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.
Every time I go there, I make a point of using public transport, and it’s maddening how a 20-minute journey by bus becomes hellish because the station was moved, but no one knows why or where or cares.
It doesn’t need more than someone in charge who cares.
Having the option to drive when there's copious amounts of transit is empowering. It lets you go hiking into the mountains where it wouldn't be economical to run even a bus at greater than 1 hr headways or haul your ski and snowboarding equipment to the slopes. It lets you ferry around your aging parents who are starting to have cognitive issues. It means when your children are still very young you can keep them from being a nuisance on the bus. Being forced to drive because there's no transit and you know your brake pads are shot and scraping against your rotors but you don't have the money or time to fix your car is dreadful.
The infrastructure should support that sort of trip out of the city. It’s intra-city car use that’s a disaster, and our infrastructure should not support that.
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.