Cars are dumb for the many, not for you personally at this very moment. We can easily build carfree cities (by improving bike infrastructure and public transport), what is dumb is focusing on short-term benefits for one's personal comfort/safety.

I don't know one resident of a car-free city who regret the transition. Would you?

The idea that car-free or very limited car is only possible if you have absurd density is false.

Its totally possible to have nice suburbs that are totally walkable and don't require a car for 90% of the population.

Cities stop being "easy to navigate by car" when they have too many cars around. And car-congested streets are also very hostile to bikes and pedestrians, so it's very hard to correct the problem once it gets ingrained. So it makes sense to give the latter uses high priority, and keep car use as a rare exception.

Not according to the article. It specifically talks about the Boston suburbs, for example.

People don't want to drive, they want to get to places. That's the actual demand that needs to be satisfied. Cars don't scale very well to do so. You can't realistically build roads in cities that can move the same number of people as a subway line. If you did you wouldn't have a city anymore, you'd have a parking lot with some buildings sprinkled across it.

More transportation capacity leads to more utilization. Given the choice, few people choose to live in an overcrowded city.

There's an inherent judgement here that cars are a net negative thing. IMO, that's a real 2d perspective.

Dense housing doesn't result in traffic congestion. If more people live closer together there is more population density, but as long as they can access commercial areas easily then they can do their shopping and work and recreational tasks without cars. When you remove cars then you suddenly have much more living space because a car takes up a large amount of room to store and there must be extra space for commuters and visitors.

Are you seriously arguing that adding more space for cars makes cities less congested? For every one parking space you add you remove a large amount of useful space for other things.

Not really. Car traffic shares its roads with buses, often bicycles. And the distances you need to cover don't get shorter if you remove roads or parking spaces.

> More housing units in areas currently taken up by parking means—theoretically, at least—less need to get around that large area on average if everything you need day-to-day is a short walk, cycle, bus or train ride away.

What assumptions does your "theory" base this claim on? That newly built houses will quickly fill with people working nearby? Perhaps they just like their small houses on the hills of LA and don't want to move to the busy center of the city.

It's inconceivable to me that my kids can't bike to school because of all the car traffic around it... caused by parents dropping off their kids to school. Cars increase the safety of the people inside them at the detriment of everybody else.

We can thankfully begin to hear the death rattles of car-dependent urban planning and our cities will be much better once it's behind us.

Even cities with world-class mass transit, e.g. Tokyo and London, are full of cars, and taxis are still a better option for some trips -- even though there are also surface trains, subways, and buses to choose from.

In those places, step 1 has already been solved: convince the population that mass transit is desirable and should be well funded. London even charges congestion fees for cars. But they still can't achieve car-free cities.

The negatives of cars seem exaggerated by articles like this and urbanist activists in general. I live in a city with mostly cars and don’t notice either the pollution or noise. Modern cars have very little pollution simply due to regulation, and I certainly don’t smell any pollution when I ride in bike lanes on busy streets. The noise is also pretty negligent unless you live right next to the highway, which most people don’t. Cars today are also incredibly safe, with only around 1 fatality per 100 million miles traveled, and provide far more utility back to society than this minor cost. Additionally with driver assistance technologies becoming standard, their safety will increase dramatically. Cars bring more communities together because neighborhoods are more accessible to each other.

These daily articles pushing an anti-car sentiment ultimately seem very one sided and childishly idealistic. For example this particular article doesn’t mention what the trade offs are in Slovenia. It claims residents adapted but has no data to establish if they are happy or unhappy with changes, if they are even the same residents as before, if living within a 15 minute radius has limited their choices, if how they spend time has changed for the worse, and so on. It similarly lacks data for those who live outside this core area but used to visit it regularly before the changes. It’s hard to draw any useful conclusion from such a simplistic and biased take.

What if I like my car, and the ability to easily travel outside the city limits that comes along with it?