Everyone wants what they can't have. Europeans want to drive in cities/suburbs and Americans want to walk. People in Paris/Madrid don't really value walkability all that much. It's an increasing trend to buy bigger and bigger SUVs.
They actually don't. I mean I do. My wife does, and one or two of our friends do. But almost everyone else we know aren't at all interested in having a walkable city. They love their cars and garages. US cities are the way they are because a great majority of Americans want them that way.
It 100% bums me out, but that's where we are at. Americans that want to walk are a small minority.
Children don't have the patience of parents. They melt down waiting for a bus/transit in snow or summer broiling heat and it becomes a nightmare. I didn't have a car most the time until I had a kid and found quality of life went way up with a car.
I was born in a walkable in Europe. School was 5 minutes (by walk) from home. High school was 10-15 minutes by bus, plus 10 minutes walking to the bus stops. The bus service was very frequent, there was no endless waiting on bus stops in snow or heat. If Communist Poland could pull it of, so could the richest country in the world.
Getting to school works but that's because everyone on the bus is going the same place.
A child can walk to say a cornerstore in the US many places no problem but the parents will be placed under arrest for negligence. Most any other place they'd like to go is most practical with public transit involving a long wait or driving by what appears to the child as a private car chartered at his convenience.
Same thing in Singapore, kids from grade 7 on take public transport to go to school (earlier grade students live close to the school usually). I think Japan is like that too.
Yeah, for a while I used to get around by bicycle a lot (faster and way cheaper than paying for parking on campus), lots of people thought it was very weird to do so. I'd show up at the usual bar scenes with my bicycle after taking the light rail down and most of my friends wouldn't begin to understand how I got there.
I take the local transit when I need to get deeper into the city and take the bus to the city parks around me with my kids. People think I'm a bit of a nut for doing so, seriously wondering why I wouldn't just drive.
I've met people that grew up in Dallas and didn't even know there was light rail. Most people don't have a clue how it works and don't care to spend a minute figuring it out. They don't even bat an eye at the thought of moving further and further out into the burbs, into developments that take ten minutes of driving just to leave one neighborhood.
Where I live in London there are football (soccer) pitches in most local parks, school grounds, etc, which kids tend to use. Most people have such a park in a 5-10 minute walk from their home. No need to drive for such short distances. It's better for kids to walk around and experience their neighbourhood, use the time walking to chat with their friends, etc.
Where I live in Texas there are football (soccer) pitches in most local parks, school grounds, etc, which kids tend to use. Also often baseball fields and sometimes tennis courts as well. Most people here have such a park in a 10-minute walk from their home.
The majority (dare I say all?) of European kids just take public transport/their bikes to wherever they're going, from a young age. I took the bus 1.5 hours 1 direction every day to go to my swim practice starting from age 10, sometimes at night too.
I don't really think soccer moms are a thing outside of the US
We're talking about kids here though, not all commuters.
And at least in the Netherlands, sample size of my office (around 300 people) maybe a dozen people max commute by car because they live ~2 hours away or in tiny villages where the trains are only hourly rather than every 10 minutes. I'd assume that metric varies a lot depending on the country you're looking at, and if we're talking about how kids go to school/practice/wherever, I'm willing to bet even in car-heavy European countries that the vast majority of kids take public transport or their bikes.
I have friends with kids in the (rural) North of the Netherlands, and their kid's school is ~15km away from their house. The kids bike that every day, to quote my friend, "they've got legs and wheels, why would I chauffeur them around?"
"The majority" seems strong. When I was in middle school (collège in french), there was a long line of cars in front of the school entrance from parents dropping off their kids. At some point my friend and I started to take the RER to go back home, and we barely saw anyone else.
Of course, part of the situation was we were in a mostly-residential city, so most kids lived less than a twenty minutes' walk away. But those who didn't mostly came by car.
That's in the city, though. I don't know what things are like in the countryside. From what my friends tell me, they had to take a lot of public bus to go to school and places. I think soccer moms were more of a thing there, because you had a hard time getting anywhere without a car. Less hard than the US, but still.
Statistically Europeans have longer commutes than Americans because they rely on public transport more while Americans drive and driving is almost always faster than surface public transport since not all Europeans have an underground in their city so public transport is often a slow an infrequent bus in tier 2 cities.
And you'd take that 1.5hr each way (three hours of commute to go to swim practice, every day??) over having a parent (or a family friend carpooling) spend maybe 10-15 minutes driving you each way?
