In academia you often come across people who are strongly anti-car. They not only are anti-car in the sense that they hate the pollution and accidents caused by cars, but they maintain that owning a car is a net negative. Their position isn't even really "people only own cars because they are forced to do so" because these people will maintain that there is no one who needs a car. At most they'll concede "you only need a car because your city design is so bad."
Now I can see how these people can envision cities with low amounts of cars, especially for day-to-day purposes. But I really wonder how they are able to think that this could be done across the entire world.
For perspetive, I grew up in the rural Midwest. On a farmhouse at least, though I don't know if it counts as a "farm" when my father was just a farmhand (though he did think about buying his own fields before going another route.) We didn't think we were especially in the boonies, especially compared to other people we knew, but when compared to the anti-car city dwelling academic we were incredibly remote. Our "next door neighbors" were about a ten minute walk away. All that was in between us was fields, pastures and trees. A walk into "town" was 4 miles each way, and not on the easiest terrain. So at least two hours, round trip. And this town had about 250 people. In terms of stores you had a tiny post office, a very limited corner store and that's it. Since this was the rural midwest there were two bars, but you can bet that they'd close if there were no cars or motorcycles.
To get to a town with a proper grocery store, it was another 5 miles, meaning that we're talking about 4-5 hours round trip. Doubt that many people would want to walk that length while carrying groceries, and forget frozen items in the summer. What if you wanted to go to a city with actual malls, or where you could buy things like computers or hobby supplies? Thirty miles, each way. We're at the "you can't make the roundtrip on foot in one day" zone, especially when you consider that the terrain wasn't exactly fun to walk over for most of it. Even by car it's over an hour round trip (keep in mind that part of this trip would be over country roads, sometimes gravel roads.)
So the question is, how do you possibly design things in such a way that we wouldn't have needed a car? What, were we supposed to have a bus stop right outside our house, which would have been good for us and one neighbor? How often would it run? Even having it stop twice a day seems like a nightmare to make economical. But that would put us into the situation where we either need to be out the entire day, or need to stay home all day (assumming we didn't have a car to set our own schedule.) And where would this bus run? To a town of 250 people, with little purpose for going there? Of course, we could potentially transfer there, but there's always the question of making the schedules line up so that it is possible for us to leave our house, arrive at a location where we want to do something, and then return.
Even supposing it were possible to handle these logistics in a way that actually was feasible to run long term, it would put us in a situation where we had extremely limited options. To leave the house we would have to take the bus to the closest town; nothing else was in walking distance. From there the options to transfer would be limited; perhaps to the two largest "cities" (both actually below the 100,000 population mark.) We could transfer from there, but that would create the need for more delays. Effectively speaking unless we wanted to make an actual multi-day vacation out of the experience, we would be stuck travelling to perhaps three different locations. Keep in mind two that we knew plenty of people who also lived in the country. We might drive eight miles to visit someone else on a farm house and it wouldn't be a big deal. But without a car our options would be to meet up with them in town, assuming the schedules lined up, or to walk to their place (and probably stay the night.)
Another thing to consider is that there are lots of people more isolated than we were. We could (in theory) walk to town, but many people lived further out and couldn't. The area we lived had about 40 people per square mile. In much of the Dakotas the number is closer to 10 per square mile, and in Montana or Wyoming the number can drop to 1 per square mile. So take all the estimates that I gave and multiply them by 4 or 40. It's impossible to make that work. If pepole in the those states are robbed of cars, then they will need to rely on horse riding.
The anti-car faction will say things like "but ah! we have plenty of small towns that have restaurants and corner stores that serve your basic needs, so if we just designed those towns better and brought some of the people in the boonies closer, things would work out well." There's several problems with this. The first is, fuck you I'll live where I want. By which I mean, I'm not going to submit to a central planning to dictate where I must live, which is what would be necessary to have this work. You can already see part of the problem in my discussion of bus lines above; when you submit to such a transportatation plan you are extremely restricted on where you can effectively go. If you also submit to a plan to repopulate you where things are convenient, you are little better than a serf. The second issue is that many people cannot relocate. Farmers need to live on their farms, especially livestock farmers who must tend for their animals several times a day. The only way to avoid this is to completely kill off small scale farms (and anti-car advocates usually claim to be against corporate farming.) The third issue is that a lot of small town businesses only work because of personal transportation. That town of 250 I mentioned has three successful bars. But it's not like everyone in town is getting drunk every night and keeping them afloat that way. No, most people drive in. One caters to bikers passing through, another gets a lot of business from truckers, and only the third gets most of its business from the locals. But even the local bar has people come in from the neighboring towns. For them it's only a fifteen minute drive to go to a place they like or to try out something different for some variety. But they wouldn't bother waiting an hour for a bus just to go to that bar. Without cars the town might be able to support one bar, but likely not even that.