Cars are by now a hard to reverse environmental and urban planning disaster across the world. We are stuck with them. As a mode of transport it has grown uncontrollably at the expense of all others (except the airplane) and practically everything has been shaped to accomodate it.
Reversing that development, limiting car traffic to where its really needed is like trying to perform a complete heart and arteries transplant on a living person. Even if there was a will (which there is not) it is not clear if there is a way.
In the best scenario it will be an excruciatingly long transformation (~50 yr) as car oriented cities (or city sections) get slowly deprecated and the car-free or car-lite segments become more desirable, more livable.
It's a gradual process, and part of the problem is actually embedded on your analogy, it's not like perform a heart and artery transplant, because there's no single action that can solve the problem, but years, and years of multiple, small and large initiatives, to make car dependency goes down.
We are not talking about perfection being the enemy of the good. The congestion of the daily car commute is as real as anywhere.
Ultimately its a question of finding accelerating solutions (the way). The article I commended on focuses too much on a certain value set (the will).
There are good things being invented. Tiny electric cars for example, that in principle could halve the car density. But remember the paradox that more space will simply lead to more traffic.
Ultimately the entire distribution of work, residential and utility/shopping areas must change. This is not shapped so much by individual preferrences around mobility as it is about real eastate and transport economics, incentives for developers, manufacturers and financiers, interplay with local government tax strategies etc.
Its a wicked problem. Being clear about the challenges can only be good. Blind faith doesnt always carry the day.