Public transportations and walking don’t replace a lot of use cases for cars, except for commuting for office works.
You can’t board a train while soaked in mud, or pushing a Subaru seat, or carrying bag full of groceries. Actually I’ve done the latter two, but I haven’t seen anyone else doing it, and it had been extremely awkward.
Everyone feels driving cars are wrong, perhaps because of emissions, but trains and buses just don’t cut it. I even doubt a public driverless taxis fills the gap, as moving large objects on human driven taxis can be awkward enough.
we only have bags full of groceries because zoning prohibits grocery stores being near where people live in most place. So you need a car and since its a pain, you migt as well stock up on as much as you can while you're at it.
If it were, you'd probably just go on a 10 minute walk and pickup enough for two days of food.
That's fine for young childless people. For families with multiple children it's a huge hassle to have to have to shop like that. Growing kids eat a lot. And when you buy heavy items like watermelon or milk or whole frozen chickens it's just not easy to carry. Much easier to drive a big car to a big box store and stock up on everything needed for a week.
I know plenty of fairly affluent families with multiple children in European cities who never bothered buying a car. By the time the children were eating a lot, they were carrying part of the groceries. Starting around 10 or so, the parents would just give them some money and have them do some of the smaller daily groceries (bread, milk, fruit) on their own, walking or cycling.
You can’t board a train while soaked in mud, or pushing a Subaru seat, or carrying bag full of groceries. Actually I’ve done the latter two, but I haven’t seen anyone else doing it, and it had been extremely awkward.
Everyone feels driving cars are wrong, perhaps because of emissions, but trains and buses just don’t cut it. I even doubt a public driverless taxis fills the gap, as moving large objects on human driven taxis can be awkward enough.