I would say that for us, commuting is the least likely journey to be taken by car because it's the time of day with most congestion and city offices make it inconvenient to park. I haven't taken the car to work now for over a year. (But when I was working in Livingston I took the car about 95% of the time, because of the huge time saving and reliability vs the train, and the nasty road conditions for cycling / trip length of about 20 miles each way on a quiet enough route - so it's not a moral position, it's purely pragmatic)
When you have relatively young kids, but too old to put on a cargo bike now, you really feel the mismatch in the way the city builds provision for alternate travel.
For e.g. the 45's hourly service gets us to music class 55 minutes before their lessons begin. The amount of walking to and from the bus stops is roughly equivalent to the time it takes to drive, so not only is the entire bus journey (about half an hour) "lost" time but we have to go another hour earlier than ideal. Then you've got the stress of "will the bus turn up" or "will the bus get halfway, stop and be cancelled and you get on the bus behind" which has happened more than once. Same thing for going up to Balerno High school, by the time you've walked to the bus stop, you can have driven to the school. Then you've got a 20+ minute stress of why isn't the bus here, it's raining and kids are whining. The option we used to use of just sticking them on a single (e-)bike that we rode at speed is gone. On the flip side, there is a lift-sharing arrangement with other parents so I guess often the net amount of cars on the road is the same whatever option we choose for our own kids.
Now you can make the argument that if people didn't have the ability to drive around to central/specialised resources like sports / culture / education places, those things would be provisioned more locally and I think that's a great ambition. But then you get onto the gap between active travel plans - the things that aren't even being built on the ground - and what would actually reduce our car use.
Case in point, the biggest project near us is the "West Edinburgh Link", which is capturing all the investment for probably a decade, but which won't even connect Colinton with Sighthill very usefully. Meanwhile they spent £60m rebuilding Currie High School, and as part of that rebuild they improved access to the site for cars, while making it worse (actually worse) for active travel.
There's a half-reasonable quiet way for us to access the north of the site, but they bottled a new access point on the north of the school grounds. You can't access it easily from the east edge because there are steps and dodgy lighting through the woods. The main entrance from the south actually narrowed the pedestrian access to widen it for cars. Whether it's just observer bias or not, it feels like the number of events that people travel to the school for is higher, but either way it's a rammie in the new car park (effectively enlarged because the old car park is still in operation too). I'm not comfortable cycling the kids through the estate on their own bikes after dark with 50+ busy parents zooming to the school in cars. Therefore we also tend to drive to the school even though it's only a five minute drive. (We never did this when it was possible to take the kids on our own cargo bike).
For years we could have sent the kids off to walk to school on their own but we escorted them with the sole purpose of helping them cross the road outside the school, as even though it's no more than a few hundred metres from any house in the estate, loads of the parents drive the kids there and then drive on to work. Zero road safety infrastructure. They've actually closed and resurfaced two more of the roads in the estate so in the decade we've lived here, nearly every road has been fully re-laid with zero pedestrian infrastructure.
If I wanted to reduce car use and increase active travel, I wouldn't worry about building hyper-expensive long distance active travel routes any more. I think that actually if you strategically blocked up roads through the estate to make it much harder to trip chain in a car, you'd get much more bang for your buck. Unfortunately that's the type of investment which the council is still on reverse-gear for, concentrating on reopening Silverknowes and Braids low traffic schemes for rat running again. They're hardly likely to come into our estate and promote safe travel at the expense of convenient driving at this point. I found the dissonance between what everyone does, and what the policies are supposed to be, very challenging. I had to basically give up on it and just accept the status quo for the sake of my own mental health! (Now I can discharge this by a semi-annual rant on CCE ;-)
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