This is a good article. Has a lot of examples showing why streets have a good or bad pedestrian experience.

It’s not as simple as number of lanes or even the quality of the sidewalk. A lot of it really comes down to development patterns. You can really feel the difference when you’re in a place not built for walking. Being on a well constructed sidewalk far away from any buildings because there’s a giant parking lot in between just feels wrong.

There are a few places very close to my house I refuse to walk to because the pedestrian experience is terrible. You feel out of place, unwelcome, and unsafe.

I live in Atlanta and going entirely car free would be a challenge for my family of four, but we did manage to go from a 2 car family to a 1 car family which has been a nice shift.

It’s had a few lifestyle changes for us, mostly me since I try to leave the car for my wife when I go somewhere by myself. The sale of our second car funded the purchase of 2 ebikes, so we like to ride bikes around which has changed the kind of place we like to go around our city. It’s been a lot of fun for us.

When I occasionally need to go to work I’ve found that bike+transit works fairly well for my needs. Sometimes I’ll also just take only transit on days when the weather is bad but it’s a lot less flexible that way since the bus schedule is so infrequent.

Overall, I’d say that you don’t necessarily need to go all in on being car free to care about urbanism and reducing car travel. There are so many things out of our control with regard to the state of our city so sometimes taking smaller steps to reduce our car usage is all we can do.