Simple: I fucking hate driving. I hate the smell, I hate the noise, and I hate the stress. Thr environmental impact isnt exactly a plus point either. You could say that I’m lucky to live in a place with good public transport, but I actively sought out a place with public transport because I didn’t want to rely on a car.

Final nail on the coffin: I developed Menieres disease, so I am prone to intense vertigo attacks at short notice - I couldn’t get a license even if I wanted one.

I’m personally baffled at how many are killed in automobile accidents. 44,000 Americans every year. American KIA numbers for the entirety of the global war on terror is around 5,000. That is roughly only one month’s worth of automobile deaths.

Americans dead in Vietnam is around 58,000 over ten years. That’s only a year and a half worth of automobile deaths.

Even in WW2, over 4 years, 416,000 americans lost their lives, around 104,000 per year. Even during the deadliest war in history, automobiles today still kill 44% as many year to year. Granted the war did not touch America as much relatively but are still mind boggling statistics.

It feels as though learning to drive is merely fueling the cycle. More cars cause politicians to invest further in road infrastructure instead. More people giving up on public transportation further starves it of the funding it deserves and desperately needs.

Cars are expensive to buy and maintain. Also I don’t think finding a parking spot and then parking is a fun activity. Also the metro can in many cases be faster, and I can use my phone while I’m in it.

I have a license. I enjoy driving as a leisure activity.

But I hate driving to work. I just take the shuttle and enjoy listening to my podcasts. We have a decent public transport system as well, so it helps.

I don’t like driving…

I don’t need to drive

Owning a car is stupidly expensive. And its an expense I don’t need to pay.

Cars make people lazy and entitled and create divisions between them. When you’re driving you’re not around other people like you would be on public transit. They’re bothered.

Basically, confidence. I don’t have enough confidence to drive a car. Heck even riding a bike gives me anxiety that I’m going to collide with somebody or get hit by someone.

According to medical checkups, I am fine, but I know for a fact I am not a safe driver. I have bad attention span, sight, reaction, field of view, and tiredness issues. I am ideologically repelled by cars. And it looks feels dull to me to drive and also to study for an exam.

I don’t think people are “refusing”, it’s not like it’s mandatory or anything. Nobody’s trying to force you to drive a car.

I know I’ll never be able to afford a car, they’re incredibly expensive to buy and operate, and most of my travel is already covered by our excellent Trams, Buses and Trains, which can get me basically anywhere comfortably and quickly.

For the times I need something special I can ask someone for a lift, but that happens only a handful of times a year. A car would be a big, expensive, risky piece of equipment to just leave sat around for someone to steal…

I got my license at 18 before I moved out, but my parents made the entire ordeal a nightmare. It was more anxiety than it was worth to get my required miles in with them as the instructor. People living in large cities often never get the opportunity, it’s high stress and taxis are readily available. Car ownership is expensive and public transportation is available, as well as biking. In uni I taught several Asian students how to drive because countries like Japan often have expensive training programs, and insurance is painful for testers. European cities are often designed for micro mobility and bikes and smart cars are preferred just because of size.

So, what’s your reason to not drive a car

I simply don’t need to, nor do I want to. I live in a country with good public transport - in a city with comparably well working public transport. There simply is no need for me. There never was.

I can get around the city either by train (“normal” trains and subways) or by bus. On weekends there is a 24 service for all trains and subways every 8-20 minutes (depending on line). There are also night busses connecting party areas with the nearest train stations and the inner city with the outskirts.

In the mornings and afternoons on weekdays there are additional commuter busses and trains and subways on most lines so the service is scheduled on a minute basis on some lines for some time during rush hours. The “worst” it gets is every 30 minutes in the middle of the night.

And if I don’t want to take public transport I can always use my bike or my electric scooter. The bike lanes are not Netherlands quality, but they’re okay. It’s also fun to drive by traffic jam having my inner monologue making fun of alle the people waiting hours over hours on the streets 😄

The great thing is: Some time ago the government and the individual public transport providers of the cities and areas made a country-wide ticket for all public transport. So I can just hop on a bus in my city, drive to the train station, enter a regional train that goes to another city in another federal state, come out the train station and take the nearest bus I want without having to pay anything except the monthly fee for the ticket or checking if the ticket is valid in that area.

