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.
What I don't like about this is that people (even urbanist bloggers) tend to form their opinions on their experience as tourists, while reality is much more nuanced and full of tradeoffs.
Case in point: I once visited my friend in Bilbao and the one thing I couldn't get over was that despite this being a beautiful, walkable, full of life city jobs were hard to come by and low-paid. Youth unemployment in particular in Spain stands at a whopping 46%.
NYC is beautiful, walkable, full of life, and you sure can find a job there. Same with the Boston area.
I've lived in both walkable and car-dependent areas for years. I am one of the people who grew up in a car-dependent small city who couldn't imagine not owning a car 10 years ago.
Now that I've lived in both, sure, there might be tradeoffs living in a walkable neighborhood, but if you build a neighborhood with the amenities you need, walking for most things is simply amazing. Having a car is useful for getting out, but it now becomes a "once in awhile" thing, almost a luxury, if you have a nice market and some restaurants nearby. And then you can do things like ZipCar or other options for the rare times you need to drive.
My (European) city is walkable by any American definition. Tourists enjoy its XIX century architecture, restaurants, boulevards and such. What they don't see is that the 1,6% unemployment rate is there thanks to huge swaths of barely walkable and frankly ugly industrial complexes providing jobs to which people generally drive or commute a significant amount of time in public transport, because with their credit score it made more sense to get something on the outskirts or suburbs. You won't see them in places visited by tourists because that's far from where they live and they generally can't afford going out that often.