You can fit an entire Italian town in the size of a freeway interchange in Houston:

https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/highway-interchange-ho...

Our cities were designed to be spread out to make them less susceptible to atomic weapons in the 1950's (not a joke).

So... Yes, we need cars. It really is a long way for many of us.

Granted, not to take away from the point of different use cases, however Sienna is a very small medieval-era town that one can walk across at leisure and the Houston interchange is one of the most complex in the US. So it is somewhat of a hyperbolic comparison.

I agree that very common suburban and rural vehicles, respectively, are SUVs and pickup trucks. But I am curious what portion of urban drivers use a vehicle that most of the time far outclasses their average use case. I would like to find data on this but it seems to me like often people own a vehicle for the extreme outlier use case.

Why would you want a vehicle that only covered 95% of your use cases?

It's like condoms - better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

It certainly makes sense on a personal level but when one multiplies this thought process by a given population there starts to be a compounded issue of excess material going into the construction of the vehicles, excess fuel being used to move them, and excess parking space used to store them, to name a few.

Redunancy and efficiency are common tradeoffs we are constantly trying to balance. It's only a question of how important the effects of downsides are.

Sometimes someone dies as an immediate result, and for some it means waiting for another 5 minutes.