The cities were radically different before we decided that a car should be able to go anywhere.

1. People are calling for radical change to their cities as they realize the poor economics of urban sprawl and suburban development. You do have a good point though as transit, density, and mixed zoning all work best when used together.

2. The shift to transit and walkability will actually make exisiting roadways and highways less congested and better serve any delivery vehicles using them. We won’t rip out all existing roads, but we will stop building a new lane every 5 years.

I don’t think we’ll eliminate 100% of cars/trucks, as they are very useful for certain applications. But if we removed all the cars from the road that are just people going some place, without any real cargo to speak of, the traffic on those roads would be significantly less.

Carmel, IN seems like an interesting case study. They haven’t going the route of adding in a bunch of public transit yet (that I’m aware of), but they have replaced nearly all their traffic lights with traffic circles, and have been removing surface level parking lots and creating more mixed use space. As a result they’ve been able to reduce lanes on roads, as traffic has decreased.

I think you’re making it out to be a bigger problem than it really would be. Nobody is going to push personal and commercial vehicles out, but there would be a lot less of them, they’d only be as big as necessary, and they’d be more environmentally friendly.

Like every other huge factory before cars: connect to railways. Or tram network if you are in city.