Public transport is not a self-goal, but it’s the best way by far to reduce the spatial requirements for transportation. In particular subways and commuter trains can move an absolutely insane amount of people for even the largest metropolitan areas, without obliterating the ability to walk.
Others include having motorcycles and bicycles for individual transport. That can work in small cities but usually impact walkability anyways. If you look at south east asia for instance, often lacking in good public transport, but having a lot of motorcycles in large cities making pedestrian movement hard.
The big problem there was the lack of sidewalks for pedestrians so you kinda had to go into traffic even if you were just following the streets.
Crossing even the busiest boulevards was actually easy, if a bit nerve racking. The flow of scooters just parts around you as you cross, giving you the “I am Moses” feel - you only have to be visible and consistent with your movement.
Honestly they should just get rid of all the zebra crossings and pedestrian lights - those don’t work anyway, and just build lots of pedestrian islands everywhere and they would be golden, oh and ban cars.
The amount of people those scooters move throughout hanoi is just staggering - even if they are a bit slow, they make up for it being like an organic flow that doesn’t stop for anything as it can just ride around it.
The problem is that people need a place to store their single-occupancy-vehicles. which means that each individual with a car takes up a permanent ~100 Sqft. They also need places to put that car. If you remove the parking lots, and the roads, admittedly, you'll create a more walkable city that means people don't need cars. But people will still want something for longer distances. And that something is public transit.
Your private taxi cab is never going to compete with the people-moving capacity of a bus, or a train. A road with 100s of cars on it, is a demonstration of how many people are heading in a common direction. If you want them to move faster in that direction, find a denser form of transportation that doesn't take up the space of 100s of cars.
Is parking an unsolved problem? I think in most cities it's a solved problem, and the consequence is traffic. But I would be curious of your take given that it's the question you asked. What is there to solve for parking?
edit: Also, Public Transportation, arguably, fixes both traffic and parking.
But ya, if we could eliminate parking, we have some more space for some nice things, but having lived it, it doesn’t solve the main problem at all if private transportation is still viable.
I'm having trouble parsing that sentence, could you clarify?
"[A developed city isn't one where poor people take cars but where rich people take public transit.]"
There's places elsewhere in the developed world where there's no public transportation, and everyone uses a car for longer trips.
You can usually still cross the street safely as a pedestrian, and expect to reliably find a sidewalk next to the road.
US roads, intersections, parking spots etc. are also absurdly large by the standards of most other countries, it all adds up.