Cars became a self-reinforcing driver of individualism, especially in net new geographies. The negative effects are resisted better in societies/regions that were built long before them. (For both the cultural reasons and plain physical reasons, like not having wide enough roads).
In the car centric places, a few generations later they become an indelible aspect of nature. It is impossible for most people to imagine society working otherwise. And even when they do, the collective action problems are near insurmountable. The introduction of technology has irreversibly trapped us in a way of thinking we can't escape.
This is exactly the premise of the Amish religion. You must strictly control technology to create the society you want, not the other way around.
Something I recently learned about roads from Stewart Brand's new book "Maintenance" is that the first groups pushing for paved roads were cyclists:
The Good Roads Movement of the late 19th century began as a grass-roots
crusade to improve roads for bicyclists. By the 20th century, it had turned
into a national effort embraced by the automobile industry, railroad tycoons
and presidents.
The advocates of the automobile have been far, far more successful at shaping US society, laws, culture and our physical environment.
I imagine that’s also true in many other nations to a lesser extent.
“Anti-personal mobility advocates” do not exist. Transit advocates exist, and improvements in transit also massively benefit those who need to or prefer to drive.
Motorists hate anything that isn't a car and is in their way. Motorists hate Critical Mass; they hate light rail or streetcars that hog their rights-of-way; they hate pedestrians (especially when pedestrians aren't wearing the right clothes); they hate Lyft, Uber, and Waymo especially; they hate big trucks and they hate Amish people with horse-drawn buggies.
Motorists will establish coalitions to vote against public transit measures in their home towns. They have come out in City Council and other public meetings, to protest and rail, so to speak, to rail against the expansion of light rail into their neighborhoods, because not only do they hate the construction, but they hate the "type of people" that light rail brings, and ultimately they hate the gentrification that comes from a fixed-route project that will ultimately close their shitty exploitive businesses and replace them with more elevated exploitation and richer moguls.
This is true for any kind of transformative technology. Marketing and lobbying can only get you so far. If something has enough utility, it will be used regardless of what people say they want.
- We would have gotten most of the social utility of automobiles, without most of the social negatives, if personal vehicles had mostly never happened.
And implied from that, we should stop having them now.
Given the known ills of society, I think those negatives are pretty uncontroversial. To the point that personal car proponents have some burden to explain why we should keep it up.
Anyone who still even has a personal opinion at all pertaining to what the world should look like distinct from swallowing whatever 'the market' has decided to impose on them is worth listening to.
That's the most interesting thing about the situation of technology today. Most technology is banal, what's notable is that apparently now a culture needs to be in possession of 'objective truth' (no such thing exists) to defend what is, by definition, a subjective way of life.