Which is why I take it to mean “replace applicable travel events with bike rides”. I can’t go carless in a suburb, but I can cover many daily needs with a bicycle. This is from someone that regularly commutes by 80mpg motorcycle and uses it for many grocery/light shopping needs, so it’s not a fear of cargo/passenger capacity.

Similarly, this is what shoots the rail dream down. Yes, it’s nice to dream about the freedom of a train ride taking you to a fun destination. But then what? You arrive at the city and then… Stay in the city? Hope it’s a city at all? If it’s a decent-sized city with an airport, a car rental will probably work out fine enough. But then how did you get to your train station? Well, probably by car too. The regrettable situation of the US is that it’s not just a cute little country jam-packed over millenia. It’s as vast as the entire European continent with the population heavily concentrated on the coasts. If visiting cities are your thing, it’s easier to work out. But no, we’re not going to completely revamp the rail system to be “like germany, Spain, France, or England” because we already have that. It’s just in a straight line from DC to Boston. The area triangle made by London/Paris/Berlin is very similar to Boston/DC/Detroit. In the same way Americans generalize “Europe” to mean Spain, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, and the UK, ignoring all the east Europeans, we forget how empty it is between the Mississippi River and the west coast states - roughly half the continental 48 states house just 26% of the continental population. That’s including Texas in the middle with 9% in itself. The carless infrastructure drops quickly because population density drops quickly. The cities are largely isolated by seas of suburbs or emptiness.

Whatever, tangential rant. I love rail, I work in rail, I rode the acela for fun. But we can’t right suburbs without displacing half the population. There is a strong westward density drop-off after the Mississippi River, a small one after the Missouri, and a sheer cliff after the line dropped from Winnipeg to Dallas until you get within 50 miles of the Pacific. That’s a 1300x1300 mile square of emptiness.