people have just accepted cars as the default mode of transportation

That wasn’t an accident and it didn’t just ‘happen;’ it was the very deliberate result of a combination of automobile and oil industry propaganda and US government policy back in the 1930s-1950s, motivated by several factors ranging from utopian modernist city planning to good ol’fashioned racism.

Some random sources to get folks started:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement

• https://www.strongtowns.org/curbside-chat-1/2015/12/14/americas-suburban-experiment

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama_(New_York_World's_Fair)

• https://www.pbssocal.org/history-society/the-birth-of-sprawl-how-ending-the-great-depression-meant-inventing-the-suburbs