The car industry is what majorly fucked us. We should've focused on public transportation from the start.

Even with fossil fuels we'd have had less of an impact, but now we could focus on electric public transportation from cleaner energy sources, and nuclear to supplement what we can't get from solar/wind/hydro. We could do SO much better and still get people where they need to go.

AND it'd probably be quicker. WAY less traffic. Less comfortable maybe to sit around others, but those freeways with back to back rush hour traffic are just fucking stupid. If we didn't give a shit about cars and just made people take trams/trains/buses, we'd be doing absolutely fine. If we focused on that, we could plan much better for the scale needed. We could focus on keeping it quick and making it super efficient without worrying about car traffic. It could be planned so much better and so much more predictable.

No, instead, we got the car industry. We pushed out the silly idea that everyone needs a personal vehicle. We designed our world around the idea that everyone needs their own machine.

This is not the most efficient or sustainable way to do it. This is due to greed and industries that care more about money than actually making it work in the long term. And the thing is, at this point no one wants to give it up. No one wants to sit on a train with other people if they don't have to. Even if there's no fucking parking, even if it's back to back traffic for an hour and a half, they'll still sit through that rather than have to wait 10 minutes for a bus and sit with other people for an hour.