> We know that cars are neither binding nor addictive because people regularly move to cities and sell their only car with little difficulty
Little difficulty? Is this a joke or do we have different definitions of difficulty?
There're hardly any cities in the US with adequate transportation, number 1. I live in a city; you probably do to. You REQUIRE your car, as do 99.9999% of all cities in the US. Some don't, like NYC - but even there you're pushing it. It's not London.
> as if ridding ourselves of cars would magically make everything close
That's exactly what it does, because everything is far because of the car. It's urban sprawl. We don't have more "stuff", rather we waste the majority of our spaces on infrastructure for cars. Roads, parking, etc.
> Before the car, going to town was an all-day affair in the horse drawn carriage
That's just not true. People live in the town, that's why it's a town. Are you a farmer or something? No, you live in an urban area. You're IN the town, your town is just car centric and therefore it sucks ass to navigate.
> Rather than trying to kill cars, why not attempt to build better rail infrastructure
Sigh... okay:
1. Nobody on Earth is trying to kill cars, including me.
2. The reason rail is bad and isn't getting better is BECAUSE of cars and car-centric infrastructure. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars on car infrastructure. That's money not going to public transportation, despite being public funds. If we divert even a fraction of that money, we can have a huge impact. But there's blockers, people like you. In addition, to make rail effective you have to not waste miles and miles of space on urban sprawl. But people love their automobiles and 2 hour commutes.