Investing in improved public transportation and allocating space where it is economically practical and wherever sufficient demand can be predicted/anticipated for realistically-wide bike lanes on public roads wherever sufficient people need to travel would/could ameliorate the problems of carfree people regardless of their moral stance on the evil/negativity of sprawl.

Investment normally requires some sort of expected return. Subsidizing money losing transit lines to less dense areas with little demand for it, or reallocating resources to likely-to-be almost unused bicycling facilities to the same locations, principally to meet the desires/demands of a relative handfull of urban car-free bird watchers, smug anti-sprawl/anti-car moralists, or bicycling enthusiasts who want to meet their total mileage goals, does not seem to pass the sniff test as a good investment of public money.