solar panels and a bike.
  
  That was brilliant in the Expanse, when the Earth was orbital bormbarded one of the protagonists immediately goes for bikes.
  
  The only vehicle we know for sure will be used commonly in the far, technologically advanced future are bicycles. Given sci-fi’s massive blind spot with acknowledging bicycles it is pretty funny that sci-fi writers fail to include the surest bet.
  Like any possible future, even one with magic hovercraft that fly around on limitless power or one with teleportation, huge amounts of people would still use a bicycle to commute to work for the pleasure and health benefits. Or… work on a massive freighter starship that is most empty? Why WOULDNT you use a bicycle to get around? On the other hand if the far future is an apocalypse… well everyone is definitely by going to be riding bicycles around.
  I mean throw a futuristic battery in a bicycle and based on the power output of other sci-fi machines I assume the electric bicycle would have a range of like 1000 miles.
  Colonizing a new planet? You could not only bring enough bicycles and associated maintenance equipment to easily provide transportation for current and future colonists, you could also easily bring the equipment to manufacture new bicycles besides maybe the tires. Almost zero infrastructure is needed to start building a bicycle based transportation system and on a volume and weight basis they would probably be one of the most valuable tools to a colony that was going to receive a shipment of supplies from a starship and then be left to fend for themselves for an extended period.
- In case of zombie apocalypse, stay on a boat for a week. Ezpz.
  
  How do I get to my boat?
  
  Might be a bit difficult for people in landlocked areas.

Jean-Paul Sartre would be so proud of you.
- I was OOTL.
  Jean-Paul Sartre declined the Nobel Prize in Literature.
  Sartre declined the prize, saying that he never accepted any official honours and that he did not want the writer to become an institution.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_Nobel_Prize_in_Literature
  
  I'm sure I'm going to say this poorly, but one of the things he focused on was meaningful decisions. So there's a joke that goes:
  Jean-Paul Sartre was sitting at a coffee shop when the waitress came up and asked him if he wanted anything else.
  He said, "I'll take a coffee, with no cream."
  She responded, "I'm sorry, but we're all out of cream. I can get you a coffee with no milk though."

Having license, didn't drive for 3 years. Not planning to!

Out of spite I leave the jacked up truck with stovepipe exhaust in the driveway and walk to the store!

Where I live having a driver's license means it's easier to vote. Sure it's possible to vote without one, but I have to show a Photo ID and prove my address, and a driver's license is the only form of ID with both a photo and address on it.
- Assuming you're in the US, most states also offer ID cards that can be used for all the same things a driver's license are for, except for driving. Confusingly they're usually handled through the DMV, since they have all the infrastructure to verify your identity and issue cards.
  
  Can confirm. I don't drive. Don't habe a driver license. I still habe a card that look a lot like one, has an ID number, and is used exactly the same for everything except driving.