One of the funniest things about American car culture is that Americans probably walk the same distance from their parking spot to the store as I walk from my home.
It's not just oppression against "other forms of transport;" it's literally classist and (to the extent that race corresponds to class, which is a lot and on purpose) racist. A lot of these zoning laws about minimum parking requirements and minimum lot sizes date back to a time when United States government policy was explicitly designed to perpetuate segregation, and forcing every new parcel and development to be large and expensive enough to be unaffordable to most black people (because they were, and still are, poorer on average because of other institutional racism) was a part of that.
I was reading about a study that showed how much the climate temperature would rise if every house had solar panels on their roof.
I then immediately thought, hey now, what if we had less asphalt everywhere, would that not affect overall temperatures as well?
I work in planning. We removed parking requirements in our downtown districts and a bunch of companies came in to buy the old abandoned buildings and expanded them into the old parking areas.
Every single retail business that moved in over the following 3 years failed because there wasn't anywhere for the customers to park. They just went to businesses that had parking avaialbe.