I don't see the anti-car position as asceticism. Rather, I see it as a recognition of the basic fact that peoples' expressed preferences are hard to separate from government policy in this particular domain.

The current state of affairs is not an expression of how people really want to live. It's an expression of the enormous subsidies we have given to a particular lifestyle. Our governments fund suburban schools much better than urban ones. They spend enormous amount of money on constant road construction and barely spend anything improving public transit. We allow the huge costs incurred by fossil fuel use to be externalized, making car use seem much cheaper than it actually is. We penalize renters and subsidize home owners by allowing tax deductions for mortgage interest. Police spend large amounts of money, on a per capita basis, enforcing uniquely suburban concerns like drunk driving, compared to how much is spent on run of the mill urban crime fighting.

It is almost certain that without these massive explicit and implicit subsidies, peoples' expressed "desires and wants" would look very different than what we have now.