Life is so much more enjoyable when you move away from the suburbs and get rid of your car. The freedom to just walk to your destination and having everything within walking range is priceless.
You can rent a car anytime you want to go on a longer excursion. It is far harder to rent walkability or access to amenities. You can’t rent “my children can walk to school and I can walk to pick them up for lunch” nearly as easily. Nor can you rent “it’s my buddy’s birthday and we wanted to go out on the town without a long car ride after”. Nor can you rent the physical benefits of movement to apply to your many car trips. Nor can you rent the climate benefits of the freedom to not take a car to do all of your errands.
A substantial portion of my childhood is 20-40 minute car rides punctuating every excursion, every new experience. Maybe it’s family time, but mostly I was on my Nintendo DS or GameBoy Color (or reading and getting carsick) and ignoring legs made restless from lack of use. Freedom has its price.
My colleague is an avid mountaineer. He has his gear in the trunk of his car at all times. After work, if the weather is nice, he drives to the mountains to go hiking. That would be very hard to do with a rental car.
You don’t lose any of that having neighbourhoods where you don’t need a car to pick up some milk. I don’t think we should ban private cars or anything, but when public schools have 3 lane car pickup lanes several blocks long there’s an issue.
My cousin's husband has been mugged three times in his life. Each time was when he was walking to school in NYC, each time was with a deadly weapon, and each time there was a chance he could have died. I've never heard of a single person being mugged driving to school.
I'm not saying this is the primary reason to have cars and live in the suburbs, but not being forced to share space with every random person in your vicinity is no small thing.
Where did I say everybody should be in something like nyc density? Even then, there are plenty of cities (especially outside America) where those safety concerns are virtually nonexistent.
I just turned 41 and my son turns one in January. I can think of a million reasons to leave the city and in fact my wife and I are strongly considering it, but the necessary reliance on cars in the suburbs is an enormous deterrent. I’ve lived that way before, so I know what’s bad about it. We are probably only going to consider walkable small towns (as opposed to car dependent exurbia).