Cars are extremely useful for traveling long distances, traveling between cities, and for those rare times when you need to haul a lot of stuff, but they are te

Cars are extremely useful for traveling long distances, traveling between cities, and for those rare times when you need to haul a lot of stuff, but they are terrible as daily transportation. They are the solution to a made-up problem that they alone exacerbate, which is that our cities are too spread out. There's no particular reason your immediate neighborhood doesn't have a small grocery store and all the other amenities you require for daily living. (That's how we built cities before the automobile, obviously.) That's a design choice and it's a particularly bad one that's making your life less convenient, your body less healthy, your streets less safe, and your environment more polluted. When everybody drives you get congestion, which forces people to spread out more, which increases the reliance on cars...and so it goes.