The core thing is that people don't think about how many assumptions are baked into their "need" for cars. The assumption that you have to live in a suburb, that public transport must needs be terrible forever, that you absolutely must be able to do this or that unnecessary thing at a whim, that nothing about the American car-dependent lifestyle should change.
Don't think about this in terms of your immediate personal situation, think about all the variables that need to change to build a future largely without cars.
>think about all the variables that need to change to build a future largely without cars.
It can be done by changing but a single variable: cost. Make driving more expensive, and people drive less. Make driving cheaper, and people drive more. With a sufficiently high cost, the majority of people will seek alternatives.
> Make driving more expensive, and people drive less.
"If we tax the poor, they'll decide to be less poor"
It won't work. The suburbs are predominantly filled with people who could not afford to live places with functional transit in the first place.
If you make driving more expensive, the few people who are wealthy enough to choose the city, will do so (driving sky-high prices even higher). And for the 99% of suburban people who already can't afford cities, these people will have even less money for housing, so they'll be forced to buy cheaper housing, which will be even further away from the city, and you'll exacerbate even more sprawl than already exists.
It's not so much an "assumption" as a true fact of life today
Suburbs today (not 1950, but today in 2019) exist almost exclusively because of failures of their cities, mainly in housing, education, and transportation. To suggest "people shouldn't assume they have to live in a suburb" is to suggest that people should assume they'll be allowed to live in a city.
And that's simply not true. That's never a safe assumption, effectively that's impossible for most people in the US. Just in housing alone, they're already priced out for at least the next decade or more. (Even in "cheap" cities, even in the South or the Midwest, etc)
> think about all the variables that need to change to build a future largely without cars.
Manhattan residents would have to be ok with all property losing 90% of it's 'fair-market value' overnight. Same for Seattle, and San Francisco, and Boston, and Minneapolis, and every other city on earth.
Oh, no one in Manhattan is OK with that? Then, effectively Manhattan residents are guaranteeing "car-dependent" (read: cheap/affordable) lifestyles for everyone else, are here to stay for a while.
Don't think about this in terms of your immediate personal situation, think about all the variables that need to change to build a future largely without cars.