In general I think cars are less useful in cities than on the country side.

In cities there are traffic jams, there are red lights, and it's difficult to find parking, often one ends up with long walking distance from wherever one found a place to park and to the destination. When counting door-to-door time, the bike often tends to be the fastest option here in Oslo, at least during the traffic peaks. It seems like the best option is to have a foldable bike and travel the bigger distances by train.

On the country side, in small towns and villages, one can just jump into the car, drive directly where one wants and park there, very convenient indeed.

In the cities at least it's possible to travel by public transport with a transfer. At the country side one may find that the bus only goes twice a day, and not at all on Sundays.

Indeed, the distances may be quite large in the bigger cities ... in my home town (as a child) we could go pretty much wherever we wanted with a ten, maximum fifteen minutes drive, driving from one end of Oslo to the other may take like half an hour on a Sunday (depending on how one chooses to define "Oslo"), much more during the traffic peaks. My wife is from St.Petersburg, distances are like crazy over there. But still ... how often does one really need to go from one end to the other? Indeed, quite many people live in one end of the city and works at the other - but far from everyone, quite many are working locally. Driving from one end to the other is quite comparable to driving from one small town to another. Daily shopping ... out of milk, even from our home here in Oslo my wife often ends up driving to the shop to solve that issue, in St.Petersburg, almost no matter where one lives, it will be quicker to go by feet than to take the car for buying common food products.