You can walk everywhere and live without a car in most big European cities. You cannot in US. That changes road design, urban planning, law interpretation, driving culture.
It's a catch 22. Nobody walks, so the social expectation is that the environment must accommodate driving, so the zoning and the laws reflect that, but the resulting environment is hostile to walking, so nobody walks.
There was an America before cars where walking was the norm, and then it was mostly systematically destroyed and is gone outside of a few metropolitan areas.
