Do people actually want to live in cities, how many of them? - (and whatever for?) One narrative here goes, there are lots of cars, so it creates an unfriendly

Do people actually want to live in cities, how many of them? - (and whatever for?) One narrative here goes, there are lots of cars, so it creates an unfriendly environment, so people have to live outside the city and have cars. But that narrative doesn't make sense for how the cars got there in the first place. Another narrative goes: cars enabled people to move about quickly, they enjoyed this. One manifestation of this ability was to escape from cities and still get to work. Thus carparks and reasonably fast roads. # Or maybe people just enjoyed moving about quickly even over relatively small distances and it snowballed For example, I live about five miles away from where I used to work. I could spend 10 minutes walking to the nearest busstop, 15 minutes waiting for that bus, another 10-15 minutes getting to the busstop in town, another 10-15 minutes waiting for the next bus to work, another half hour or so while the bus drives there (takes longer because of stops). Or I could just get in the car and be there in 16-20 minutes. An hour and a half vs 16-20 minutes. And this isn't a bad place for public transport. Buses, on average, every 10-15 minutes is pretty good. It just adds up. Heck, given a couple of hours I could probably walk there. It's far from clear that it makes sense, even under generalised utility, to agree with the author's desire to make cities better places to live at the potential cost to people who may prefer to live elsewhere and drive.