Only by traveling to places that were developed before cars took a chokehold on the world can people realize how nice it is to live without them absolutely everywhere.
Many Americans get a taste of that when they vacation to Europe. They often choose to leave their suburb and spend their 2 weeks in urban environments like Barcelona, London, Munich, Paris, Rome, etc., that where built for people and not cars, because it's so pleasant to live like that, and because letting cities develop for people first leads to cities that people actually want to be in, with car-free streets, plazas, promenades, etc. (Yes, today those places are also full of cars. But, unlike American cities, their skeletons are people-first and cars are the invasive element.)
It could be argued that so many problems of American life - weight gain, loneliness, fracturing of the social fabric - stem from how we've isolated ourselves in unwalkable suburbs, where there's no spontaneous social interaction because everyone's always in a car, and where our only exercise is the walk from the parking lot to our desk.
What's depressing is visiting developing countries and seeing them start to ape the worst of American car life. Places like Colombia, which I visit often, are building shopping malls, big-box stores, parking lots, suburbs, and freeways, while after almost 100 years of that type of car-first development in America we're only just starting to realize that actually it might not be that great.
A lot of bad decisions were made in Europe stemming from American city planners after the second world war. Like David Jokinen's influence on Amsterdam and The Hague: https://viewpointvancouver.ca/2019/10/27/the-1960s-when-the-...
It's strange that people are so eager to export (and import) urbanism ideas around the world without much understanding of the cultural differences and needs.
It's not even just cultural differences and needs. It's the lack of questioning in decisions and groupthink.
Tax per acre used to be a metric that was used in urban planning decisions. That was mostly thrown away when people started to want cars. A primary metric then became level of service. LOS was a way to measure traffic volume but didn't necessarily mean increased net economic output, although it was nearly used as one. It doesn't paint the picture correctly for municipal urban planning in a financial sense.
For sustained economic vitality in a very simplistic form, the infrastructure and municipal services costs should be subtracted from the amount of tax revenue gained from the land. Basically, is this land making the city money or is it costing the city money. This info can be used to adjust taxes, plan better built environments, amongst other things.
If that was regularly being measured throughout the last 100 years and acted upon, I imagine much of the car dependent areas of the world would look a lot different. If you talk to urban planners today about this (which I have), many still don't use it at all.