If we means society at large that requires a large portion of society if not more than a simple majority. That doesn’t exist for ending the use of automobiles. If the goal is the reduce the impact of automobiles, assumed from the thread being discussed, it’s not sufficient to help those who want to walk to walk to the grocery store. That’s a wonderful thing to do. But to reduce the impact of tire microplastics, the most likely route to actually achieve a reduction isn’t to get people to walk to the store. It’s to address the microplastic debris of tires. Better formulations, better runoff management, mass reduction of cars.
Maybe we can change society fundamentally. Maybe. I posit probably not. But we can definitely mitigate the impact of our cars on the environment and must. The rest is “nice to have.”
I don’t think I ever say anything about 100% of trips done by car implies a lack of desire to less car reliance. Truly, this is reading what you wanted to read, and a clear ascribing of a bone headed intention on my part. But reducing reliance isn’t enough to change the problems meaningfully. As has been noted elsewhere the 5 minute drive to the store doesn’t compare to the 2 hour drive of the 18 wheeler trucks distributing and redistributing the products from farm to store. Nor does it compare to the work commute, nor does it compare to the weekend outing to the mountains, with four or five hours of driving total, 50x or more the trip to the store.
I lived many years in NYC, and I walked to buy groceries. It was good (although as my family grew the logistics of carting that much food in a push cart got tedious to be frank). But even in nyc I found myself increasingly buying things via delivery, especially non perishable items. Public transit takes so long to get from one part of the city to another, often two hours round trip, that I found myself buying anything I needed on Amazon. Which then brought delivery trucks into the picture. Uber and Lyft and taxis were a constant part of life, even with a pretty complete transit system, simply because to get to a specific place not on a major line you had to do multiple transfers and the total commute time ballooned. Then you have to add in how incredibly unpleasant public transit can be - hot trains, insane people attacking people randomly, being pressed back to back for an hour with a huge crowd of strangers, break downs of signaling.
Now I have a car and I live in a place that is walkable, but is adapted to cars better than NYC. I enjoy walking and biking, but I will never live in a car hostile environment again.