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  • Agreed, but somehow you need to undo the structural changes to the way people live that car ownership has caused. That means more local clustering of services.

    For example, think of trip-chaining, ie the parent that drops kids at school, takes an elderly relative to a hospital appointment, works part time and shops all in the same day. That doesn’t work without a car if your town doesn’t have all the different bits of the puzzle.

  • That means more local clustering of services.

    Yes, and more generally: More even distribution of development. Before the coming of the railways, Europe (and I guess the vast majority of the world, but I've only studied Europe) had a very simple structure--market towns surrounded by agriculture, with some larger cities, usually where power was concentrated--but most market towns were roughly of equal size and quite evenly distributed, depending on the shape of the land. In the villages, you had independent craftsmen/craftswomen, and in the towns you had certain other services that needed a bit more traffic to make them worthwhile. There was an unevenness of development, but while the difference between the rural areas and the cities would have been felt to be stark by people at the time, it was nothing compared to today. That's not to say it was a golden age; there were enough problems as it was, e.g. poor healthcare, but the basic shape was much better than what it was replaced with during the (first) 'Industrial Revolution', i.e. a few mega-cities (by the standards of the time, not the even worse trend today), flight from the land, etc.

    All of this was exacerbated when mass motorisation happened. As @h2o says, there is a widespread acceptance that mass car use is/was the future. Of course, car use is only one aspect of hypermobility, the expectation and practice of being able to carry anything or anyone anywhere at the drop of a hat (including freight shipped across half the world). The main root cause of this is economic concentration, i.e. businesses/wealthy interests usually want to be able to do business from as little land/as few sites as possible while exploiting artificially depressed transportation costs that make this possible.

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