This is myopic - it assumes that our currently built world is immutable. It didn't appear overnight, and we can certainly take steps to reduce our dependence on personal automobiles. Sure, it's not going to be for everyone, but we can't just keep going down this insane rabbit hole of SFH sprawl where everyone just drives everywhere.
These days, "sprawl" always comes with some degree of urban planning that some essential businesses like grocery stores are reachable without having to exit the community boundaries, even if a car is needed. It's very easy to develop and plan over an old shopping mall or farmland that got sold. I would question the feasibility of built a giant high-end brand new city of elite high rises and all the amenities of a New York on parcels bordering forest and farmland and located far away from the moneyholders.
It was economically feasible to go one car back then. It's not now. The market has adjust to the larger labor force and everyone has to work and fend for themselves. That's not changing.
Put the workplace a half mile from home and skip the public transportation altogether, then your pie-in-the-sky utopia can become a reality. But if someone needs to work in a laboratory, that's certainly not too practical.
People are taken out of cars because traffic sucks and that the local lands are heavily developed. Not because of the environment. Transit-oriented development's de fact goal is to make city life easy and increase revenue flows into the transit system, not to save the environment. It's not surprising that many examples of TOD are also in places that was able to procure rail funding and a rail system many decades ago and in established major cities with high collective spending power.
Public transit are designed with a model of movement, often with a periphery-to-center model. Those who need to go East-west, some other direction not included in the model can use it, but with a heavy, heavy time cost.
You sounds like someone who has never rode public transportation or even paid attention to how the local governments run their network. Ridership determines frequency of services. Routes that go where "everyone goes" can have much more service than those living on the "edge".
I live in an area where 35 miles is the distance from countryside to the city itself, and the city happens to be designed to be separated into four quadrants.
Where there is bare farmland land to be developed, urban planning is evident as the lots are populated with town centers.
However, houses that were built up from decades before are usually not going anywhere. Massive road changes are not going to happen.
I also happen to live in a state with a Democrat-monopoly bordered by more Democratic monopolies. So there are no Republican roadblocks here. Only internal constraints exist.