alt Hacker News> aiming to have fewer cars and abandon car-only transportation as policy,
impossible in the US due to (sub)urban sprawl. The only way to get rid of car-only mode is to get rid of suburban sprawl and put people back into dense Eastern European style commieblocks.
Also it is impossible in the US due to market economy. People will inevitable have to commute long distance to reach job sites or customers. Eastern commieblocks could solve that because people worked in large industrial factories, and there were only a handful of factories per town, and one downtown, and all routes were predetermined and planned.
car-only mode is the expression of the American Dream (tm), that you can live in your SFH in a burb, and hop into your personal car any second and go anywhere you want. It is the Ultimate Freedom (tm) and anything else is a significant downgrade in a lifestyle
We certainly face headwinds and challenges and we will never be totally free of suburbs or anything - even Europe has those, but we can make great progress in specific areas and to your point leverage market efficiency to drive the progress we need to make as a country. When I think about my hometown of Columbus I think about the hundreds of acres of surface parking lots, those can be converted to economically useful land with shops, small-scale workshops, housing of various types, offices, and more. And by doing so we can build up appropriate density without too much of a challenge. Younger folks than me are clamoring for better living conditions - we should make it happen. That doesn’t mean we abandon cars or anything - I like mine, but with better building patterns we can reduce the burden on everyone to have to buy all this stuff just to get a loaf of bread, go to school, or any other normal daily activities. Then we can make more use of our existing infrastructure instead of building more and then not being able to afford to maintain it (state DOTs are big jobs programs and they build even if they don’t need to so that they don’t have to lay people off - biggest scam in the USA and maybe the world).
There’s a really well known photo of Amsterdam before and after their car-first infrastructure. I can try to find it later but if you search for it, you could find it pretty easily I think. You’ll know it when you see it and it’ll blow your mind.