I grow up with a mother without a car. Both school and shopping was within walking distance, and when we got older and chang d school within easy 15 minutes bicycle distance. And this was not in a city center, but in a suburb. And most importantly, not in the US. The problem with the US is that everything is built for cars, which means that all the distances by necessity becomes huge to fit all the roads and the parking lots. Remove those and you can place everything much closer and you won't need the car at all most days.

You don't really seem familiar with the U.S. suburbs. They weren't built for cars, they were built for agriculture originally, then for people who wanted yards, land, and more freedom.

I grew up in a suburb of Chicago. I could walk to two grocery stores, but each took 30 minutes each way. I also grew up across from both my grade and middle school, a horse ranch, a gym, and a massive park.

I loved my childhood because we could play full field soccer games, rugby, football (American), etc. However, if my parents wanted to get anything you had to drive.

Most people on HN don't appear to realize what it's like growing up or living outside of the west or east coasts of the U.S. or Europe. It's not that it was built for cars, it was built for farms and agriculture, nothing is wrong with that either.

I lived for two years in Ann-Arbor, not that many hours drive from Chicago. Almost all of US suburbs were built to be suburbs planned for everyone to drive whenever they wanted to get somewhere. They aren't countryside that organically grown into suburbs. It's just ridiculous how long it takes to just cross the parking lot outside a mall by foot if you get the idea to actually walk there.

We had a forest behind our house, a soccer field where we also played bandy in the winters, 10 minutes walk to the horse range, a golf course that also was used for cross country skiing in the winters, 5 minutes to the commuter train that took you to the city center in 15 minutes, lakes we swam in the summers and ice-skated in the winters. Markets for food within easy walking distance and a decent mall within easy bicycle distance. I bicycled everywhere when I didn't use public transport. I didn't even bother to get a drivers licence until I was a bit over 30, and the only reason I got it then was because I was planning some long holidays in the US. You don't need to center you society around cars and driving to have a very high and pleasant standard of living.

I am from Brazil. Here around 1950 the government deliberately gave priority to roads over railroads and rivers as a way to attract car factories, hoping to get their taxes and create employment.

Currently in Brazil the laws about import cars are extremely draconian, and taxes are overall sky high, crappy local made cars are frequently 2 times the EU or US price of the same, but higher quality model.

People still get in terrible debts, paying sometimes interest that totals several times the principal, to buy cars anyway, not because they are useful, but because frequently they are the only choice. For example in Rio de Janeiro, because of the Olympics, the government deliberately canceled public transportation routes connecting poor areas to the touristic areas, forcing people of poor areas to use cars, specially because parts of the route are impossible to cross on foot (mountains with no hiking trails, with the passage being road tunnels)

Or that for the world cup, the government declined several train proposals in favour of making "light train over road" routes, where you just build gigantic roads on pillars and place buses on them.

Cars were very successfully marketed as status symbols and expressions of personal identity. Having a nice car in the suburbs meant your family was safe from the evils of the city.

The entire government apparatus spent decades and untold fortunes making the car the fast and flexible option. We now have the benefit of hindsight that tells us it was a massively inefficient use of public funds.