The idea of needing specialized transport as an individual beyond just walking is a failure of society. Replacing cars with "not-cars" isn't really helping that aspect. You should be structuring society so that cars or "not-cars" have no need to exist for almost everyone.
Someone versed in urban ecosystems could chime in better, because there's gotta be proper terms for city to city transport, city to neighborhood, neighborhood to street, street to home.
Bikes or some kind of personal vehicle are still probably necessary to get you from city to home, because they can't put train stations next to every house (unless they figure out how to shoot us through tubes or something).
I rode my bike instead of driving today. It took twice as long, and the hills kicked my ass, but I felt amazing afterwards. Evem hours later I am still riding the endorphin high. Hearing traffic used to give me anxiety, but I used noise cancelling earbuds so I could listen to an audio book and that made a huge difference
The transition needs to be easy for adoption to happen though. I think first replacing cars with not-cars, and only then scaling cities to be more walkable makes sense.
I don't see how going from car to proper city planning is any harder than going from not-car to proper city planning. This just feels like an extra unnecessary step that could be taking resources away from the city planning part.
If you make a city hostile to cars first, people will still have their cars and their commutes, it will just double the time it takes for them to get anywhere. You will lose support for any further changes.
If you replace the cars first, such that no one's daily schedules are significantly altered, and then condense the cities, then the change might be less jarring for those who can't weather dramatic changes in their lifestyle.
it shouldn't, should it? Switch an ICE for electric, as long as they travel the same daily distance and meet the same use cases, the only lifestyle change would be the expense.
It'll take years to build that high density housing. And several generations to convince everyone to move into it. In the mean time, it'd be good to use velo mobiles for transportation from suburb to suburb.