Basically with car, I went from home -> work -> home and unless I went really out of my way (pull into shopping center, park, get out of car, walk to store) then I wasn't near anything to buy. I basically had to make the conscious decision to go to a store.
Where as now, every time I enter or exit a train station I pass by 15-20 store fronts (book stores, bakeries, coffee stands, dessert stands, lunch stands, clothing stores, drug stores, grocery store, etc...) and it's literally 1-2 seconds off my path to be in one and buy something.
In various countries sprawls, shopping districts and office-only areas are prohibited by building regulations in order to create mixed areas where people can live/shop/work and build local communities.
Do you have any links? that goes entirely against my intuition. SF is generally considered walkable and has high street crime. I'm pretty sure the same is true for NYC, Paris, Berlin, other highly walkable cities where as say Irvine, Brea, (E.T. like neighborhoods that require a car to do anything) have low-street crime.
Update:
The first 2 hits I found on google found higher walkability correlated with more crime
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001391652092184...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41284-018-00161-7
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkability#Socioeconomic
As the sibling poster wrote, by comparing the only walkable area in the downtown of a car-centered city you are [involuntarily] cherry-picking the populace that cannot afford a car. You have to compare whole countries.
I can't remember the link, but one study I read found that it mainly affected whether people took multiple trips or one to do the same number of things.
E.g. if no traffic, you'll pop to 5 different shops on 5 different days because it's easy.
If tons of traffic, you save it all up to go to the same 5 shops in a single trip instead.
So obviously the effects are complicated, and the consequences aren't obvious. Also, if it's harder to make it to the middle of the big city, that can stimulate more vibrant jobs/shops/activity/etc. in towns on the outskirts that weren't there before.
So while all the examples you've chosen are detrimental, you can also reframe them all as positive.
On the other hand I don't think it's funds that are the problem here, there's plenty of money chasing more urban lifestyles. The limits are on the zoning and permitting for urban housing types in the locations that need them. Once there is capacity for people to urbanize, then we can talk tactics to nudge the reluctant.
If you just make the suburbs painful without upzoning the city, all you've done is decrease quality of life.
Each individual sees a small disadvantage when a bridge is closed, but the overall economic effect might be very substantial, and hard to measure.