> I also didn't intend to advocate for a single mode of transportation.
To be clear, I don't either. And I don't want "car-centric city planning". I want "people-centric, car-integrated, transit-integrated, pedestrian-integrated city planning". What's the best solution given all of those tools that places a high value on people's time and effort and treats our current system as a bare minimum baseline that we must not do worse than.
We disagree on the proportion of transit that wants to be point-to-point EV trips, but I would advocate for using the right tool for the right job. I love long-distance train travel whenever I have the opportunity, and I've also encountered local rail systems or subway systems that work reasonably well at getting vaguely near the right place. I think public transit could adequately serve far more people than it does, and the current state of it in the US is abysmal and should be improved. I advocate against positions that claim it will work for the vast majority of people, or that people should have to accept some amount of inconvenience and use it when it's less optimal.
> Right, but this only works if only some of the population of a city travels this way. If everyone does, we're back to congestion and traffic jams, which make this mode even less efficient again.
I disagree with this being an essential property, rather than being one that has arisen from many many terrible ways we do both city design and transit design. (And to be clear, that does include bad design that arises from being car-centric and in particular car-ownership-centric, rather than a people-centric design that integrates cars as well as other modes of transportation.)
Among many other bad designs that we could improve on, given the will to do so:
1) Absolutely build mass transit systems, and use them to get all the predictable non-point-to-point transportation off the roads. Make the mass transit systems free (because they literally lose money collecting fares today and would save money and time by not doing so). Make them comfortable, frequent, and un-crowded. Solve the other societal problems (e.g. insufficient housing, see (7)) that currently have the side effect of making mass transit undesirable for many.
2) We currently have systems in which cars and pedestrians ever interact, and we shouldn't. An ideal car network would be 95% invisible to people, either elevated or underground (or alternatively and more feasibly in many pre-existing urban areas, with the walkways elevated and with interconnections between buildings), completely silent, no pedestrian crossings needed (because elevated crossings or hidden roadways), and as few stops/intersections as possible. (That's before the further optimizations that would be possible if we have roadways exclusively usable by self-driving vehicles.) That makes roads faster and more efficient, and makes walking areas more pleasant.
3) We currently try to design self-driving vehicles that ever interact with non-self-driving vehicles, rather than seriously looking at what a robust and safe design could look like if it didn't have that constraint. I am skeptical that our current approaches will produce results anytime in the next decade or more; with dedicated spaces that problem becomes one of infrastructure and largely not one of technology.
4) We have parking taking up space near everywhere people want to stop, rather than designing primarily around drop-offs and pick-ups. (This is an improvement before self-driving and a much bigger one after.)
5) We have advertisements and storefronts and similar that expect people to see them from their cars, which is related to (4) and (6). Get out of car, get on escalator/elevator/stairs, be in or adjacent to the building.
6) We have huge numbers of commercial spaces that take little to no advantage of vertical space. There's (almost) no excuse for 1-2 floor stores or office buildings; that's a lot of wasted vertical space. Many people prefer suburbs for living and don't want to share walls with people; not everyone wants to live in an apartment/condo tower, nor should they have to. But that's far less of a problem for most (not all) businesses or offices, and we get much better transportation efficiency if the last leg of many journeys is an elevator.
7) We have far too little telecommuting and far too much commuting, even in recent years. And the commutes we have are too long. Allow building more housing, a lot more housing, no even more than that, until housing in every area is affordable, so that there's no premium or compromise required to live closer to work. Design taller, denser commercial areas, so that the places people work are easier to get to, and make sure there's plenty of housing in those areas as well. And ensure there's good mass-transit to those buildings, because commutes are one largely predictable bit of transportation and congestion for which we should be able to provide fast point-to-point rail. Have businesses that mandate in-person work provide most of the necessary funds, and enjoy the side effect of many businesses suddenly discovering that telecommuting is fine after all. Once commutes are largely addressed, that addresses the single biggest sources of congestion in most places.
8) Stop denigrating cars as exclusively for "people with mobility issues", and accept that they're for people who want to get directly from point A to point E without having to walk from A to B then take transit to C then take transit to D then walk to E. If a point-to-point car trip is faster than the transit network, and you can't make the transit network go that fast or be that convenient, accept that people rationally want to choose the car and you have to be better than that for people to switch. (And no, you don't get to cheat by going "well, if we make the cars slower people will have to take transit", as I've seen many try to do. Start with the premise that people should be able to get from A to E with as little time and effort as possible, and help them do so.)
That's one handful of possibilities, and I think plenty more naturally arise when you have a design that integrates many modes of transportation. Also, to forestall an obvious objection: the above is written based on planning for the future and based on substantial investment in transportation infrastructure, both of which I think are reasonable for any large-scale plan. I've frankly seen plans for mass transit that would require substantially larger investment in transportation than this, and have substantially less possibility for incremental evolution.