>However there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a sprawling urban area enabled by cars. You just need to take care to design it well enough.

Optimizing for individual transport in cars and public transport are not compatible goals. The first reason being that if individual transport is made available to most people, they will opt out of public transport and therefore all political will for maintaining and increasing quality of public transport will disappear.

And optimizing for cars means you can't optimizing for walking or other forms of transit.