It's not even the car that is the problem. It's the lack of viable alternatives to the car. In my city in North America there are almost 1.5 million people, I live about 4 kms from the city center and it's extremely uncomfortable without a car, even though I live on multiple bus and one LRT line within ten minutes of walking. I purposefully bought and built where I am because of all this connectivity, maybe 5 % of the whole city has it as good as I do, the rest have it worse to much worse. I basically live in the best situation in the city for alternatives and it's worse than the crappiest parts of the city for alternative sin places like the Netherlands.

To make alternatives you can look at what the Netherlands does. They have much more relaxed lot coverage, height limits, parking requirements, etc. so they get the same single family square footage in way less geographic area and they intermix that with much higher density so their cities proper are 3-4 times denser than where I live while not feeling cramped. They didn't get rid of the car, what they did do was ensure people had great walking, biking and transit options to fulfill the normal trips that make up their lives. That is vs where I live where I am fine getting downtown with transit, but to my kids schools, groceries, or any other workplace outside of the core, I am screwed. The extra density makes providing these transit options possible (along with reasonable regulation on other areas leading to reasonable density)

Yeah, all this is the stated argument here.

But in the US, at least, the underlying argument is about class, and race. If you haven't already, it might be worth reading about redlining, the historical practice of outlining which neighborhoods were "safe" to issue mortgage loans in because they were white and not at risk of non-whites moving in. This was about race, primarily.

Redlining became illegal starting in the '70s in many places, and its replacement was exclusionary zoning---a practice that continues to this day that relies instead on race's strong correlate, wealth. Apartments and other similar higher-density arrangements are much more affordable--and as a result, accessible to racial minorities (and the crime, etc. that racial minorities were "associated" with).

All the modern arguments around traffic jams, neighborhood character, transit, etc.---these are all modern-day variants of the same old arguments, because again, who can afford a 1:1 ratio of cars to people-in-household to get around the low-density suburbs?

So when you hear people say "I can't park! It'll be loud!" consider if they're really saying "I don't want those other people who rely on transit in my neighborhood", but using the words "there won't be room for me to park!"

The idea that if you remove cars from 90% of the population that you won't sometimes need to drive something into these areas is laughable. Even Tokyo has roads.