Also a huge number of people in the US travel to places that are walkable:
- Disney World
- Las Vegas (The strip is anyway)
- DC
- NYC
Yeah, I agree with you. Being 100% without a car is hard in most cases.
And the answer I see is trains. For the amount of money that does into the car industry (+ multi lane roads, administration, maintenance, etc) we could have super fancy, comfy, fast, frequent, and cheap/free trains.
And people would have more mobility too, at a fraction of the cost and environmental damage.
Trains for long distance + trolleys and subways for local travel. There will invariably be people whose transportation needs require a private vehicle but this combo alone would clear up the majority of cars on the road in my opinion.
Even in countries with pretty good public transit like the UK and Germany, a large majority of families have a private vehicle. If we had better trains and subways in the US, I don’t think too many people would sell their cars, but only use them once or twice a week, rather than once or twice a day.
That’s a huge win in my book.
UK and Germany don’t have good public transport, maybe except for individual cities. Switzerland on the other hand has good and frequent public transport nationwide.
