[mike_d]

Energy consumption is a factor of distance. "Get people out of cars" in inherently implying removing the fundamental right to freedom of movement and living a better life. Cars have done more to equalize rural populations and give them a quality of life closer to city dwellers than any other modern invention maybe short of publicly funded water and power infrastructure.

I'd highly encourage you to move to the middle of the country and live a 30 minute drive outside of town (because that is all you can afford). You'll quickly realize that super bad evil cars are the means by which a good percentage of the population has access to fresh food, medical care, and other basic needs.

[acdha]

Energy consumption is a factor of both distance and efficiency: this is why trains are so much more efficient than semi-trucks which are more efficient than personal vehicles even if they’re traveling between the same points: steel on steel rails have less friction and the first two have better engine to cargo ratios. My comment was specifically focused on the latter since a huge fraction of vehicle pollution comes from affluent people driving in urban areas, not farmers.

Also note that I’m not disagreeing that mobility is important but that we literally cannot afford to continue polluting the way we have. You tried to make this emotional with the “super bad evil cars” phrasing but it’s a simple engineering question: right now, people have built lifestyles based on low subsidized fossil fuel prices and being allowed to ignore externalities. I’m aware of what that lifestyle is like – and how often it’s not “all you can afford” but “where you can afford to buy the house as big you think you deserve”, too - the latter being far less sympathetic when asking everyone else to subsidize it.

When energy is cheap and you can ignore pollution, you can drive an overpowered vehicle on frequent trips with minimal use of the total cargo capacity. If the cost goes up, those calculations all change: people pay attention to fuel efficiency when buying vehicles and combine / reduce trips, invest in household efficiency, etc. Cost-constrained American rural dwellers and those I’ve met in other countries with higher fuel costs don’t drive a vehicle designed to haul livestock to pick up groceries because it’s overkill.

That extends to things like zoning: the majority of people living in exurbs for financial reasons are doing so because closer in development was low density, often required by code, and significant amounts of land were required to be used for car storage.

Part of climate change mitigation will be reversing those problems, and that kind of thing seems like a more fruitful area for us to be spending time than trying to make high-pollution commuting more appealing.