Public transport, dedicated cycling infrastructure, and planning policies aiming for the "15 minute neighbourhood" are what you're looking for.
Public transport, dedicated cycling infrastructure, and planning policies aiming for the "15 minute neighbourhood" are what you're looking for.
Even many neighborhoods designed to be 100% walkable and pedestrian-first make affordances for delivery vehicles and similar. Those vehicles can and should be electric, but cycling and transit still aren't at all complete substitutes.
Commutes can also be faster by public transit than by car, especially if start and destination are in the same city.
Delivery vehicles and trucks are probably the most difficult, but they're also major contributors to the noise and stink.
Billions of people seem to have worked out how to do this on bicycles and public transport.
By comparison, my residential building here in Berlin has a restaurant and a café on the ground floor, a business office on the first floor, and the rest is residential, and even the parts of the city with houses rather than apartment blocks do similar things horizontally rather than vertically: house, house, kebabs, five houses, small supermarket, three houses, office.
Similarly in the UK, you’ll have domestic resistances above or next to shops and pubs and offices. Or next to (I’ve never seen them above) industrial buildings: workshops, factories, etc.
In the US, we are so far away from "forcing" people to get rid of ICE cars that the very concept is ludicrous. What we instead force is ownership of ICE cars, and it's nearly impossible to live without one because we have banned, via law, the land use that would allow a person even the option of living without a car.
As somebody who advocates for the mere legalization of car-free land use, I am frequently accused of forcing others to get rid of their car, or of being exclusionary, for merely proposing the possibility.
People in the US are somewhat sick in the head when it comes to cars, and need to at least let the huge population of people who don't want to be subjected to the violence and pollution from cars to live that way. The contrast between Paris, which great expanded non-car options during the pandemic, and a car-addicted city like San Francisco which can't even convert a lightly used beach highway into a bike and walkway, is massive.
The US must change drastically, but the drastic change is to allow people to ditch their cars, not force them.
I could certainly see cities like London banning ICE cars within their centres within 5 years, without much impact on poorer individuals. It’s already financially prohibitive to drive into the centre due to the congestion charge, and most people would consider it insane to drive due to traffic, and the fact that public transport is about twice a quick.