Ok first and foremost I'm not going to pretend I'm not biased in this discussion. I hate driving. I live in America where walking is basically defacto illegal, and I hate driving a massive piece of shit hunk of metal fast enough to turn me into red paste as a regular chore to get medicine and groceries. If you live in a nation that actually cares about pedestrians maybe you don't understand my ire, but in America I have to regularly stare at the road for 40 minutes or more to make sure some crackhead doesn't try to peel out on a red light just to go to a walmart, so I have to ask.
Why?
Why do we have cars?
I know a bit of the answer! A very good reason why we have cars is because its expensive and impractical to create multiple rail lines across every settlement in the united states to insure they are being supplied with food and other things they need to live, so cars act as a cheap way to get around and go from one place to another!
In theory
In practice its ludicrously expensive for everyone who has a car and is probably worse than just making rails everywhere because with rails you can control what goes where and when which means a lot less traffic fundamentally since karen wont be able to buy her own train car to drive to hobby lobby to pick up scented candle and nothing else because she NEED to smell cinnamon while watching days of our lives.
And heres another thing, Even with roads, personal vehicles are extremely inefficient considering things like buses exist that do the same thing as a car but with more people? Sure you dont get to pick where you park but if the roads were JUST cargo trucks and JUST buses I can guarantee traffic would drop.
And thats only for places that still need roads.
If we connect major settlements by rail that would cut down traffic even further because resource distribution and population transit would follow major arteries that can go as fast as they want because its highly scheduled, while minor towns could be supplied through highly controlled road traffic. And in my most radical of dreams this means city traffic could be brought down to near zero since emergency, transport and supply vehicles could just be turned into trams, subway cars, or forklift sized and slow moving single man cars, that are almost completely out of the way of civilian traffic
Now I'm not saying that for REALLY small towns or isolated farmsteads a personal car can't be bought for convenience sake, but thats not where the majority of car owners live now is it?
So why dont we do this? Why dont we, as a society, have our roads and transit structured around buses and trains instead of personal cars that are almost never at max capacity? Why do we have a multibillion dollar industry devoted to making the common person buy a car that will just end up congesting the road and causing problems, risking the lives of thousands every day by allowing a system that expects every idiot and geriatric to have a license to operate a massive piece of machinery that can punch a hole through a house? I find it absolutely absurd.