Shall we take my recent trip to London where it was too far to walk and too far and inconvenient for me to drive?[1] Or when I got to London (by train) I then couldn't drive around because I didn't have my freedom-car and instead used the quicker and cheaper underground train? Or where I couldn't ask my coworkers for a lift because none of them bring cars into London because cars are too expensive and inconvenient? Or where freedom-taxis were less convenient to organise and wait for and slower and several times more expensive than the underground?

Or my holiday which involved a ferry and the freedom-car was too expensive to justify bringing on the ferry and too inconvenient to park this side of the ferry, but the train/bus replacement went right to the ferry port?

Or my trip from home to train station which is walkable (if a little boringly far) and I have the freedom to go through town or through the park or through the suburbs, into shops along the way, and straight into the station whereas by car it's 10-20 minutes of stop/start traffic, no meaningful choice of route, no way to stop in anywhere along the way, the train station has almost no on-site parking and the nearby parking isn't gratis? How does car win for 'freedom' there?

Or how about that I have rarely ever driven more than two hours in a day, but if I want to go somewhere far in my car (such as London and back) I would have to commit to driving eight hours - and if I got there and felt unable (tired, ill) to drive back I would be stuck having to drive unsafely because of the freedom-car ball and chain, or arrange a hotel for the night - whereas a train or coach you don't even have to be awake the whole way, let alone concentrating on moving a two-ton vehicle at motorway speeds? Where's the 'freedom' advantage there?

By the time you are doing regular long car journeys it's eating large amounts of your time and money to the point where you are likely only doing that because you are economically trapped by house prices and job locations, rather than because you are free. Cars are good for the medium-short journey of 5-15 miles which is mostly crummy design of putting big box stores and industrial estates with no options except driving, assuming people will drive to them, and thus self-fulfilling prophecy meaning people have to drive to them. Cars are good at this, but an unthinkably expensive way to be good. Next time you see a road, count the cars in terms of $20,000-$60,000 purchase price each. Five cars to a hundred k, fifty cars to a million dollars. Economic boom or burden on the drivers?

From Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours idea, I am well on the way to being a world expert at my old commute, and trundling back and forth over the same bit of motorway for over a decade, ploughing thousands of hours of my life into pushing a pedal and turning a steering wheel, is not a skill worth developing and not any kind of 'freedom' the likes of which the Founding Fathers or the Ancient Philosophers were discussing.

There have been about 110 billion humans on Earth in all history, and over a hundred billion of them lived their entire lives without ever driving twenty minutes to Walmart, driving an hour to the next town for a coffee and a look around, driving eight hours to see Aunt Margaret once every couple of years, driving twenty hours to go skiiing, or driving a week coast to coast to burn some fossil fuels and feel important. And even today, the majority of car journeys are not people free to visit Aunt Margaret, they are people stuck in commutes or driving to stores who would generally prefer not to do that. If everyone who wanted to, could live a high quality of life close to work, how many car commuters would say "I don't want to live close to work and have more free time and less stress, I want my car commute because that's freedom"? Mostly they will say either "I can't afford to live closer to work" or "that's a horrible place to live" not "I love stop-start driving in traffic on a four lane concrete expressway".

[1] Let's it not pass unnoticed that driving is more than just distance and time; driving safely and concentrating and paying proper attention to the signs and conditions and other drivers is effortful and tiring, navigating in unfamiliar areas can be stressful, driving safely is a responsibility. How many drivers are honestly too tired, too distracted, too ill, too medicated, to be safely and responsibly making their journeys on any given day - but have no other reasonable choice but to cross fingers, pray, hope, and push through it?

[2] Edit: Using this soapbox to call out car adverts showing drivers on almost empty roads, such as this Ford Focus ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-gGFaDZc3k whereas most people's experience of driving is more honestly like this https://evinfo.info/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/london-traffi...