Pontevedra has around 80K inhabitants, so it's practical to design it this way. But when cities are much bigger, problems start to arise. Not everyone can afford to live in the center (nor is there space for them, and building taller than a certain number of meters or floors is often forbidden for various reasons), so people begin moving farther out.
Sure, there's public transport... but only until it takes six times longer than driving a car - and that's not even counting all the issues public transport has in many places, which some people deny even exist, although doesn't matter to me because I just experienced them first hand way too many times (I have never owned a car until recently).
At that point, you might as well move farther out to a nicer house, less expenses and just drive a bit longer.
>Sure, there's public transport... but only until it takes six times longer than driving a car
if everyone is driving, noone is. This is simple game theory and a system fault happens when there are too many cars. You can't widen city streets.
For example: public transportation in NY is often faster and cheaper than a car + parking.
I would argue that a public transportation network is a requirement, maybe even a prerequisite, for high density. Manhattan simply could not work without the various public transportation methods -- if everyone commuting in from CT, LI, NJ, upstate NY, etc., had to drive in, would there even be enough space for all those cars on the island?
> But when cities are much bigger, problems start to arise.
Actually, the bigger the city, the more efficient public transportation is. Just look at LA with it's 16 lanes of car traffic, and compare it to London - the fundamental difference being that LA has no real public transport and London has an extensive tube and train network. Oh, and London has about twice as many people as LA... which one would you rather be a commuter in?
Just an example: a colleague of mine was commuting from Reading to Canary Wharf (before the Elizabeth line even), this is now an hour long train ride, if you tried to take it by car it would be double that - and then you'd have to find parking for your car in Canary Wharf, which is not easy and very expensive.
It's not about being bigger, but having high population density.
Obviously in larger cities it will take longer to travel from one extreme to the other, but that is a similar problem as trying to travel to another city. Trips that are 20km long need to be treated as such, no matter if they're in the same city or not.
Some suburbs in Barcelona and Madrid have more than 20K hab/km2. And they are expected to have as low car transit as other European cities with around 3K to 6K hab/km2.
It is obvious that even though lots of people might be able to switch to alternative ways of transportation car is still extremely useful for many use cases.
The solution is the right city design: more populated areas in the district centers, and less densely populated areas towards the outskirts. Spain is terrible at this, as they design high density areas everywhere. Americans do the opposite, it's mostly all low density.
A balanced solution is how dutch cities are designed. You can live in your own garden house, while having access to commerce, offices in higher density areas, just by 5-20minutes by bike (up to 5-6km).
Cities can scale far further than that and cars make the situation worse, not better. The Amsterdam metropolitan area houses in the ballpark of two and a half million people, most of them not living in the city center.