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> Whatever comes out of these modern transformations might as well leave the city centers economically deserted, or at least less attractive to their current citizen.

All experience with cities that reduced or banned car traffic point in the other direction. Madrid for example reports a 9.5% increase in local business https://copenhagenize.eu/news-archive/2019/3/14/the-benefits...

If you’ve ever been to the Netherlands you’d also see that their city centers are far from deserted wastelands. Quite to the contrary, actually, at least the ones that I’ve been to.

> But they also should understand that cities do come with downsides and there is no guarantee that you can have the cake and eat it.

Living in the suburbs comes with downsides, too. There’s for example no inalienable right to drive your car in the city.

You must be from USA. In Europe we had all the large cities before cars. And curtailing car usage doesn't lock out individual travel. You still have public transport, bicicles and such.

My urge to live in a city comes from the fact that I could get everything I need to live, by going out of my apatment for 30 minutes and walking to few nearby shops. No car needed. And I can get to various interesting entertainment venues by hopping on a bus for a 15 minutes.

> In Europe we had all the large cities before cars. And curtailing car usage doesn't lock out individual travel. You still have public transport, bicicles and such.

First of all, public transport is not individual travel. Neither the times nor the locations nor the cost are under your control. Bicycles are individual travel, and that is why they are so relevant in modern cities, but they are neither weather-independent, nor barrier-free, nor do they provide the same utility as a car. Funnliy enough, they seem to evolve pretty much the same way cars did here in Europe by getting ever larger and more capable.

I would not be surprised if bicycles would be the next piece of individual travel that's becoming unfashionable. IMO the problem cities have with cars is not the pollution, it's the individuality that they cannot deal with. Everything individual tends to become problematic with a high enough population density. Today's 2sqm parking lot might be tomorrow's 0.5sqm bicycle stand or next week's 10sqm individual bathroom. If there shall ever be an acceptable degree of individual space consumption in a city, that city needs to define a limit on population density. Somehow I doubt that any city will ever do that, though.

> First of all, public transport is not individual travel. Neither the times nor the locations nor the cost are under your control.

Then cars are not individual travel as well. The only thing you control is time of departure (not arrival). You don't control locations because you are limited by availability of parking space. You don't control the cost because it's just a function of distance, gas prices, your car efficiency and time of travel.

Car fits you definition only if you have a parking outside of your flat and right at your destinations and there's no congestion. Even then you would not control the cost and time independently. I think your definition of individual travel is unreasonably restrictive.

> Bicycles are individual travel, and that is why they are so relevant in modern cities, but they are neither weather-independent, nor barrier-free, nor do they provide the same utility as a car.

And car in congested city does not provide same utility as a bicycle or subway. Car is not the ultimate mode of transport, just one of many, one overused and abused.

> IMO the problem cities have with cars is not the pollution

You should appreciate pollution. Recent studies show that even at 'safe' levels it significantly diminishes human intellectual capacity. This affects for example results of important exams in your life and harms your career as result of that.

That's a really interesting point you brought up there. I wanted to come up with the counter-example of Hong Kong, which is already a hyper-dense city. But, as it turns out, bikes do get pushed out there in favour of public transport:

https://www.tripsavvy.com/where-to-rent-and-ride-a-bike-in-h...

Other contemporary* cities should still implement more bike-friendly infrastructure. There's other goals which can be furthered by more people biking. Climate change and public health come to mind.

*we can worry about the problems of hyper-density when it's actually here. For most of the big western cities this is probably at least a few decades out.

> we can worry about the problems of hyper-density when it's actually here

I think we should actively work against hyper dense cities. Or at least have the citizens decide about how dense they want their city to become (but then they'll have to live with the consequences). Right now we are facing dense cities and try to somehow adjust the policies after the fact. That seems not ideal.

It surely isn't ideal, but that's kind of how the world works, no?

New developments emerge and we adjust our laws to deal with the new situation in a way that society sees fit. IMHO voting on something like maximum population density policies is way too abstract of a concept for people to even have an opinion about. If it were the opposite one might think we as humans have some kind of plan going into the future... ;)

> Everything individual tends to become problematic with a high enough population density. Today's 2sqm parking lot might be tomorrow's 0.5sqm bicycle stand or next week's 10sqm individual bathroom. If there shall ever be an acceptable degree of individual space consumption in a city, that city needs to define a limit on population density.

Usually money is way better at limiting than any attempts at enforcing hard limits. You just need to price things right. If market doesn't get the price correctly to include environmental costs then you can always tweak things with tax.

>If there shall ever be an acceptable degree of individual space consumption in a city, that city needs to define a limit on population density.

Acceptable to who? You?

Acceptable to the city, of course.

Of course it is regaining. Cities predate the car by thousands of years. Oslo itself is almost 1000 years old. The city center was built when pedestrians and the occasional horse-drawn carriage was the typical mode of transport.

Plus you're completely ignoring public transport for some reason.

I think the other comments have done it justice, but I'd just like to add that there's a lot of other means of transport than cars. America seems to lack public transport modes, but these provide access to cities without the huge footprint (space-wise and energy-wise) of cars.

I mean, it's not like individual automobiles are the only way to get around...

It might hard for some to believe, but there are huge portions of the USA where every trip begins and ends in a car.

The layout of many "cities" in the USA literally requires car transport. Residential is clustered with other residential, retail is clustered into strip malls with a vast stretches of asphalt (for parking), office parks are also clustered in low-density arrangements of flex-space (1-story buildings with a truck dock in the back). All of these places are separated not only by distances that can't be covered on foot, but also pedestrian-hostile highways and utter dismissal of public space.

And yes, schools are large and dotted across the landscape. So in addition to getting to work, by car, many families have to juggle transporting their kids to school in one direction, then go a completely different direction to get to work, repeat the process in the afternoon, and go in other directions for shopping, groceries, and other "third places".