I live in a town of 5000. It's a tourist town and has relatively good bus connections as well as a train line.

But if I want to go literally anywhere the buses are usually every 1.5h (more often directly to the capital but that one is either a 2h bus ride or goes there directly without inbetween stops) and the trains are every 2.5h.

Let's say I need to go to the hardware store. I can take the bus leaving in 40mins, walk 15 mins to the store, 15 mins back and then wait another 30-40 mins for the bus back.

Or I can take the train 10mins to a completely different town, switch trains (hopefully I got the one that has a connection on the other line) and take another 10 mins to the same spot the bus would drop me off. Then repeat the 30+min of going to the store and back. Take the train back to the other town. Hopefully catch the train on the line back home (or wait 2-3 hr for the next one).

Both the train and bus stations are about 10-15min walk from where I live. But any of those options take me at least 1hr of just commuting in best case scenario (no waiting or minimal waiting for bus/train).

Or I can take a car, get to the store in 10min find whatever I need and be back home in 30min from when I left.

For people living in small town is an obligation.

Broadly speaking, sure. But most people live in cities. The idea that we need an eight lane highway to accommodate the handful of people coming in from the desolate sand wastes of Bumblefuck, Nowhere is absurd.

The bulk of city traffic is city residents traveling between points in the city. They're your priority. They're the ones creating all the traffic

For people living in small town is an obligation

Car culture is actually making it an obligation.

This is highly variable depending on your country, area, town. I have lived car free all my life in Canada, in some small towns, and moved to a big city. It's entirely possible to live in a small town without a car depending on what you do and the size of the town, even with deficient public transit.

Most people live in urbanized areas and towns are just clusters of houses and people that could be served by transit. According to statista, more than 80% of Canada's population lives in an urban area. In fact, some of those towns were even created by transit, or already had transit, and now cars are an "obligation".

And if we are to compare with old numbers from 2012 for commuting distances in Canada, most people will drive less than 10-15 km to go to work, with the vast majority being less than 10 km. So the vast majority seems to gravitate within their town or urban cluster. The "obligation" is mostly made up by car culture, and people will happily defend it so they can justify having their own car. Nobody will be demanding transit and it will die.

There is however a spike for people commuting more than 30 km. And those can have a real obligation to use a car. They should switch to electric when it's going to be possible. Nobody wants to force them to give up their car, but they are in the minority, meaning cities, and even towns, should not be choking with cars.

In fact, nobody wants to force anybody to give up their car if they truly think it's an obligation. Just be aware that electric cars will obviously not solve congestion issues, will continue to pollute in certain other ways, will still be deadly, and are not an easy works for all fix.

Everyone benefits from having less cars on the roads and them being electric will not achieve that goal. It's not because a minority of people want or really need a car, that we can justify building whole towns, cities, and infrastructure for those cars.