Most small American towns may have small population, but enormous land mass. There's a video somewhere about how old towns had to be small in area in part because people didn't have things like cars to get around, so although population was low density kept up. Those are the kind of towns we should be encouraging these days.

As for driving to work, I do think that transit into work would be a perfectly good (and personally preferable) alternative; Id rather sparse communities have decent car infrastructure and storage at transit connections to dense cities, which don't have as much space to build car storage and road capacity and suffer from far greater utilization since they catch the traffic from all suburbs instead of a subsection of them. It's just a more scalable design.