I don't know where you live, but if you can cross town in 12 minutes in a car, you don't have a problem. But if you live in a city with chronic gridlock, decoupling from cars begins to make a lot of sense.
Every city is different. I live in DC. Our arterial roads are jammed. The prospect for building significant new road capacity into downtown is approximately zero, and there would be nowhere to park if we did. The city is rapidly gentrifying, largely because those older, close-in neighborhoods start to look attractive to people whose alternative is to spend two to four hours a day in their cars.
The truth is, there are great neighborhoods all over the metro area. It is easy to minimize commutes if you open your eyes. (The schools pose a problem, but leave that for another day. Voucher the schools, and gentrification would become a tidal wave.) It is misleading to look at metro-wide statistics on car use; one really has to drill down to neighborhoods. People in the 'burbs are mostly stuck in their cars, unless they can make it to a convenient metro stop. People in the central city core, however, have much more abundant options.
I continue to be astonished at how many suburbanites cannot connect the dots. The bike lobby does not expect commuters in western Fairfax County to get out of their cars. But it would be nice if the people gridlocked on I-66 twice a day would stop to realize that everyone on Capitol Hill or Takoma Park or Bethesda or West Hyattsville who walks or bikes is one less car jamming the roads, and one more available parking space downtown.
The best way to relive traffic congestion here isn't to build another lane on I-66 or I-270 or I-395 (which isn't going to happen anyhow). The best way is to unclog the congestion at the front end of the pipe by getting people in the close-in neighborhoods to use alternative forms of transit. Twelve percent of the people in DC walk to work, and other four percent bike. Bike commuting has increased 445% since 1990, which reflects investment in bike lanes and, where possible, off-road trails. But that's area-wide. The figures are much higher for the close-in areas.
I live in the 2nd largest city in Michigan, and yes we do have gridlock. You can still drive from one end to the other in less than 12 minutes if you know what you are doing because our highway system here goes through the middle of the city.
And yes our mayor is a nutty lib that is trying to shove bike lanes everywhere, and have been trying to make it as hard as possible for people to drive and park in the center of town so that we all get on buses and get on a two-wheeler. They even had a plan to turn a two lane road into ONE lane where both directions of traffic drove at each other, leaving room on both sides for bike lanes!
And no we aren’t “decoupling from cars”, because we live in Michigan where water freezes and falls from the sky for half of the year, and we have better things to do than take an hour to get to a destination.
If you have little to do with your day, then get on your bike. Some of us have way too many responsibilities to waste on a 10-speed.