Sprawl is what happens when developers buy up land around a city and develop it with the idea that they can market a subdivision or job-site as 'just a short drive from the city.' At first, there's not much traffic to go back and forth to that area from other parts of the city, but as the developments grow and snowball, the traffic gets worse and worse until you end up with multilane roads, highways, expressways, bypasses, toll roads, etc.
From a financial perspective of investors living elsewhere, the sprawl development is a good thing, because all the road building and development renders concrete sales, contracts to build on the concrete, new business opportunities in the space built, etc. But from the perspective of people who moved out to a rural area to get away from bustle, it's a nightmare. Everyone wants the bustle of business and traffic to happen far from their own backyard.
I think a certain elite could have the lifestyle you're talking about without it hurting the environment too much, but there are too many people for everyone to live like that without it having negative impacts.
I just don't think that efforts to reform automotive culture are all doomed because of what people are concerned about outside the business/economics of auto-production, maintenance, insurance, etc. etc. These are big businesses that deal in a lot of money and they have a lot of people convinced that they can't live well with less than the excesses that they've normalized.
If everyone denies responsibility because they want to shift the burden to others, then nothing ever changes for the better. Everyone just keeps passing the buck, so to speak.