Pretty sure OP's comment assumed city life. In most rural and suburban USA towns, cars are the only thing that enables connection to others. If cars suddenly disappeared, half of America would effectively become hermits (not to mention starve due to lack of access to basic necessities like groceries).

Ending Car Dependence basically means move to a denser city, which you're never going to convince everyone to do.

No - car dependency isn’t a problem in rural areas, it’s a problem in metro areas. Places like Columbus, Indianapolis, Tampa Bay, San Diego, etc. are all completely 100% reliant on cars for transit.

People already live in the cities, there isn’t anything to convince them of for that. Instead we have to build transit that allows people to not rely on a car for their daily needs. Not that you can’t have one, of course. But walking, biking, and rail infrastructure need much, much more funding and then we can reduce how we handicap society with car-only transit.

What is interesting is that there are pockets of car free living even in these examples. E.g. in Columbus you have 45000 undergraduates at Ohio state, the bulk of whom live within a half hour walk of campus and all their friends from college, and might only use their car to shuttle themselves and all their roommates to the grocery store once a week.

Many of them have cars and pay for parking or if they live off campus they just park their car on the street. I would guess that 30% to 50% of those undergraduates have a car somewhere close by.

The best thing the university does is add a COTA (regional bus system) ticket as part of the tuition price to get students riding the bus locally instead of driving as they inevitably try to do.

Unfortunately, the bus service once you leave campus is comically bad so everyone just drives, catches a ride, or uses ride-sharing if you ever want to actually do anything not physically on campus. There are a lot of low-hanging fruit that the city and region refuse to take. We could run a tram from the southside all the way up to Old Worthington along the same street and you'd hit all the most dense spots in Columbus and you'd probably eliminate a lot of driving, traffic, and deaths but instead they're spending tens of millions of dollars adding new highways.

I've heard it hypothesized that one of the underlying factors in why Americans romanticize the "college years" so much is that, for most, it's the only time they've ever lived in an environment (the campus) that's not designed primarily for cars.

In the Netherlands you can bike between suburbs and rural areas. In the US that is hard, not only because of the distances, but also because there are no safe roads for bicycles in rural areas. It's highway shoulder or nothing, basically.

Doesn't stop anyone around here. Curvy rural two-lane highway, no shoulder, few passing zones, poor sight lines, and people are biking on it.

> Doesn't stop anyone around here.

Yes, it does. Go visit the Netherlands and you'll see the remarkable difference. Just because some people are biking on those roads doesn't mean you have anywhere near the bicycle trip share that the Netherlands does.

Even in the city its like this. Pick an arbitrary A-B in any city, e.g. go test brooklyn or chicago. Unless you happen to pick an A-B that is within a few mins walk of the same single rail line (no transfers), the car is always faster and by a good deal. Usually its like you can drive 25 minutes in a car or wait around for two busses that will get you there in an hour and ten minutes.

this hasn’t been my experience in manhattan/brooklyn fwiw. taking the subway is routinely faster. i can see the bus being slower but it’s usually not by much. You also need to deal with parking for a car if you’re not using a rideshare.

That's if you don't need to transfer. Brooklyn/manhattan example I'm assuming you are going into or out of the city into brooklyn. Look at the map, all the lines work for that sort of commute, and pretty clearly don't help you if you have a commute that isn't on this hub and spoke system.

Suburban USA towns are impossible to live in without cars because they're built with the assumption everyone has one. There's nothing inherent in lower-density housing that prevents it from being walkable, or from having basic amenities zoned to be closer to residential zones.

(Rural is a different matter, but they're usually left out of infrastructure in general)

> In most rural and suburban USA towns, cars are the only thing that enables connection to others.

I mean I suppose this is technically true. But as someone who was raised across a smatter of rural and sparse suburb and who now lives in/near dense urban areas - the urban areas are the ones having much more trouble feeling a sense of connection.

In all of the rural areas, everyone knew each other by first name, greeted each other, dropped by with baked goods. Were they dependent on cars? Yeah I guess. Feels like we missed the elephant in the room though