false dichotomy- there exists a world in which cars are not the normal mode of transportation because everything you could possibly want is within walking distance and intra-city travel is something you do only occasionally.

Does there though? I personally would be interested in living in a 1mln+ city that's 99%+ car free.

would be or would not be- I'm confused by your statement

I wanted to say that while I would like to live in such a world, I can't think of an example.

I couldn't possibly want to leave the city, drive down a logging road, tour around, and enjoy my personal freedom, right? Why would anyone want that, when someone might possibly have a small chance of dying because of it?

it's not just the small chance of dying, though- it's the very real and cumulative effects of driving cars in general. We have laws around being able to pump raw sewage into rivers and lakes as well as laws around leaving depleted uranium anywhere remotely possible of causing harm (and even then it probably still isn't great)

You're welcome to leave the city via some means that doesn't pollute the atmosphere. Walk, bike, etc. It's really whiney of you to feel so incensed that you can't just do whatever TF you want because "mah freedoms" when those activities are contributing to a degradation of the livability of the planet.

Yes, we as a species have reached the point where there are things we _can_ do that we _ought not_ do. Sucks I guess?

If you demand your personal freedom in that way, why do you live in a city at all? You can't park on a street at night and blare loud music, you can't shoot pigeons on the rooftops with a rifle, you can't fly a drone over people or around other's property without permission, and those won't even kill people.

A very small minority of elite cyber criminals, less than .000001% of the population will ever have the privilage to drive a vehicle manually in this future.

>>providing energy to our overlords

The Matrix AI robots do not really need humans to survive. They had a form of fusion. In reality the reason why they created the symbiotic relationship was as a kindness to their human supporters so that the human race would not go extinct.

The truth is that in the original imaginings of the plot to The Matrix, the artificial entities of the machine world had reversed the roles of interaction between humans and computers. It wasn't about energy at all, but about using human brains as a computational resource. They were farming the humans and enslaving them, because the machines occupied the antagonist role in the plot.

They were the villains. It's established in the animatrix set of short films, that the machines did not perceive themselves as villains, and this is a common characteristic that cuts across most tropes of villainy. During a monologue, a villain will often equivocate their motivation with that of the hero. (you and me? we're really the same...)

Focus groups and producers interfered with that aspect of the plot (the grid computer made of people, hence the name: The Matrix), and rewrote the story to depict the machines as using humans as an energy source, a power grid (changing puns and quips using, instead of computational terms, to energy references, such as "coppertop" and the like), which tested as a more accessible concept to the lowest common denominator in the target audience.

If you watch the supplemental material included with the trilogy boxed set, I think it's mentioned in either one of the commentaries or the documentaries and interview segments.