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Can you point to a single country in which cars are not the strong revealed preference? Everywhere in the world people drive when they can afford it.
Japan & Western Europe would be the obvious answers.
From the cities I've visited, it applies to - Paris, Geneva, Barcelona, Madrid & Zurich.
Manhattan, Brooklyn & Boston (before MBTA crumbled) do pretty well too.
Just like America, as soon as you get outside large metros, everyone in Japan owns a car. And even in Tokyo, once you get to the "outer" wards (e.g. Adachi, Suginami, Setagaya, Katsushika, Nerima, etc) many people own cars. I live in a medium side city in a rural prefecture, and every functioning adult I know owns and regularly drives a car. The city does have bus lines, but the few times I've taken them there are only tourists or the very elderly aboard.
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LOL, I once took a little rest by the circle around the Arc de Triumph, watching the car accidents. People in Paris love their cars.
As for Manhattan, no, mere millionaires do indeed use public transportation. But in Manhattan, they're not rich.
There are a lot of people in Manhattan who could afford to replace their transit usage with Ubers who don’t do so.
If your argument is that having a chauffeur is preferable to taking the subway, I’m not sure what the point is. Revealed preference is that many people prefer to take public transport (particularly trains and also long haul rail in countries that have fast trains) rather than drive even when (a) they own a car, (b) gas costs are cheaper than public transportation and (c) the road infrastructure for the trip exists.
You can drive from London to Paris or Munich to Amsterdam easily on clean and well-maintained roads. Yet the revealed preference of the public is, in many cases, public transport. US cities only break this system because of zoning rules that forced or strongly encouraged the construction of huge amounts of above-ground parking space that was economically perverse.
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We just had an entire subthread about how the Japanese restrict car ownership to the wealthy while the plebs use public transit
I didn't see the thread, but car ownership in Japan doesn't save time by getting you to a place quickly. It saves time by allowing the wealthy attend to their chores in the 'back seat' of a car. Because the wealthy don't drive their own cars. They have drivers.
If you don't have to drive, walk to parking, find your own parking or maintain the car......then yes, car ownership is cheap.
You prove my point. There isn't a revealed preference for cars. There is a revealed preference for being chauffeured. It is a revealed preference for having a Butler.
No, the vast majority of people in Japan drive themselves, it's just that being able to do so marks them as upper middle class. Because they can only make the poor use public transit by restricting them from having cars
The Tokyo subway shuts down at 11:30 and doesn't reopen until morning. Nobody crowing about how Japan is a public transit success asks the night janitors if they care about walking home.
Nitpick, but plenty of lower middle class and what we Americans would consider "white trash" people drive in Japan as well outside of Tokyo. There's even a stereotype that if you have fake blonde hair, heavy make-up, and buy your clothes at Don Quixote, you probably drive a Toyota Voxy. My wife wouldn't let me buy one because it's a lower middle class marker.
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I'll keep the conversation to urban areas, with dense urban cores. So.....Tokyo. I don't care much about towns or rural places.
In Tokyo, the majority does not drive cars.
In Tokyo, the majority can’t afford parking spaces in the centre. It’s perfectly liveable, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t help feeling that the path dependency is strong. American cities are mostly built for cars, other cities mostly had cars retrofitted. You can’t turn those cities into Tokyo any more than you can turn Tokyo into, say, Detroit (IANAA). You’d have to blow up the whole thing and start from scratch. Unless you’re making a new city, deciding which mode of transport you’d prefer in a context-independent sense seems rather beside the point.
Most American cities were not built for cars, because they are older than cars. That includes Motor City.
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The vast majority of people who drive drive themselves
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