From the article:

Instead, I expect that America will undergo a long process, lasting much longer than my own lifetime, in which cities that are not built around cars will gradually expand and attract an ever-increasing share of the population, and the most thinly populated car-centric places will gradually decline in value, because they are just not nice places to live.

The street a half-block from my house (Lake Street in Uptown neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota) is getting modified to be more multi-modal and the results have been fabulous:

• Before: 4-lane one-way road with narrow sidewalks
• After: 2-lane one-way road, protected bike lane, dedicated bus lane, wider sidewalks and generous bump-outs on each curb

The nearby street was one of the things I liked least about our house, and now it’s an asset. It's possible to change these car-centric places, but the change itself has been brutal — 1 year of major construction and lots of NIMBYism and pushback from neighbors.

For all the progress that the optimistic claim we're making with solar energy and transitions to clean energy I look around me and see everything pulling us in the opposite direction.

The obsession with cars—gas-powered cars and trucks—and ATV and dirt bike gas toys continues to grow unabated.

We've seen a new industry emerge around here in the supposedly enlightened capital of Vermont, consisting of men buying giant pickup trucks, to pull big trailers, to haul around giant lawnmowers, to mow half-acre suburban lots with. The noise, the fumes, the justification for owning death machine pickups. And everyone around me, including those pulling EVs into their driveways, are happy to subsidize this instead of using a little gas mower or electric mower for an hour once a week. My walls and floor shake when they show up to mow the lawn next door. It's the soundtrack to my life.

The neighbors now have someone dropping off and picking up kids driving some sort of giant diesel truck with a logo on the side. It idles for 10 minutes in their driveway or at the curb. It competes with the TV in my living room, doors and windows closed.

A once easy drive through VT to New York State, on narrow two-lane roads lined with rural homes, was recently officially opened up to tractor trailers creating a shipping corridor of cars backed up behind FedEx and Walmart shipments negotiating its twists and turns.

Tourists come in and out of the state with their pickup trucks hauling their gas toys.

It's ugly and it's rampant, and there's no stopping it.

The r/fuckcars subreddit has 450,000 members.
https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/

I think this channel has been mentioned on Kottke.org before, but the "Not Just Cars" YouTube channel is full of great videos about this topic. It's also added the word "stroad" to my vocabulary.

https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes

Mathematically speaking, the "median scene" of this country would be empty pasture or forest. Humans don't even take up a majority of the U.S.'s real estate. And even if we limited the range to just towns and cities, the median scene would be a rural neighborhood scene of houses with side yards featuring minimal traffic. Yes, cars are annoying, but our infrastructure and housing stock are an incontrovertible fact. To remake our lives without cars would require us all to move into city centers and abandon unimaginably vast swaths of housing equity. Short of an extinction level event, it ain't happening.

As with most terrible things in the United States, we can trace the roots of this stroad ridden hellscape we all live in to that unholy, but extremely effective, union of corporate interest and racism.