It's not even true in the United States. In the Boston area, there are still plenty of those "strong towns" the bloggists go on about. I live in one. My car gets used to go to Home Depot, to drive to visit my parents four hours away, and if I need to go to my doctor who's just a little too far off the beaten path to drive to. The rest of the time, I walk, and I'm within a mile of a commuter rail station to get to Boston proper.

Of course, we have not here decided that Government Is The Problem, so we tend to wield it a little better. A number of my neighbors want to change that, being as afraid as they are of "Transit-Oriented Development" (you can guess what that means), but hey--democracy isn't free, we need to push that nonsense back.