Yes, but please join me in finding ironic the fact that nowadays not having to own a car has become a privilege. It is a “privilege” that has been artificially built into our societies. Taking the US for example, car companies in the 50’s bought and demolished streetcar lines to force more people to use their cars, created entire propaganda campaigns to remove the streets from public transport and pedestrians, and literally indoctrinate children with their agenda. This is a video I always recommend watching, as it goes through all these points from a US-perspective. This absolutely did not just happen in the US, this a map of the tram lines in my city in 1929, this is it nowadays.
About smaller settlements, again, while I DO think that a good public transport is possible even there (I think Switzerland is a good example of how that can be done, maybe the Netherlands? Someone in the comments will sure tell me better examples, thank you commenter), I feel like the prime scope of this community is on cities, aka where the big stuff goes on, where people live, work, shop and hang out (very good article about that).
3+5. I agree, infrequent or unreliable public transit is like no public transit at all (okay not really, but it sure is bad). There are two ways to make good transit: you either make it so frequent you literally don’t care about the schedules because you know the next ride is going to be at the station in 10 minutes or less at the most (hello, japan?) or you strictly schedule stops so that users can reliably know at what times the service will be there (I am obviously more of a fan of the first option, but the second probably applies better if you have a very small budget like a 5,000 people town). I suppose the reason you gave up on using transit despite living on a transit corridor that goes to your workplace is the lack of both, correct me if I am wrong.
I have to disappoint you on this, but I took my license driving here. I passed my driving test with no errors and I have never gotten into a crash; I always drive at the speed limit. What happens to be the reason one gets mostly honked at here, is actually following the rules: going at the speed limit rather than 50% more than that, or giving the right of way to a car in front of you which has it by law. There is no “local driving style” here, there is just anarchy resulting from decades of total lack of traffic rules enforcement, which goes hand in hand with having one of the bloodiest amount of deadly/injuring crashes in europe every year. Driving doesn’t make people just uncomfortable, it makes them stress. For an intelligent and curious species like humans, doing an extremely boring and repetitive task to which they are supposed to give their full attention the entire time, is stressful; road rage is very common, to the point it has become “normality” here, crashes are as well.
About smaller settlements, again, while I DO think that a good public transport is possible even there (I think Switzerland is a good example of how that can be done, maybe the Netherlands? Someone in the comments will sure tell me better examples, thank you commenter), I feel like the prime scope of this community is on cities, aka where the big stuff goes on, where people live, work, shop and hang out (very good article about that).
3+5. I agree, infrequent or unreliable public transit is like no public transit at all (okay not really, but it sure is bad). There are two ways to make good transit: you either make it so frequent you literally don’t care about the schedules because you know the next ride is going to be at the station in 10 minutes or less at the most (hello, japan?) or you strictly schedule stops so that users can reliably know at what times the service will be there (I am obviously more of a fan of the first option, but the second probably applies better if you have a very small budget like a 5,000 people town). I suppose the reason you gave up on using transit despite living on a transit corridor that goes to your workplace is the lack of both, correct me if I am wrong.