Cars are by now a hard to reverse environmental and urban planning disaster across the world. We are stuck with them. As a mode of transport it has grown uncontrollably at the expense of all others (except the airplane) and practically everything has been shaped to accomodate it.
Reversing that development, limiting car traffic to where its really needed is like trying to perform a complete heart and arteries transplant on a living person. Even if there was a will (which there is not) it is not clear if there is a way.
In the best scenario it will be an excruciatingly long transformation (~50 yr) as car oriented cities (or city sections) get slowly deprecated and the car-free or car-lite segments become more desirable, more livable.
This is what the car lobby wants you to think. The transformation to a better and more livable city free from overwhelming car traffic is closer and faster than you imagine. The primary challenge is the power of the car-industrial complex both inside and outside government and the continued work to destroy and hobble other forms of transit.
The city I live in is modest in size, 250k-300k depending on who you ask. It will never be a walkable city. Throughout much of the year, that's asking to die of heatstroke or something. It will never have a subway. Hell, there's only one or two buildings that are more than 5 stories tall. It is hundreds of miles away from any city of comparable size. My in-laws live in a township of about 6000 an hour away.
Are we supposed to give up cars? I have a 6 minute ride to work in the morning if I hit the stop lights wrong. Why would I ride the piss-stinking bus, when it'd add 20 minutes of irritation to my day?
It's not a car-industrial complex that is an obstacle to your imagined utopia. It's that there are people like myself who don't want to make our lives more difficult so that yours gets better. I'd be shocked if there's a non-coastal city or town anywhere in North America that supports your vision.
One could say the same about Singapore yet they find ways to make it work.
> It will never have a subway.
250k-300k is about the right size for a small tram network - compare e.g. Ghent.
> Hell, there's only one or two buildings that are more than 5 stories tall.
That's fine if there's no need for them.
> It is hundreds of miles away from any city of comparable size.
Sounds like banning cars from the centres of bigger cities won't really inconvenience you then.
> Are we supposed to give up cars? I have a 6 minute ride to work in the morning if I hit the stop lights wrong.
If traffic isn't a problem then there's no reason to give up cars. But generally as cities grow they reach a point where space is at a premium and cars take up too much of it. Again if we look at Ghent as a good example for a city that size, they have a car-free zone but it's only a few blocks around the very centre (there's a larger zone around it where cars are permitted but subject to emission requirements). It works well, makes for a really nice city centre that you can actually live in.
> Why would I ride the piss-stinking bus
What if I told you it was possible to have busses that don't stink of piss?
> It's not a car-industrial complex that is an obstacle to your imagined utopia. It's that there are people like myself who don't want to make our lives more difficult so that yours gets better.
Why do you think any change must be about making your life more difficult? Your whole post seems to be about looking for every possible problem and not making the slightest effort to look for solutions to them.