> A self-driving car can stop 2 meters outside your house on an arbitrary schedule.

No it can't, because cars aren't allowed on the streets around my house, with the exception of emergency vehicles and logistical vehicles like moving or delivery vans. The closest spot where a taxi could stop to drop me off is a lot further than where the bus or trains are. The closest parking space is actually a good 200-300m away from my door, reserved for residents so also always full, whereas I have a bus stop literally in front of my door and a train station 20 steps from it. I can also rent a bicycle 24/7 from the train station if all other modes of transport fail me (and I didn't have access to my bike for whatever reason).

Same in the center of the city, you cannot get to many places by car. A deliberate choice, for example when we dug out the hideous polluting highway and replaced it with a canal instead (which funnily enough was a canal in the first place before they made it into a highway). Utrecht is a perfect example of gov't realizing a mistake it made with car-centric design, doubling back and correcting it in a way that increases the QoL of every single resident of Utrecht.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/14/utrecht-restor...

This isn't even to say that the Netherlands is some kind of dystopia for drivers, if anything drivers here tend to be happier since they don't need to contend with a bunch of other people on the road, and more than half the country drives anyways.

> Not sure what you mean by the last bit - the US already has that highway system, and the local roads serving the last mile, because that last mile infrastructure already has to exist to get from public transit to your house.

My point was that building out the highway system was a deliberate policy choice made in lieu of a strong passenger rail/public transport network. Had they focused on making passenger rail more viable, then we'd be talking about the opposite world here, where building highly space-inefficient and expensive highways would be a ludicrous proposition.

> China doesn't have the exact same problem because so much of the country lives in dense wall-to-wall housing, which sucks no matter how you spin it if you like having any kind of space to yourself.

We're talking about cross-country lines here, if anything it's even more absurd that the Chinese can have such a strong rail network when the majority of the country has no use for the lines serving the far-west of the country where there aren't that many people. Whether the cities are shit to live in or not is a separate discussion altogether.