Sounds like the kind of hypocrisy you'd hear from "urbanists" today: Complain about pedestrian deaths, then complain about a thing that prevents them.
Drivers are the one with huge mechanical advantage, make them go up and down, don’t force the local pedestrians who live in the to take huge detour, just so drivers from out of town can save 30 seconds.
Turning all of spaces in car centric spaces also has cost, it’s just less obvious. Many time building that car bridge is cheaper for a government, if it helps keep people out of cars, and removes the huge number of negative externalities that car ownership brings.
Railways are for trains, roads are for people.
A drug den isn't a hospital just because drugs are administered there. A diesel and an EV are not the same just because they only differ in fuel source. You treat them differently, you try to encourage the positive externalities and discourage the negative ones.
Some people have seen it coming a long time ago that as a society we are encouraging cars and their infrastructure too much and among other things we're giving up some (maybe too much?) individual freedom in favor of them. And wouldn't you know it, a century later we're aiming at making cities walkable again, even banning cars entirely in some areas, as proof that society is realizing those concerns weren't at all hypocritical.