(I assume the massive downvotes are from the people that have never lived in the Midwest and/or have never lived anywhere other than 'downtown' in a major city, or ancient city that was built before locomotion, and are wholly unfamiliar with suburbs)

>I cannot think of any reason why you should own a car in a town with an average public transportation network and some form of car sharing.

Because you don't want to waste an hour or more every day standing around waiting on a train/bus? Would like to regularly visit friends and family on the other side of town? Would like to not have to plan your life around transportation schedules?

I could maybe see getting by in Europe, I've one friend in Germany that is quite happy taking the train a half mile or so from his apartment for most stuff but even he still owns a car for getting to work, doing groceries, going to his postal box, bringing home stuff for art, going to the woods etc.

I cannot fathom life without a car. I'd say my closest friend is 10 miles away, two I go to see fairly regularly are 50 miles away. If I want to go see a movie it's 3-20 miles depending on which theater I want to go to, work is about 10~ miles from my apartment with my two gyms between me and work that I'm at 4x a day each and at another a 5th day. All of the performing arts theaters around Indianapolis are downtown, on the east side or north of Indy in Carmel - all of which are a 20-40 minute drive for me probably 15-25 miles.

I can go to these places above in 5-60 minutes in my car, public transportation would require multiple transfers and probably 4-5 hours, with some of them running fairly infrequently, for some of them and a couple of them I simply could not get to with public transportation.

Without a car I'd also have no way to get to the meetinghouse of my Church, or to singles firesides at a meetinghouse on the other side of town.

Without a car in the spring and summer I'd show up to dates, or to hang out with friends, sweaty and smelly. It will be 86F with the humidity reaching a high of 87% today.

Without a car, I couldn't go shooting if I wanted... I can't get on a bus with long arms and a few bricks of ammunition and be like "hey, I know that isn't a stop up there, but can you drop me in front of that range... this stuff is heavy". I couldn't go hunting, I couldn't go fishing, I couldn't go mushroom hunting in the spring, I couldn't go hiking because buses don't go to the woods.