Even if my local area was designed for foot traffic, the amount of space between literally everything here would make it impossible not to rely on a car.

If your local area was designed for foot traffic, then things wouldn’t be so spread out. One of the many reasons this is so bad in america (and this is the case in DFW) are the awful parking minimum laws that have ruined so many cities. Since the 1950’s new business developments have been required to have a minimum amount of parking so that even at max capacity there would be enough spots. In a less car-centric city almost any place you would need to visit regularly -be it a grocery store, a department store, or whatever else- would certainly be within walking distance of (or a short public transit hop away from) your home and work. But the parking minimum laws spread everything so far apart that to walk or bike anywhere is unimaginable, and it also isn’t feasible to build up good public transit because you would need stops at every major street corner (rather than in a reasonable city where you would be taking transit hops between dense clusters of businesses and other destinations).

In DFW you can sum about any trip to somewhere you want to be to a 30 minute drive. Favorite restaurant that isn’t literally right next to you? 30 minutes or an hour without tolls. Work? That’s another 30 minutes. Wanna go to a store nicer than a Walmart? You guessed it. 30 minutes. Get home from work around 4:30? We’ll now you have a cool 5 hours of time until bed time. Subtract an hour of the gym, an hour of cooking and maybe you’ve got 3 hours of time to do anything else. Waiting for public transportation or wasting time walking would just cut down even more of the hours in your day. Maybe I want more out of life than sacrificing my time to public transportation and walking.

You said “I don’t think they live in the same reality I do,” but not only is this pretty much exactly the case in the city I live in, but I have given very similar rants when complaining about living in such a car dependent area. Honestly I was confused for a moment because you have some great points on why living in a city designed for cars sucks so much. The reason I consider myself a member of the fuckcars community isn’t that I think people should walk/bike more or that I don’t like cars. It’s that I want our city designs to change. Walking, biking, and even public transit simply doesn’t make sense in most North American cities but it doesn’t have to be that way. With policy change and redesign projects over time our cities could be so much better.

For me, the dream is a place where I can take a 20-30 minute bike ride to work without worrying about getting run over. Instead of needing to make a big grocery “trip” every week or two it wouldn’t need to be a trip at all. Two or three times a week on my way home from work I could just make a 5-10 minute stop at one of the grocery stores that was already along my path. It would be a similar deal for the gym and other places I might visit on the average day. When I want to visit a restaurant that isn’t super close I could just hop on the tram or train and take a nice traffic-less ride to a stop within walking distance. I wouldn’t need a car, and I wouldn’t want a car. Why pay all the upkeep on a car when I could just rent a car for the handful of occasions a year I might need it.

Places like this do exist

Fuck I should just move to the Netherlands already.

I’ve followed the FuckCars community for a while (started on reddit). Being one of them car fuckers myself I would disagree. There certainly are people there whose thought process doesn’t go much further than car = bad, but boiling the whole community down to that does a disservice to their more important points. I think most people there aren’t so much advocating for less cars as much as they are advocating for policy and societal change toward a world where we aren’t so reliant on cars. Obviously for a massive chunk of the world population (especially in North America) cars are a necessity like you said, but do they need to be? Wouldn’t we all be better off if the world was less car dependent? We aren’t saying that there should be no more cars, just that we shouldn’t continue to design our cities in such a way that you need a car to live.

If you are interested in more about where the fuckcars comunity is coming from I would recommend checking out the youtube channel Not Just Bikes. All of his videos are great but I think this one is a good intro to the channel. I also like this one because it outlines a lot of the specific “first step” type things that could be much better (most applicable to north america). Also, his Strong Towns Video Series is really good if you have the time.

(here are a couple more because I can’t help myself: Why it sucks to grow up in car-centric cities, How American cities are ponzie schemes, and His video about Stroads)