I think the problem is that American anti-car rhetoric doesn't speak with one voice. There are people who know what they're talking about, who are mostly saying "If we follow some of the Dutch practices, we can get a city where people can get to a local destination by bike safely. But we should also take note that even in the Netherlands, the need to engineer roads for bike safety is something they continually forget". But there's others who say "The US is a hell-hole, Americans are evil and dumb, cars are evil, they will destroy the earth, we must all copy the enlightened Europeans who are good and wise people".

It is like that for so many reform proposals. Heterodox economists (MMT or gold standard or anything really) will say "we ought to consider this evidence in making our economic decisions", and their acolytes on forums like this will say "If we adopt this reform, we will be able to solve all our problems, but it's just corruption and self-interested politicians who stop us". Voting system reform people say "The US is screwed by FPTP, if we adopted proportional representation we will depolarise and have a nice consensual politics", but people who study the politics of countries that use proportional representation don't really indicate that (I think in this case there are some political scientists who get close, but only by circularly defining perfection in politics as exhibiting the consequences of proportional representation).