When I want to take longer trips further away I’ll likely take a train on our highspeed railway network covering basically the whole country (not covered by the ticket I mentioned). It’s notorious for being delayed or having issues, but my individual experience is much better than in the memes that exist.

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A bit unrelated, but where I live the price of car school doubled in the past few years. It’s the reason my girlfriend still hasn’t started driving school yet. I could see that as an important factor. If I had to get my driving license for the current price, I might also reconsider. Cars are generally ludicrously expensive compared to everything else. Here you could pay roughly (converted) 120 bucks a year for public transit, or pay 80 monthly AT LEAST to drive (just gass and ensurance).

Unless you experience physical pain from driving, it’s a slippery slope because every facet of modern life gets easier in car culture if you have a car.

Just look at Road Ragers: people who experience extreme emotional duress from driving, possibly endangering everyone with their angry antics and maybe giving themselves health problems from the blood pressure fluctuations, and yet they keep doing it.

And some people even drive without a license, simply because getting between places in time is nigh impossible otherwise.

As for why I decided to give up renewing my license, here’s my rant from elsewhere:

It’s not just the pollution from the exhaust, it’s not just the tons of trash/scrap that rots away in junkyards, it’s not just the rubbers and plastics from tire wear and tear getting into ecosystems, it’s not just the gigagallons of hazardous chemicals required to maintain, it’s not just the steady trend toward “Cars as a Service” while locking your premium features behind a paywall, it’s not just the carwashes draining their runoff into the local groundwater, it’s not just the needlessly large cities to accomodate every individual having a car to themselves, it’s not just the ever expanding highways in between cities that continue to have congestion but now take more space and more time to repair and do more damage to the environment, it’s not just the asphalt island effect, it’s not just the burden on local economies that is car culture, it’s not just the hostility drivers have for pedestrians and bikers, it’s not just the millions of accidents causing hundreds of millions dollars in medical damages and 40,000 deaths every year, it’s not just the blatant disregard for millions of animal and insect lives left on the roadside and windshields as warnings, it’s not just the arms race between assholes for bigger and louder and more dangerous death machines so they can feel like they’re the only one on the road who matters.

It’s all of it, and more.

Originally, undiagnosed ADHD. The pathway to get licensed was somewhat annoying for me, and I couldn’t be bothered engaging with it. I’ve also always had great access to efficient public transport, which I took to school so was accustomed to using it.

There’s been lots of secondary reasons over the years - for a long time I had fines to clear before I could progress getting licensed. The fines were bullshit, and I wouldn’t pay them out of principle. Now they’ve expired, that roadblock is no longer in my way, but I’m still not licensed.

Sometimes it’s annoying, but only really in the sense that I’m proud of my independence / don’t like the rare occasions that I’m dependent on others for travel. I’m in the US on holiday now, and there is comparatively almost zero public transport - that sucks. When I’ve travelled around Europe, Asia, New Zealand, or at home in Australia - the issues are pretty few. I don’t feel held back enough to care, and it seems like a money pit.

I have learned to drive a car, though. I’m just not licensed to, and don’t. M 33

A few reasons come to mind following the first one.

1. The first and foremost reason would be trust. Driving as an act always has seemed fragile if one scratch or bump caused by a minor thump by you can get you sued, one even slightly delayed response can cause you to hit a reckless pedestrian, and one even slightly miscalculated turn can turn into a destructive crash. A friend of mine once joked that driving is society’s new way to apply Darwinism so that those with concentration/patience/coordination/streetsmarts survive, and there are complaint groups whose complaints make that joke uncanny. Especially considering I am not up to par in terms of body and mind, leave me out of that please.

2. It’s unnecessary. It has often caught my attention how people who do drive will drive the distances they can easily walk. The grocery store is a few minutes worth of driving away from me but twenty minutes of walking, which is still not bad. Except for maybe going to the doctor, which I go with people in groups to do anyways, I can live on my feet.

3. I get to say hi to Mrs. Robinson while lightening my gorgeous red hair keeping my body loosed and stretched.

4. I don’t contribute to pollution. Climate change might be over-politicized like Covid but they’re both still very real things. One could say one benefit many years from now is I can tell my peers I wasn’t one of them.