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I recently found an interesting post about the driving/transit+walking divide that I'd like to discuss some here: If We Want a Shift to Walking, We Need to Prioritize Dignity.
The basic point that this article makes is that a good and necessary measure as to whether people would actually want to walk somewhere looks like so:
I would like to use this to assert that: For 99% of modern-day American cities that are not currently pedestrian-friendly, there is no reasonable change that will ever make them so.
The problem is that, once you build a city to be car-friendly in the modern American style, with 3-4+ lane arterial surface roads and expressways everywhere and all businesses having massive parking lots that are virtually never full, the structure of your city is fundamentally unwalkable. You can toss in some sidewalks and buses, but you'll never create a landscape where people actually want to walk places. Not that literally nobody will ever walk anywhere, but where people who have money and status and can afford to keep cars will actively choose to walk and take busses to places instead of driving.
Here's a link to a Google Street View of a random road in a random medium-small city in America. It's actually fairly urban compared to the surrounding region, but I'm pretty sure nobody who has any alternatives chooses to walk there. And in fact, there aren't any pedestrians visible on that road in Street View. You can create some paths to walk on, but you can't duct-tape making walking dignified and respectable onto a region where it isn't already.
IMO, the majority of attempts to make walkable neighborhoods in non-walkable regions are not particularly useful. Usually, they're in residential areas, and you can maybe make that one neighborhood walkable, and create one little walkable urban square with some restaurants, coffee shops, light retail, a bar or two, etc. But you're not going to be able to create an area where a successful person can access everything they want to be able to do regularly with walking and transit, because they can't get anywhere but that one little urban square easily. Not saying that they aren't pleasant or that people living there don't like them, but they're never going to lead to a region or society where people choose not to have cars.
There are walking cities in the US. They are dense and thus, very expensive. Plus they tend to be in more temperate areas, making them more expensive (because of the nice weather).
Not everyone can/wants to live that way.
Why do you think you're in the position to change people? Some people like having a house in the suburbs... Have you every actually been to the US? It's kind of a big place...
I'll be honest; In the city I live in, there has been many attempts to make it more walk-able. They have all been heavy handed (locals complaining have been labeled deplorable adjacent), expensive, made traffic much worse, and have had little impact on anyone actually walking or taking mass transit.
I know a lot of amateur urban planners will never acknowledge this, but a car is the most pleasant, efficient way to get anywhere more than a few blocks away. You're not going to get 99% of people out their cars unless you actively make driving unfeasible.
A car is the most pleasant, efficient way to get anywhere more than a few blocks away if everything is designed around the assumption of everyone going everywhere with a car, such as surrounding everything with huge parking lots and stroads. Otherwise it can be a lot easier to take a train or metro a couple stops than worry about where to park.
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