To bring it down to a real and concrete case, we can do so much better than each family ferrying their children to school/activites, then driving everywhere in single-occupant cars. That's a world where children and senior citizens have greatly reduced independence and community.

How would it look like if there were reduced day-to-day car dependency? Maybe something like this: a "walking schoolbus" where senior citizens and schoolchildren connect with one another as they get exercise on the way to school. Who wouldn't want that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeYBL5u97c8

I really like the Barcelona Superblocks model [1] for existing urban environments, but subsidizing families to relocate closer to schools is also an option imho. You have to find the intersection of what is politically palatable and the resources available; the next 100 years is going to see structural demographic decline, declining working cohort participation, less growth and productivity, continuing rapid fertility rate decline, declining household sizes, etc so creativity and flexibility will be required (imho). I am also a fan of what Culdesac [2] is doing, and is a pattern to be scaled.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” got us cars, and I think the new question is "How do we deliver locality and mobility for quality lives without cars, when possible?" Cars are not going away, but we should not build for them specifically as if they were the default option, as this cost burdens the future with potentially unnecessary and expensive personal mobility and infrastructure obligations. Even today, they are unaffordable for a substantial population of people, based on the evidence in my comment above.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=barcelona+superblocks

[2] https://culdesac.com/

I don’t think many US parents would accept their child independently walking or bicycling to school, even over short distances. The Stranger Danger mainstream media has them absolutely terrified that their kid is going to be kidnapped as soon as they leave their front doors.

Just to consider this on a small scale where, it would actually need to be implemented, one neighborhood at a time, I live in a medium-sized town where the school district has chosen to reject free land that developers attempted to donate to the district for the construction of schools, in favor of just assigning the families who move into these new-build homes to the schools in the other part of town where schools have ample capacity due to the large 4+ bedroom single-family homes mostly being owned and occupied by empty-nest Boomers.

We live somewhere in between the "new builds" part of town and the area that has a bunch of schools, so the walk from our neighborhood to our assigned (and closest) middle school is only 2.5 miles, a 55 minute walk with 155 ft elevation change. This walk takes you across a road with a 60MPH speed limit, basically an expressway. The elementary school is a bit closer, only a 40 minutes, 2 mile walk, but same expressway.

Oh, and they don't even offer a school bus of any kind. I suppose the gen-x parents killed that idea off 25 years ago because they were so worried their kids would be out of direct supervision even walking to a bus stop, so each child is chaufferred door to door, rain or shine, until 16 when they receive their own cars.

I agree with you that all this is absurd. Kids are capable of walking to school and shouldn't have to leave a medium-sized neighborhood to do so. But significant demolition of neighborhoods and construction of schools, local grocery markets, etc. is the only prescription for our ills that would provide anything resembling an alternative to cars for the residents of the tract homes that make up a significant part of our car-dependent suburbs.

This is why I think whoever upthread is arguing that people aren't exactly being reasonable expecting the America we inherited from the 20th century to stop stalling and transform itself into 1,000 Amsterdams. Even though the places that share that awesome non-car infra are highly sought-after.