This is a great way to put it. Quite often these arguments against cars feel completely blind to reality. We've built our cities and culture around having cars, we can't easily change that. Starting with some small regulations, like having bike lanes everywhere, would go a long ways. I would love to not pay for a second car, and gas, and insurance, but where I leave, it's just not reasonable.
I don't even think if the entire town got together and said "we want a sidewalk on the main drag with Walmart so carless folks don't have to contend with walking on the shoulder with cars doing 55 in a 45" it would go anywhere, cause there's nowhere to even put that without some huge eminent domain grab.
It's not just a political or environmental problem, it's purely a "where does this infra even go" situation.
One thing people don't realize is many US lanes are twelve feet wide, which is much wider than needed for slower traffic (in fact, one of the best ways to slow traffic down is to narrow the lane). An 18-wheeler is 8.5 feet wide, so even a 10 foot lane offers excess room.
If a stroad is three lanes each way, and they're 12 feet each, that's 12 feet that can be recovered simply by reducing lane width, and that doesn't even involve any sidewalk rearrangements.
But bike infra doesn't have to even follow the car infra, you can put a nice bike lane setup one block over from the stroad (more properly the arterial or collector). Nobody really wants to bike next to a bunch of cars anyway.