Raise the Hammer

"There will be people who can get from point A to point B much quicker when they don't have a car that they have to find and pay for a parking spot for."

This holds in large cities with very dense dt cores such as NY, HK even Toronto. But in a city like Hamilton it is almost always easier to go from A to B with a car. Even dt in rush hour. Parking is plentiful and cheap.

"There will be people who would be willing to wait a couple of minutes for a train to take them across town."

A couple of minutes? More like 15 min. I can leave my mountain home and be parked dt in less than 15mins.

"There are a lot of people who have walkers and bags attached to them who would benefit from a convenient service to get them to / from the grocery store."

Yes. We already have that. The HSR provides pretty good services in Hamilton. It might not be on demand door to door service that you guys expect but they are providing reasonable service based on what we can afford and competing priorities. We also have DARTS and discounted taxi fares for seniors.

"There are a lot of people who don't need to go anywhere at 2AM."

True. But there are also a lot who do. People working shifts, traveling, entertaining etc. Owning a car creates the flexibility to do things at 2am if need be. Have you ever tried meeting women in Hamilton without a car? Good luck!

"There are a lot of families that could free up $10K / year of their hard-earned income they can spend on other things other than running and maintaining a second car just to have it sit in a parking lot most of the day..."

Owning a car is a big expense. You don't need to tell owners how much money they can save by only owning one car (or none). However, the fact these people chose to purchase a costly second car should tell you that they have a need for it. It saves them time, allows them to run errands easier (carry grocery bags, hockey bags etc), creates more flexibility when you have to go somewhere, both spouses probably work in different parts of the city. It's a cost-benefit analysis. People are buying these cars because the benefits exceed the costs.