Then I moved to a smaller city with a larger suburb area. Within 6 months I had bought the car. The last straw was having had to wait an hour for the bus, carrying grocery bags. At the same time, you find parking spots almost everywhere, and walking was not that easy, with longer distances and in many places not even sidewalks.

It's just two different worlds, really.

Surely you can have city centres (especially old towns) without cars and people living in suburbs, with special needs or whatever to own a car.

I'd love to drive to a city centre and then have a walk without the traffic noise! I'd hate taking 90 minutes of bus instead of 20 minute drive.

There's a huge inherent contradiction here though: You are creating the very problem you want to escape from for everyone along your path of travel. land tends to be quite expensive in the city center, and parking is not a good use of it. Are you willing to spend $50 to park your car there to drive to the city center?

That's pretty common for people who drive into big cities for the day (or indeed to work for a day). Maybe they park on the outskirts and take transit in. But that takes time and, especially for a family, the savings may not really be worth it.

To most people it isn't worth it to spend that much, especially because traffic on the bridges and tunnels is usually so bad that the trains are not only cheaper but faster, too.

Completely car free city is a pipe dream. Diversity is good.

Cars need special roadways with expensive construction methods, maintenance, signaling and provisions for parking their bulk.

This takes up huge amounts of space that could have been used for waking streets, bike paths and attentive urban spaces, instead of large expanses of boring black asphalt.

Ask a shop owner whether she would rather have thousands of people in cars driving by her store and not even look at it, or hundreds of pedestrians who stop and look at her display windows.

Ask a cafe owner whether he would prefer to have his outside seating right next to a major thoroughfare, or on a busy walking street.

Cars actively make environments hostile and uninviting to people.

I'm talking about creating boundary around downtown to which remaining of metro can travel to by either means.

In a lot of cases (at least here) the shops were there first, and the thoroughfare grew in use next to them. This road cuts directly throuhh the middle of the entire city.

Specifically a stream that had decent walkable paths alongside was put underground and a big thoroughfare put on top of it. I'm part of an initiative to reopen the stream and put the traffic in a tunnel underneath, in order to create a park/urban space for people, rather than cars.

I want the entire city to be pedestrian first, bicycles second and cars dead last.

What you really need is a shift so the closer to the centre you get the more you are forced out of the car and onto public transport and ultimately cycling or walking. Cars should be for when you want to leave towards the highway.

Most of them are deliberately deprived of decent public transit, because a segment of people don't want buses and especially don't want trains in/near their neighborhood. The most common explanation I've heard is that public transit attracts the homeless, the poor and criminals.

A lot of suburbs are even designed to prevent walkability for the same reasons, leaving out logical shortcut footpaths and bike paths between streets and cul-de-sacs.

This obviously speaks to a whole host of societal problems and paranoia, to be honest.

With a good local train network with stops in every neighborhood, you could just leave the car at home and not have to worry about parking in the city.

I suspect some of it is political, if you are right leaning then you may well view cycling and public transport as a step towards socialism. It probably doesn't have much to do with the practicalities.