No such a thing as "have to". To walk everywhere you need to would take hours in a day it's impractical.
https://eurocities.eu/latest/parisians-will-live-within-a-15...
On the whole, I think city planners should design everything around public transport and it should be seen for the societal value add, rather than as a public expense.
Sadly, in Canberra it is buses, often once an hour. And most people feel as though if you catch a bus, it is a social signal that you are not doing very well.
Doing public transport well is hard.
But Canberra laid a good foundation for great bicycle riding!
What it isn't is in anyway useful to anybody. It shouldn't even be called public transit, be honest and call it last ditch option.
Real public transit needs to run more often. Half hour service is marginal public transit.
Designed and planned from the beginning, founded in 1913.
Has several "town centres" with the similar idea of "close to everywhere you need to be".
But imbalances of distribution through all the various factors of life mean one town centre has better [X], another has better [Y], your [Z] hobby group may be mostly in another area and your friends and family end up all over the place.
And so you travel everywhere anyway.
If you think ‘need to’ doesn’t needs quotation marks, try sitting through a few local community board meetings focused on re-allocating free parking for anything more useful :)
I can't imagine doing weekly shopping for a family without a car (we buy from both a grocery store, and a wholesale warehouse store)
I live in the suburbs (20 miles west of DC). My office is 1 mile away and I walk. The schools are 1 mile away; if I had school-age kids, we'd walk. I can walk or cycle to the grocery, the brewpub, coffee shop, post office, and burger joint (all 0.5-2 miles away). I rarely use my car during the week; the vast majority of my mileage is weekend trips to the mountains.
Even having it all sorted for day to day living. You still have a car to go somewhere else.
I feel the same here in Australia. Much of our day to day living doesn't need a car. Some of our friends though are in small country towns that would be a big hassle to visit without a car.
But few American communities are planned with minimizing car use as a key tenet. I’m lucky to live in one that is.
A personal data point: My wife and I used to live about 20 blocks from the gym we used. She would drive because of the vagrants and street people who would follow and harass women. Cycling wasn't an option because anyone who left their bike unattended would have it stolen.
Well planned communities can be close to car-free, at least for day-to-day activities. The problem is we haven't prioritized being nearly car free, choosing instead of externalize the costs of car culture (pollution that generations will have to deal with, health impacts on some community members today, depletion of fossil fuels and the impact of digging them up, vast swaths of land dedicated to flat tarmac for car storage).
They want to see sights 90 minutes drive away. 3 hours drive away. And be home again that night.
I support "local living without cars as much as possible", but I think cars are here to stay for most of us.
"The cities we live in are hundreds, if not thousands of years old. The idea of that a 15 minute city has any bearing on real life is sadly laughable."
The two sentences don't make sense together. Those old cities were "15 minute" cities by necessity - easy long distance travel wasn't a thing until the industrial revolution. We've since redesigned many of them for car use, and in some cases realized the mistake and redesigned them again (Amsterdam, for example).
There will be various solutions to our energy and pollution problems, and some of the variations will depend on the region the solution is being implemented in. I don't think solar power will be as big in Canada as in, say, the Sahara Desert.