But for people that live in towns, they shouldn't live in environments built for cars rather than people.
I'm European and lived in Columbus, Ohio for a period and traveled the US a bit and I just can't understand how can people do not recognize those cities are barely livable, walkable let alone enjoyable.
At the end of the day it's a matter of trade offs and I have nothing against people willing to live in car oriented cities, I'm just surprised that it's like that literally everywhere bar some downtowns I've seen like Boston (but my memory may fail me), there should be more variety of city planning, rather than isolated buildings with countless parkings everywhere.
Also, cars are really bad for health, even if they are not gas powered tires create tons of dust. If you've lived in a city and a country you know the difference in dirt in them, and it's largely car dependent.
You're right. The problem is all of the people saying things to the effect of "we need to ban low-density single-family housing to save the environment" who want to keep us from living how we want.
Seems easy if you're not the one paying for the cleanup I guess, except if you're a taxpayer then ultimately you will be.
Even if you discount CO2, cars still produce a lot of plastic waste in the form of tyre wear, estimated as about 9% of that currently produced (https://www.systemiq.earth/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Breaki...). EVs actually produce _more_ of this because of their weight.
Cars are also the primary source of noise pollution (again, even EVs) and are responsible for a considerably number of deaths (number 1 cause of deaths outside of disease). Road maintainance is also one of the highest financial burdens on towns, to the extent that towns actually are unable to pay for their own road maintainance at all and taxes from people living in cities needs to make up the shortfall. A massive reduction in driving would constitute an enormous cost reduction for the federal government, allowing taxes to be allocated to other sectors.
Maybe none of these seem particularly compelling by itself, but taken together it adds up to a lot of reasons to reduce car reliance to whatever extent we can.
> Banning single-family housing in most places in the US is not necessary
Why do you qualify those statements with "most" and "a vast majority of"? Are there places where you do want to only allow high-density housing and totally ban single-family homes?
What is the ideal city lacking that sees you need to travel for other reasons?
Don't get hung up imagining the shitty cities of today, except without cars, actually think about an ideal city.
There are plenty of reasons you might want to leave somewhere even if it is quite literally perfect.