Perhaps the most car-brained reaction to the idea of USian cities not being built around cars for a change is: "You can't do that here! The US is so *big*!"

The reason this is car-brained is because cars have universalist propaganda baked into the culture.
"If you did away with inner city cars, you must do away with them everywhere, checkmate, libs."

BS.

We could build pervasive, multimodal public transit like billionaires build data centers, but we're too busy arguing with each other.