Tire dust makes up the majority of ocean microplastics

You're comment can be distilled to "well the solution is many orders of magnitude better than the status quo, but it's not perfect so it's equally bad"

And busses, light rail, intercity trains.

But America associates one-car-per-person with all kinds of twisted politics and self-esteem anxiety.

We need a psyops program to wean people off cars, and it will take a decade or more. Just look at the anger in any HN thread that is critical of cars, it runs deep.

I live in a neighborhood full of small apartments, single level duplexes, and single family homes. What stores are walkable? The liquor store, and gas station, and if i really feel like it, dominos and 7-11, both of which are at least 1/4 mile one way. Most others in this area, dont get those even. Past that its about a mile one way to the actual grocery store. And then after all the shopping, i have to walk back, now with 50+lbs of groceries.

Honestly, all this we need more walkable cities stuff, i get it, yes, you should be able to get places by walking, but really, its just not even feasible most times if youre going to be buying something. Im not gonna walk home from best buy 4+ miles away heaving a huge TV on my back, no one will. We invented transportation that didnt involve humans using their legs because we are slow, and easily over encumbered when carrying things. Theres a reason we saw an explosion of carriages way back. Its easier to haul more, and much faster, than if a person, or even many people at once, were to do it.

Housing density is a huge factor in a lot of this, but having swaths of tall purely apartment buildings is also not the answer. People want single family homes and other styles for many reasons. They wont be going away anytime soon. And even if they did, the only answer is very mixed use zoning.

One of my favorite examples, in downtown Denver, there is a tall apartment building, stacked on top of a large chain grocery store, it includes parking for the store, and spots for the building, under the building too. This is what i would consider peak use, and what people complain about walkable cities really need to focus on. Having a city you can walk anywhere is great, but you need to be able to get to the societal needs without having to walk far. Of course the grocery store also serves for a large part of that neighborhood, and distance to the store is a variable, but this mainly serves multiple buildings in a small area. The big problem is all the space we waste dedicating to parking. It might be more expensive, but you can gain a lot more use if you force parking lots to have shops above/below them, and that reclaimed flat land can then be used for the mixed use building. Parking is also not going away, like i said, we invented carriages for a reason. Howwwweeeeevvvveeerrr all of this comes with a number of caveats, like the ridiculous price to lease a storefront, build the building, etc, and of course its just a feedback loop that gets worse as we waste more space, space becomes premium.

All of this is to sum up my point, walkability is variable by person, and changes greatly depending on if youre going to have to be carrying things, and theres never going to be good "walkable" cities, short of nuking a city and starting over, you wont make it vastly better, especially with the politicians and government we have now.

The bulk of the problem is 5000lb+ vehicles. F150, SUVs like Suburbans, etc. etc. I'm not even sure if people are using these big vehicles to carry their families around, its probably just single-person drivers in most cases.

I'm not even sure how to approach the weight problem. We have plenty of cars in the 3000lb or 4000lb range but more-and-more people are pushing 5000lb+.