100% agree. I love driving, road trips, windy roads, and take pride in having a clean and well maintained car. But I despise the car-centrality of most western cities. Any chance I get, I park well outside a big city and take a train in. It’s almost always faster and far less stressful. Even though I can parallel park, yield to cyclists, not run over pedestrians, and safely follow the rules of the road, most other people can’t or won’t because of how normalized bad driving is. Even worse, most people don’t really want to be driving and do it simply because their job/home are not properly accessible, so they have no other choice.

Commuter rail is hilarious for this. All the same people that were in orderly lines, holding doors open, giving seats to older or disabled people, and saying “oh you go first” for the last hour spend thirty seconds back in the “safety” of their white SUV and they’re acting like absolute animals to all the same strangers.