>A vastly more effective approach would be to encourage and cheer those trying to wean America from its addiction to automobiles....
While that's true, it's also not happening: the only real way it might is through considerably higher density (which I support, both through the removal of urban height limits and mandatory lot setbacks), but across the world density has actually been declining for decades, as Shlomo Angel shows in Planet of Cities:
New empirical evidence on the average population density of cities across space and time confirms that these densities have been in decline almost everywhere for a century or more. The new evidence is counterintuitive, since numerous academic researchers believe that urban densities have been on the increase. Were that true, it would lend encouragement and support to those favoring densification. However, urban density decline has been persistent and global in scope, and it predated the automobile. It is not restricted to the United States or other industrialized countries, but is pervasive in developing countries as well. [. . .]
You should support greater density, bike lines, etc., but in reality we're going to be relying on car-based transportation for the foreseeable future—which means decades at the very least.
Again, I would like to see more cities that allow and encourage non-car transport, but I haven't seen much of it, and current property law prevents people from actually building those kinds of cities.