Laughs in San Francisco
That being said it’s not really a groundbreaking or even particularly interesting thing to point out that America has a cultural problem with favoring cars, and that too much parking is a simple consequence of that.
It's nearly 4% of the US population (2021).
It’s more interesting to have this conversation about a city like Dallas or Houston or St Louis or Tulsa, all of whom have absolutely kowtowed to car culture to create negative externalities like what this article is going on about and for which public transportation probably could not easily be described as “adequate” in comparison to the aforementioned cities of NY, SF, Chicago.
The issue isn't cars specifically. The issue is our built environment requires cars. Maybe more things should just be down the block.
People used to be able to just go down the block here. That's been made illegal many places by zoning.
The continental United States has about 3.5 million square miles of land. By comparison China has about 3.7 million square miles. Roughly the same, give or take a few. Observe the number of public passenger rail lines that China has and the timeframe in which they were built them.
The idea that America is just too geographically big for public rail or any kind of public transportation system and we must be beholden to the car is categorically false.