1. Nobody's proposing an elimination of streets. What is being suggested is that streets become more open to cycling and even pedestrian use without an implicit serious threat of death.

2. Re-thinking cities, where we design not around personal car ownership and convenience is possible. There are countless solutions that still allow for automobile use. For example, a number of parking garages throughout—or on the edges of—the city. Think about amusement parks, for example. You can't drive your car right up to Space Mountain when you go to Disney World. You park your car in a massive lot, and a shuttle (glorified golf-cart) takes you into the park where there are miraculously no cars, and no threat of being killed as you cross the "street" to get a cotton candy.

As I said in my previous post—there are working examples here. There's no need to pretend these are unsolvable problems—or even difficult-to-solve problems. Would we need to re-shuffle some things in most US cities? Absolutely... but that's exactly what we're talking about doing.