Yes, and he's pointing to a very big reason why: electeds defer to small business owners, who tend to be irrationally hostile to those alternatives.
Zoning reform is all well and good (pretty sure Owens agrees with you there), but road use reform is much cheaper and faster path to greater safety. And it too will lead to greater density.
I live in such a place. The primary reason why I bike to the grocery store, restaurants, and coffee shop while my spouse does not is safety. They're very concerned about the risks. I'm more tolerant of the risks, but their position is perfectly reasonable. If there were more biking infrastructure that made it safe to bike (separarte bikes and cars), more people would bike. But building such biking infrastructure is often seen as taking something away from car-driving customers.
But I also support denser housing. We should be doing both.
It's fine if biking is not for everyone, but it is a great option for some people. If we can encourage more people to sometimes bike instead bof drive a car, that is positive.
Even if we say that 1 mile is gold standard biking distance, surely there are people that live within 1 mile of a grocery or a restaurant. That is a very comfortable distance, as far as physical exertion goes, for many people. But, again, whenever cars and bikes are negotiating a shared space, it's dangerous, and a lot of people simply won't do it for safety concerns.
Next, I agree that increasing density is a very good goal. I want that. But surely you must acknowledge how painfully difficult that has been to achieve politically in most places in the United States? I think we should keep pushing for denser towns and cities, but even when progress is made, it is gradual. The vicious cycle is that cars encourage more sprawl, and sprawl demands cars. Maybe the city council isn't going to budge on bringing housing and businesses to be dense enough for most things to be 1 mile of each other. But maybe bringing some stuff within 4 or 5 miles is more possible sooner, and if it is, we should take it. Increasing density a little bit now makes it easier to increase density a little bit more tomorrow, and a little bit more the next day.
My last bit I want to share is ebikes really open up what is possible. Trips can be longer, the terrain can be hillier, and the exertion lower. The physical barriers to biking drop a lot. Costs are coming down, and are quite a bargain if one is able to replace a car with an ebike. The missing piece is infrastructure to support safe biking.
The average in the Netherlands in 2016 was ~3.5km (~2.2 miles) for ordinary bikes and ~5km (~3.1 miles) for ebikes. [1]
"For trips of up to 7.5 km (65% of all trips), 38% of the Dutch use the bicycle and 34% the car. For distances from 3.7 km and more, the car is more popular than the bicycle." [2]
"55% of workers who live within 5 km of their workplace go to work by bicycle. When the home-work distance is between 5 and 10 km 31% of the people go by bicycle and between 10 and 15 km that is 14%." [2]
[1]: "Figure: Distance per trip in kilometres (left) and average speed in kilometres per hour (right) for e-bikes and “ordinary” bikes by age group, 2016." https://www.government.nl/binaries/government/documenten/rep...
[2]: https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2023/01/04/how-did-the-pa...