Have you lived in a 1000-2000 people town/village without a car ? I did at one point when I was younger - our islands here have plenty of such places.
I can't see anyone with the ability to drive chose not to in this situation - even the basic things like shopping - there's usually one or two small stores arround but getting to a bigger shopping mall was 30km round trip, doctor comes to town ambulance three times per week and if you have a medical emergency you're at the mercy of your neighbors or lottery that the ambulance from the closest ER is not busy, taking your children anywhere involves planning bus trips with limited time windows, if they miss a buss to school they are out for the day. And not to mention about 70% of people need it for work.
Have you lived in a 1000-2000 people town/village without a car ? I did at one point when I was younger - our islands here have plenty of such places.
-- I called the points debatable. The entire argument strategy is looking point X in history and then point Y in history, noting Y is better than point X and then saying essentially that anyone questioning the steps that took us from point X to point Y is a complete moron and doesn't deserve to have their position addressed further.
I'm actually living in one of the few surviving original cities of the area (Nevada City, official population 3,000).
I could drive my car 1-2 a week before Covid and drive it even less now. Of course, as hip, hippy town the place now benefits from it's connection Sacramento and the Bay Area. But those longer connections could happen primarily by rail, in places in Europe, these connect do happen by rail. Brighton wouldn't be Brighton-as-it-is without rail connections to London.
There are unique opportunities in such small communities and qualities that cannot be replicated in denser urban areas. Once my children grow up I could see myself living there. Suggesting that we shouldn't live that way because it nececitaces a car ridiculous.
The cost of giant road network connecting a patchwork of exurbs is vast. If the exurbs wind-up being considered a luxury and inhabited by those who can afford, the cost per-person goes up. Even more, if the US gets rid of its extreme wealth/income imbalance, the number who could afford it would go down even further.
Essentially, Exurbia is millstone around this country's neck, effectively moving the place palpably to disaster via fire, unhinged ideologies and generally unsustainable infrastructure.
Where "dense city" is still a pretty small town. A five digit population can easily support a hospital, a school, a train station and other basic necessities of life (e.g. jobs that don't require commuting to the next urban core).
Farms take up massive areas so farmers can not live in cities. Natural resources like minerals are unlikely to be located close to major population centers, so miners can not live in cities. Between population centers there must be people maintaining the transportation infrastructure, these can not live in cities. All of these people who can't live in population centers need various services, the providers of which also can't live in cities. The people in rural areas are overwhelmingly there because they need to be. People want to live in urban areas, it's a real problem that people leave rural areas despite the need for their services, and thus the rural communities are no longer capable of providing good quality of life, leading to even more people leaving until only those who can't escape remain. If the communities providing resources to the cities collapse, what happens to the cities?
I can't see anyone with the ability to drive chose not to in this situation - even the basic things like shopping - there's usually one or two small stores arround but getting to a bigger shopping mall was 30km round trip, doctor comes to town ambulance three times per week and if you have a medical emergency you're at the mercy of your neighbors or lottery that the ambulance from the closest ER is not busy, taking your children anywhere involves planning bus trips with limited time windows, if they miss a buss to school they are out for the day. And not to mention about 70% of people need it for work.