If you design cities to not have alternatives to cars then of course there's no substitute. All my day-to-day trips are currently faster using a bike+train, significantly less stressful, cheaper and also much healthier. People don't generally prefer specific modes of transportation, they just want to travel quickly and conveniently. That can be achieved with any mode of transportation, yet cars are the most expensive, most polluting, loudest, lowest density and most stressful.

I just took a look at a picture of Seattle from 2011 and it looks like half the area is dedicated to car parking with huge stroads everywhere. Having to take a car to go to the shops 300m away sounds like a total nightmare. And it's not even the suburbs! If those roads had little traffic on them then that was clearly just due to the population not having caught up. Once it did of course those roads weren't going to be enough. At that point you can either bulldoze more of the city for the car and still get awful traffic or provide better alternatives...

For reference this is the photo I found: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Downtown...

Very few American cities actually offers FAST point to point transit via automobiles. 50 years ago, it was probably realistic, but now automobile traffic in most American cities makes quick transportation anywhere unrealistic.

To be fair, cars are on demand, unlike tube where waiting times can reach an outrageous 5 minutes.

https://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-12-how-many-cars-a...

I for one simply don't want to pay the to own and maintain a car, preferring instead to rent one or purchase a ride (via taxi or rideshare etc) as needed.

I've never been to Seattle, but it looks like a medium-density city on the map.

Yes.

Now go look at Peter Cooper Village in NYC.[1]

"The complex is designed as two large "superblocks", independent of the grid system that characterizes the majority of Manhattan below 155th Street.It consists of two large parks, one for each part of the complex, juxtaposed with modern red brick apartment towers."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_Town%E2%80%93Peter_...

But I suspect a huge part of it is visiting Europe or Asia as a tourist and enjoying being without a car.

But they didn’t actually live there.

There are tradeoffs, but I much preferred being able to take the train or bus and relax and zone out rather than have spend the entire trip in the vigilant state you need while driving. And while cycling, yes, you have to be vigilant, but you're getting exercise too.

I'm at a point in my life where, I probably don't want to live in the big city as much. (Funnily enough, when I was much younger I never thought I would want to.) But anyway, I'd still much prefer to live in a denser, more walkable suburb, which tend to be unfortunately hard to find and expensive in the US for reasons that are probably already all discussed in comments in this thread.

Agreed.

As a tourist you also tend to visit the historic center of capital cities, which have by far the best public transport and fanciest architecture.

Plus you're on vacation and having fun.

When you live there and walk to your commuter train a gray november morning, it's a very different experience.

Still preferable, to me at least! Getting in to work and shucking off your mist-covered coat and making a nice cup of tea made it just fine.

I live in Dublin. I'd rank it as pretty middling in transport by European standards. We have a decent bus network, commuter rail to the suburbs, trams that are frequent but overcrowded at rush hour, and intercity trains to the other cities in the country.

I've been here nearly a decade and have no great rush to buy a car. And there's still obvious improvement to be made. The red line needs a relief line unless work from home makes the expanse of new offices at the end of the line mostly empty, cycling lane coverage is spotty and often conflicting with buses or parking, and bike parking is lacking.

I think it's such a pervasive meme that the US is bad for transit that people don't even try. I don't ever use cars (like twice in 450 days) AND I live beside one of the major transport hubs in my city (65/Folsom in Sacramento), yet I don't know where or when buses could bring me.

There is a dearth in communication.

I was in Orlando last week and the buses were great, and empty.