I don't mean this as an attack but one could write books about how much cars retroactively shaped perception of transport and city planning before cars. It's insane. The usual thing seems to be to assume that because everybody has a car now everybody just used to have an individual horse, commuting from their suburbian slash peasant dwelling living place on horse roads with horse congestion to downtown (centrally planned around 50.000 horses to the detriment of 8 cranks that walked). For 99% of history and for 99% of people your options to get anywhere were:

a) walking b) public transport of some sort

Then came train, bicycle, automobile at around a 50 year timeframe. First one revolutionized public transport, second one revolutionized individual transport and then for another 50 years cars were hated by everybody but the rich dipshits that could afford them endangering anybody else.

You ever hear someone say "roads [or roadspace] was always for cars"? Yeah, it's that. It's assuming that because the world is the way that it is now, it used to be that way forever, except horse.