In a lot of walkable cities the first floor of most buildings is often reserved for low impact commercial uses like shops or restaurants.
I am in a car dependent city (I need the car to go to work) but the fact that there are 3 stores in walking distance helps cut down on the voluntary car trips significantly. Even the weekly trip to a far away store takes 10 minutes at most by car.
No pedestrians or bicyclists die on I-95, and few motorists do to boot. The issue is with cars inside cities, not the space between them. Of course you get between cities with cars, long-distance busses/trains, and flying.
Belize and Norway are extremely low density overall in their countries: they have very different house prices, but neither has much sprawl.
Sprawl is a result of policy decisions.
How so? You mean the snowy towns or the hilly towns or...?
> I think there is also some outcome bias towards cars because they’re a comfortable/ known quantity for most people.
There's a bias toward cars since it's incentivized to drive cars. Our laws mean everything is far apart so trips are far and our transportation infrastructure is almost all fast or long roads. These are choices that prop up cars: if you could go to the grocery store with a short trip without a high risk of being hit by a car, more people would walk or ride a bike there. If transit was convenient, people would take it. People just want to get where they're going: cars are the best way to do that in the US because we have decided to incentivize car use over other options.