Look, I grew up in California suburbs where car culture is the only culture, but I’ve also looked at the data enough to know that the status quo isn’t working. It’s clear that cars do not scale even if you spend amounts of money we can’t sustain, they have significant negative impacts on people who live near busy roads, and the planet isn’t exactly getting any cooler.

More to the point of the article, we know that every year forty thousand Americans are killed by unsafe operation of vehicles and at least hundreds of thousands are injured, usually with permanent life altering impacts. Experts estimate that there is close to a trillion dollar annual gap between what drivers pay and the cost to society for the status quo: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/01/18/why-car-i...

So the question from my perspective is how we improve quality of life for everyone while reducing costs for everyone, and that means less car trips which also improves the car trips which are necessary. For example, emergency vehicles are most commonly blocked by private cars. If we care about improvement there, getting more people to walk, bike, or take transit helps everyone because a fire truck or ambulance isn’t routinely stuck in traffic. The same applies to safety for children, the ability for the blind or elderly to function independently, ease of delivery, etc.: every single part of urban life improves if there isn’t the assumption that everyone in the city needs ~120 square feet of space to move themselves around, and the heavy equipment is reserved for the small percentage of trips which actually need it.