That being said, cities don't have to look like the US dystopian suburb. Germany, for instance, is full of towns and cities that are walkable, bikable, and impose no artificial restrictions on car ownership and usage. It's the big cities that have problems with cars due to space constraints. But that's not an inherent property of cars. They start to see similar issues with cargo bikes and will arguably face problems with kitchen ownership at some point.
This is purely a function of contemporary car-oriented infrastructure, nothing more. People do indeed select the choice that is most convenient, and the built environment as is today does favor the use of cars.
Though, for all the reasons mentioned in this thread, and more, this is a grim mistake.
>That being said, cities don't have to look like the US dystopian suburb. Germany, for instance, is full of towns and cities that are walkable, bikable, and impose no artificial restrictions on car ownership and usage. It's the big cities that have problems with cars due to space constraints. But that's not an inherent property of cars. They start to see similar issues with cargo bikes and will arguably face problems with kitchen ownership at some point.
Cargo bikes scale far better than cars. Germany, while better than the U.S, is still not peak built environment. As a nation they lean quite a bit on cars.
That's a huge misunderstanding. They scale in exactly the same way: they have space usage that grows linearly with the number of owners. They are of course smaller, but also carry only one adult. A city that has a problem with x million cars will have the very same problem with 3x million cargo bikes. That's a serious problem, because cities tend to grow ever more dense. The constant factor simply doesn't change the equation. The only thing that scales better is a shared mode of transportation, but that doesn't offer the same level of freedom as individual transportation and is often not as efficient as one would like (e.g., subways getting overcrowded during rush hour).
Trains only go where there are tracks. Tracks are much more expensive to build and maintain than roads. Trains to do not run on demand.
Bicycles do not protect riders from the elements. Bicycles are not suitable for hauling large or heavy objects, or many objects.
This whole anti-car thing is getting tiresome. Yes, the US needs to dial back its car culture. But cars do have a place, and fill a niche that other transportation methods cannot fill.