Because it's rather inefficient moving two tons of stuff for (often enough) 80 kg of payload. I'd rather take well-functioning public transport than force everyone to own a car just to be able to go grocery shopping. It's wasteful, not only regarding the resources involved, but also for your own bank account.

(Also everything the parent of that comment said. Plenty of places are horrible to use without a car even where the distances involved are easily walkable or cycleable. We increasingly tend to plan for cars first, people second which I personally would consider a dead end and rather short-sighted.)

But this assumes "well-functioning public transport". In reality, this does not exist. Many, even most buses where I live are empty most of the time.

Energy efficiency issues aside, cars provide something even more valuable: isolation and privacy from the disgusting and invasive sensory overload that is public transport.

The car companies paid good money to make that happen http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_cons...

Replacing street cars with public buses is hardly eliminating public transportation. Honestly, buses have so many advantages over electric streetcars that I wouldn't be surprised if this move prevented a lot of cities from scrapping their public transportation all together. Even countries that don't share the US's unfortunate emphasis on automobile transportation don't use streetcars anymore.

Nobody is forcing anybody to own a car. And stop worrying about the decisions other people make about how to spend their money.

The externalities (noise, pollution, horrendous city planning, ...) are carried by everyone, though. And while people may not be forced, there are certainly places where living without a car ranges from inconvenient over hard to impossible.

Cars kill more kids than anything else. Electricity won't change that.