Addiction is really the only explanation as to why so many people fail to grasp the severity of how saturated areas have become with driving and automotive culture. When motor-cars were first introduced, many people were concerned about the potential effects, yet those concerns have been largely abandoned as driving became normalized.

If you have experienced alcoholism or other substance addiction, you're probably familiar with the glamour effect you associated with using the substance. Smokers think the Marlboro man looks cool, or otherwise associate smoking with glamor. College students can be overheard ruminating about how 'sh*tfaced' they got at a given party. Drunken foolishness that annoy sane, sober, people appear amusing, clever, etc. to people who worship the effects of alcohol. Each addiction comes with a set of positive imagery that only appear positive to people who share the addiction.

I think if you would talk with people who live in areas where driving is either not dominant or absent altogether, they would not be as positive about heavily automotivized areas as people who have adopted and embraced living in such areas. You could find many people who would like to move to a US city to make money, and might even like living there, but they would probably not want their home area automotivized, and if they do, they're probably already suffering from automotive addiction.

But I can already anticipate people arguing that it's a logical trap to say that anyone who likes automotivism must be brainwashed by addiction. So, we should ask the question what it would feel like to not be addicted to driving. To do this, I think you have to be able to look at something you're not addicted to from the perspective of an outsider, such as, say, air travel. When I was younger, for example, I travelled by plane a lot and when I stopped, it felt like something was missing from my life and like I was deprived in some way. After a few years, I got used to it and now I would avoid flying if possible because of all the hassles, security checks, consumeristic labrynths walking around airports, etc. Those things used to seem neat, but now I realize it was a side-effect of addiction, which basically boils down to addiction to a certain self-image of yourself as part of a 'jet-set' class, or something to that effect.

I think driving addiction is also a self-image addiction for many people. People get into the image of themselves sitting cooley behind the wheel with their sunglasses on. They enjoy the way they look entering or exiting an automobile. They like to look at their car from different angles after parking it, etc. etc. It is part fetishism, part addiction.