You can rent a car anytime you want to go on a longer excursion. It is far harder to rent walkability or access to amenities. You can’t rent “my children can walk to school and I can walk to pick them up for lunch” nearly as easily. Nor can you rent “it’s my buddy’s birthday and we wanted to go out on the town without a long car ride after”. Nor can you rent the physical benefits of movement to apply to your many car trips. Nor can you rent the climate benefits of the freedom to not take a car to do all of your errands.

A substantial portion of my childhood is 20-40 minute car rides punctuating every excursion, every new experience. Maybe it’s family time, but mostly I was on my Nintendo DS or GameBoy Color (or reading and getting carsick) and ignoring legs made restless from lack of use. Freedom has its price.

You don’t lose any of that having neighbourhoods where you don’t need a car to pick up some milk. I don’t think we should ban private cars or anything, but when public schools have 3 lane car pickup lanes several blocks long there’s an issue.