If we can't even use electric vehicles, what's left? Horses?
It's amusing to contemplate whether it would actually be feasible to have a decent sized modern town in which horses, rather than cars, are the main form of transport.
If that article is right, they would be about as affordable to the owner as a car. And note that they all come with better self-driving software than any car currently for sale to the general public, and probably better than any that will be for sale within the next decade at least.
They are generally slower than cars, though. A walking horse goes around 7 km/hr (4 mph). They trot at about 13 km/hr (8 mph), and can easily keep that up for hours.
They canter at 2 to 3 times trot speed, but can only keep that up for about an hour over reasonable terrain, which I'd hope a town would have. They can gallop a bit faster, but not for very long.
[1] https://www.moneycrashers.com/cost-owning-horse-alternatives...
The big problems becomes dealing with the huge amount of horse waste, both manure and urine, but mostly manure. A horse will create about 15kg of manure and 5kg of urine each day. For a small city of say 200,000 people, you'd need say 100,000 horses. That means 2000 tons of additional waste each day (the humans will be generating about 200 tons of biowaste a day).
This sort of problem was faced in the late 1800's. Some predicted the end of urban civilization caused by horse manure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Horse_Manure_Crisis_of_1...). Automobiles saved us all from the horrible fate of being buried in horse poop.
If you let someone else board the horse it's another $260/month on average. Assuming $10/hour that's 26 hours, or about an hour a day to maintain your horse.
How much time do you spend maintaining your car per day?
The normal bicycle posture might be hard for many animals but maybe something more like a recumbent, adapted for 4 limbs since animals don't have such a big hand/leg strength imbalance...
This wayback link[1] comes from the Wikipedia article on horse cars [2]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140124204000/http://www.uctc.n... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsecar
2) Electric bicycles and scooters. These are lightweight by design.
3) Public transportation.
We didn't go through the industrial revolution to go back to horses. All the solutions above are not available/appealing at the moment because of "bad" urban planning (cities and infrastructure built around cars).
Things cannot change in a day, and the transition must start now, so electric vehicles cannot be avoided, but the urban transition must also happen quickly.
They are the most common form of transport in China as far as I can tell...
The focus going forward should be on mass transit and not on cars.
Get a horse!
According to Mr Norris M Davidson, a retired radio commentator on music including opera, and very widely read who was born c. 1908 this was a common American phrase in my childhood, when the motor car or automobile, as we called it, was a novelty. The roads not being paved were full of mud holes; tired were apt to burst, engines conked out and publication like Life, Puck and Judge were filled with illustrations about stranded motorists. Many showed the car being towed ignominiously by a horse. Urchins would shout 'Get a horse!' at every daring motorist.
-Dictionary of Catch Phrases by Eric Partridge [0]
[0] https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3eoQAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA98&lpg...)
Electricity does have a lot more optimization opportunity, though, whereas those liquid fuel processes are pretty much at their optimum already. A local solar panel DC'ing straight into your car's batteries is going to be pretty good compared to the "generic" pipeline I gave you above. (On the other hand, it can go the other way, too; if your electricity notionally passed through something like a gravity storage step, you lost more there too.) Although from what I've gathered from looking at solar setups, most local solar setups won't actually do that, so it's an optimization yet to be done rather than something all roof-mounted solar panels already do.