People who are "pushing an agenda" aren't arguing that there should be no cars ever, anywhere. Cars are the smallest-scale form of long-distance transport, they are unavoidable in low-density areas or for services that requires complete flexibility. All the agenda-pushers I've seen in real life are just saying that there's better options within cities, at least for a lot of people. Most of the time, most people only move within their cities, myself included. If transit within my city was in any way adequate, I would choose it over the car. I could cover those rare out-of-city edge cases with rentals or train travel.
Besides, it's not even the same in Europe. In a few countries, maybe, but in the majority the inter-city transit or transit within small towns is not even in the same universe as what's available in most of the US.
A massive chunk (if not majority?) of those top 20 metro areas are largely car dependent for most of their populations. Large areas don't have any public transit at all, and the rest is often designed to be actively hostile to pedestrians.
Try living without a car in these places, all in the 4th largest MSA.
And even in most of those metros (OK. Leave aside Manhattan), not having a car tends to imply a lot of lifestyle choices in terms of activities, visiting friends outside of the metro, etc.
There are certainly people who are OK with living like they did in their urban school for a few years after graduation. But that's not a long-term solution for most people.
NYC is the absolute best case in the US, if you're talking about the ability to exist without a car. It's not that no one talks about those millions of households, it's that they are all concentrated on a few standout islands (literally!) in a sea of the nearly identical car-only supermajority of cities. It's the exception to all exceptions.
Most people live in cities, but the vast majority of American cities do not approach even 10% of the quality and availability of transit in NYC. That's why I said that NYC is a massive outlier among the rest of the US.
I don’t think the average city is a useful comparison when more people live in larger cities which tend to have better mass transit options.
People live car free in a wide range of cities, it’s more convenient for more people in NYC thus the large percentage of people doing so, but the percentage is rarely zero.
It’s not useful if you generally fly most places you travel to. An of course if you’re going months-years without using a car then renting becomes relatively more convenient.
Not possible when things are 10+ mile apart and a general grocery run takes 3+ hours and you can't carry more than a backpack, so you have to do it multiple times a week.
The US is ripe for an e-bike revolution. The distances, the wide roads with plenty of room for bike lanes, and the revulsion against things like Flock...
Unfortunately it's as likely as this being the year of the Linux desktop because Windows 11.
Meanwhile a few months back I watched a pickup swerve towards a bicyclist. USA on the average is hostile to anything non-car in a way that is hard to even comprehend.
