Well, might be unpopular but... I hate cities, no matter with cars or not: I hate cities because I love efficiency AND evolution.
- creating large buildings, so large aqueducts, that normally have to grab water far away, altering MUCH the natural water distribution cycle for a big radius around cities, so large sewers who push much concentrated pollution (recall: without oxygen we die, with too much oxygen we die as well, in nature "a poison" is something at a poisonous concentration) is not a good thing, yes we spare land, but we consume MUCH more, not much less contrary contrary to common belief, which I suspect is the result of interested propaganda;
- large cities, large buildings are things we can't quickly evolve. There are too much people, to physically near interests to being able to agree and realize something new, and in a changing world, so a changing society being able to evolve is needed;
- large cities often are somewhere because in a far past there was much reasons to have them there, sometimes some reasons are still valid (like local climate, water availability, accessibility, ...) but sometimes are not there anymore and other reasons NOT to be there are much more relevant. Again moving light homes/sheds/compact warehouses it's far easier than moving large complex. Jakarta is the extreme example and the new Nusantara is a good demonstration of the insustainability, similarly "most efficient modern cities" like modern Fordlandia, like Telosa, Arkadag, Prospera, Innopolis, ... are good example of the same: cities are giant factories made to transform citizens into workers, that do not own the factory, do not decide their jobs, that have nothing and mush follow the stream to been able to earn enough to get services, and services costly enough to ensure they keep working at maximum, getting essentially nothing in the end. Trapped in a process they can't really control or direct.
Modern cities can ONLY works with mass transit, private cars in such dense are are an unsustainable nightmare, but modern cities are unsustainable and a nightmare themselves. Like money in modern world is a tool to extract values from most, in very few private cleptocratic hands, cities are a tool to force people working and conform to the few who organize them. I like freedom, so I do not like cities.
If you try to REALLY be curious in the scientific sense, you'll end up simulating costs, raw materials and so on of a fictional city vs a fictional spread area, NOT like USA suburbs but like European Rivieras (meaning work and residential areas intermixed) and the result is that the spread version (not too much spread, not too dense) is CHEAPER and obviously can evolve better. Oh, yes, a multi-storey NEW building is more efficient than a set of NEW homes. Today. In 50 years you can't upgrade the multi-storey now not so new building while you can upgrade/re-create from the ground small homes. So in the long run the initial energy efficiency drop. The bigger structure demand much more raw materials than many little/lighter ones as well. Similarly trains are more efficient than roads, but demand much more to be build and kept up. Going by air demand a lot more energy to go from A to B, but do not demand an road/rail infra between A and B and so on. In the past we have experimented mainframes, than we understand clusters are better, more resilient, easy to evolve and so on. Sure, they are harder to be made and used efficiently, but that's is. Try, for sure and think about dense city life vs sparse life. Think about how much you spend depending where you live, think about how much packaging you use just to eat/drink downtown vs at your own home, how efficient a small food domestic stock can be respect of buy grocery every days and so on. I've done the math and tried myself having left a big city for mountings (of course, in a not that remote area).