Actually not. The highway allows undense spread out development. While you can build transit to those areas, to have useful transit (meaning stop every 5 minutes, not too many detours, and few transfers) you end up spending far more capital to build lightly used lines that are expensive to operator because so few people are on them (even if we assume private cars are illegal there wouldn't be many riders).

Note that not dense is the important part of the above. If you are willing to allow dense development (which most zones in the US prohibit) everything changes.

>If you are willing to allow dense development (which most zones in the US prohibit) everything changes.

Yep, this is the answer to it all: we need to build much more densely, and people need to get used to not having a big McMansion with a gigantic lawn.