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Notes -
There are lots of reasonable changes that would make them so. Better yet, many of them can be implemented incrementally, so it's not like you need to do them all in one go. That's not the problem.
The problem is that a car-centric society has a ton of costs sunk into car infrastructure on both a personal and social level, and investing in car-related infrastructure is a bit of a rachet. Even a city where you don't need a car for 90% of trips is a city where you need a car for 10% of trips, which is another way of saying you need a car. And since a car is mostly fixed costs for the individual, once you've got it there's a lot of incentive to prefer the perpetuation and expansion of car-centric policies.
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