Comment by rwyinuse
7 months ago
Yep. Something worth considering is also building long-term parking spaces to the outskirts of cities, accessible with public transport. I know lots of city-dwellers who pretty much never use a car for intra-city transport, but need to own one anyway to reach other important places that are beyond reach of public transport.
In case of Finland summer cottages are one such case. They're extremely common, and located in areas that usually have no public transport. Lots of people have also older relatives who live in middle of nothing.
Surely car hire would make more sense for that type of usage
It's pretty common for people to stay in their summer cottages for a week or more, several times a summer. Renting a car for all that time gets very expensive, and it will be just sitting idle most of the time. At that point you may as well just buy a cheap used car for the same yearly cost.
The need for car ownership would plummet if we had self-driving cars that can autonomously drive back to the city, and to pick you up from the countryside.