With the kind of circles that I run in, I tend to make a lot of friends who have grown up in and are frustrated with the car-centric North America that they live in today. The car, of course, is the symbol of this car-centric world, and so it is shunned and hated by pretty much everyone around me.

And for good reason! A New Flyer Xcelsior XDE40 diesel-electric hybrid bus gets 5.77mpg (40.8 L/100km) and carries between 67 and 123 people depending on how large of a bus you get. Let’s be stingy and assume they made the mpg calculation on the smallest bus, so you’re averaging about 0.61 L/100km to transport one person. Meanwhile, a modern Honda Civic hybrid gets 4.8 L/100km while only moving at most five people, so about 0.96 L/100km to transport one person at best. That’s 57% more fuel!

Plus, cars are much less likely to travel full than buses since they’re not shared commodities. In the worst case, the Civic carrying one person is as bad as 6.8 times more fuel than a full bus, and as soon as you have 9 people in the bus you start beating a Civic with just the driver in it. And the bus has a much smaller per-person footprint on the road than a car, making for much less congestion on the streets. And all this isn’t even to mention electric buses, streetcars, trains, and all the other very efficient forms of public transportation present in any modern city.

So then, why drive a car at all?

I have been a car enthusiast since before I was a computer enthusiast. Heck, the reason I got into computers was so that I could send a pirated copy of a car racing game to my friends over the internet so that we could play multiplayer. The web server was my laptop port-forwarded onto the public internet, the domain name was one I got for free for a year because I didn’t have a credit card, and the game was Midtown Madness 2.

In addition to the multiplayer modes, the game also had various kinds of racing tracks set in the streets of San Francisco and London, and also a mode called Cruise. Cruise mode had no opponent cars, no checkpoints, no timers. They just let you drive around in the cities, on roads and highways and sidewalks and buildings alike, and do whatever you want.

I spent an inordinate amount of time in Cruise mode. Of course the easiest thing to do is drive like a maniac, crash into everything and total your car or throw it into the ocean. But if you wanted, nobody was stopping you from stopping at traffic lights, or practicing parallel parking, or just driving up to various landmarks and taking in the sights. I did all of these things.

I eventually grew up, and got a driver’s license for myself. Driving a real car takes much more mental effort, but it is also more rewarding because you can control it better. The accelerator and the brake aren’t an on-and-off thing like the up and down arrows on your computer, they’re pedals you can push down as hard or as gently as you’d like. Of course, there’s a correct way to drive your car, and you get better at it as you drive more. You learn to feather the throttle to drive at a fixed speed, to ease off the brakes at a traffic light to avoid a jerky stop, to gently turn the wheel along the curvature of a sweeping highway. Every time you do one of these basic maneuvers perfectly, you feel a hint of satisfaction, and every time you screw up a bit, a twinge of disappointment.

You can tell how you’re doing not just through your eyes, but also by feel. The car talks to you in how it rides over bumps, how it sounds as you accelerate, how the wheel vibrates corresponding to the shocks the tires feel, how it becomes heavier to turn at higher speeds. Nobody teaches you to look out for these things, your body simply starts to feel new things through the car and intuit what they mean. After a while, driving becomes as natural as walking.

And that is just what goes on inside your car. Outside, you engage in an intricate dance with other drivers called The Rules Of The Road. You follow the directions laid out on the stage floor, changing lanes when required and following speed limits and traffic lights. You even choreograph some of your own movement, signal the other drivers of your intent with your brake and turn signal lights, and watch for others’ intents in your mirrors and windshield.

And somehow, these rigid rules and cryptic gestures combine into the ultimate freedom, to go where you want to go and do what you want to do, at your own time and of your own volition. All thanks to this giant mecha that you pilot, care for with regular servicing and maintenance, and grow to understand and love the way you’d love a pet.

Driving is fun to me, the same way programming is fun, writing is fun, cooking is fun. There are so many more aspects, so much more depth to it that I can’t summarize them in an article, much less a sentence. But yes, that is why I would drive rather than take the bus. Driving is fun.