[clarry]

Small city: everything is in walking or cycling distance, there's little congestion. Big city: distance between points of interest is large, there's lots of traffic and congestion, people complain about public traffic, and take an hour to get from place A to place B.

This is my experience, having lived most of my life in small places (ranging from a monastery to a city with 25k people) while listening to people in big cities complain about their commutes.

Now I live in a city that isn't exactly small but not huge either. I'm already suffering the consequences of traffic and longer distances. Moving out of small cities is when I started to actually need a car... of course having more people and congestion doesn't show up in traffic only; it's also in the grocery store queues, restaurants packed full, parcels not delivered to home because they're too busy to deal with everyone personally, etc.

[BigJ1211]

I've lived in places ranging from 20k to big cities. All base necesseties were in walking distance where I lived in the cities, and mostly in the smaller places as well.

The thing with smaller places is that you can generally get like 80% of what you need locally, but on occasion you have to go a few towns over or into the nearest city to get that 20%. So you can easily live in a city w/o a car, but it's substantially harder to do so in smaller places.

[clarry]

I don't believe in that 20% being a problem. I mean you can take a bus / taxi / train / buddy to get you to the next town if you need to be there. If you need to transport stuff, then you might need a car, but it's not like you would be transporting that same stuff without a car in a big city. So you need the car there too.

Also, my experience is that the 20% is more like 1-2% (when I lived in smaller cities, I needed to visit other towns or bigger cities a few times a year).

Like I said, I started needing my car only after I moved out. As a matter of fact, I only got a car a year before moving out, and I only got it because it was given to me for free.