It seems to mostly revolve around (not) designing cities for cars. The typical suburban towns and cities in America are almost not towns at all, more arbitrary geographic boxes drawn around anonymous wide streets, traffic lights galore, parking lots, driveways.

In my area there are occasional attempts to improve downtown areas or build new "Euro inspired" developments. This has varying success but they tend to be isolated caricatures, more like shopping malls than communities people live in... there isn't a coherent regional long-term plan. And there is always a pressure to deal with traffic, adding more housing/density creates more and more traffic and parking needs. There's a bus network but it also gets stuck in traffic doesn't properly deal with the far-flung regional destinations caused by the fundamental lack of density.

The cars also cause a general feeling of danger. Even in quiet neighborhoods kids are at risk of death from a passing car.