I understand the problem fully. The problem of solving it is a whole different kettle of fish.
How do you break the cycle? In the USA it feels insurmountable. Nothing is close enough to be walkable, so you must have cars to do just about anything. But that makes everything more spread out, which leads to even less walkable environments and so on.
I live in a hilly area, for example. Being built around car infrastructure means that steep grades don't matter all that much because you won't be sweating your ass off pedalling up a 10% incline; you're in a 3 ton hermetically sealed air conditioned box with a 6.0L V8 chugging diesel to get your fat ass up the hill.
I'm sure that if we were building our environment around bike infrastructure and public transit and actually had to think about things like this, the entire road network and neighborhood layout would be drastically different. Without just starting over from the beginning, how do you fix that?
