I have no knowledge of what this Dutch effort was beyond the info in your link, but nothing suggests that the public outcry was go actually ban vehicles or disincentivize ownership and use with tactics such as with higher fees, reduced parking availability, which is what U.S. urban road safety advocates I see pushing for.
Alongside increased bike infrastructure funding, the Dutch effort certainly did involve disincentivizing car use by higher fees (both parking and ownership), reducing parking availability (and also non-parking car accessibility), and slowing down car speeds (speed bumps, cameras, narrowing roads, calming road design, reducing city speed limits to 19mph), and generally reducing car allocated space. It's typically done during scheduled road maintenance, where separated bike lakes are installed, often by converting the street parking space or turning a two way street into a one way (for cars) street or even banning car access.
I mean Amsterdam is kinda renown exactly for reducing parking availability, slow speed limits and generally human-first city planning nowadays.
Wasn't always like that either. In the 90s it was cars-first just like the OP likes nowadays.
It's definitely true that having only bicycle infrastructure doesn't really work for families though. It's a different story if you've got a cargo bike and public transport... But it's understandable that that's not even entering his mind considering the culture of the USA.
Agreed, I only know of a handfull families that manage with no nearby public transport using bicycle only. It is possible, I managed doing 50km for couple of months with a cargo bike and small kids, you adapt. I do not recommend that to anyone unless you really want to, it is just too cheap to own a couple of cars.
It's only cheap because they are heavily subsidized. And then we go back to a discussion about policy. If you remove all the subsidies or make car-owners pay for the externalities, things would quickly turn in favor for higher density, public transit, and AFAIK no game has put this into their game economics.
The forthcoming Car Park Capital[0] looks like an interesting reflection of your sentiment (but it's about planning cities to make them more car centric).
You are looking at the cost in your pocket, not the aggregate.
Add the cost of the gas needed to power all these cars, plus the cost of the land allocated solely for parking, plus the costs of the roads, plus the costs in healthcare associated with air pollution, plus the environmental cost of all the concrete and steel need to build and maintain the roads, etc.
It's not just "car ownership", it's "car-centric infrastructure" that is expensive.
Because car-based roads are so fucking noisy, we throw a ton of green space and front yards to mitigate it. Not to mention "sidewalks" are unnecessary when you can just walk in the centre of the street.
The size of a traditional road is about 6 metres wide or less (that's measured from the front wall of the building on one side, to the front wall of the building on the opposite side). In comparison, the same wall-to-wall measure of a car-centric suburban street comes out to, IIRC, 20-30 metres. That's 3-5x the cost in just land alone, let alone maintenance.
And yes, we will need some roads - about 20% or so, as arterial roads. But right now we're closer to 100%, and most of the throughput of arterial roads is tied up in one-occupant passenger vehicles rather than actually necessary cargo/tradie vehicles.
The public outcry was to ban cars - literally. They blocked streets, and did what they needed to to block drivers and vehicles. It's long enough ago that maybe the abrasiveness and confrontational nature of it is forgotten now - lots of big changes start out that way, but if successful the success almost drives the way the history is remembered more postively.
It looks to me like it was 100% a "think of the children" moment that often gets ridiculed. I can see the same inflection point in my country around the same time, when street and road design shifted to car orientated and car priority - Amsterdam being one of the notable exceptions but with a well documented fight.
