> arrange your life to prioritize that. Live in NYC or Boston. Or Amsterdam or Paris. In all of those places, car ownership is a net negative and so you'll find a lot of life arranged to assume you don't own a car and as a result, a lot of like-minded people.
That was indeed my point - "just go live in NYC or Boston" is not realistic for most people for a variety of reasons.
What I internalize from that is that the life optimization function coefficient on "live without a car" is not high enough for that person to outweigh the coefficients and input variables on other quality of life factors.
If "live without a car" was 1.0 and all other factors were 0.0, they'd decide to go live in NYC/Boston/someplace else that optimized that. Since they don't, they have other factors that they are weighing (probably implicitly) to conclude that they shouldn't do that.
No one can have everything they want. Most people can have the one thing they want most in the world, if they're willing to make enough other sacrifices to get it.
That was indeed my point - "just go live in NYC or Boston" is not realistic for most people for a variety of reasons.