Side comment: I just looked at your profile and saw your most recent comment regarding you realizing you came in with a close mindset and now realize that. Good on you! You’re young and learning. I totally get the general “cars bad” mindset. I wish that at least US cities and major suburbs were designed to be livable without cars. Some are, or at least some areas are, of course, but cars and car infrastructure almost always comes first.

Getting away from needing cars would be awesome and it should become a bigger goal in the US. I don’t disagree with you at all there.

Keep in mind that the US is BIG and, from an area perspective, a vast majority is rural. Out there, cars really are a necessity. Maybe there are long term solutions to reduce the dependence on cars in rural areas, but I have a hard time imagining what they are. Keep in mind that rural means that there simply isn’t the population density to support public transit because, pretty much by definition, rural areas don’t have centralized locations for people to be picked up at; small numbers of people are going long distances to a variety of places.

That said, cities and big towns are the “low hanging fruit” for reducing car reliance with by far the largest return on investment.