You may or may not remember, there was a time before the automobile, that mankind managed to get around.
speaking of horses..
I am only being half dramatic, half facetious.
btw, I spent 2 years in england, near ipswitch, I remember the narrow roads and walking to town (or drunk walking and/or crawling back to base). I also remember taxi's. I used to have a road atlas of england.
The only straight roads on the continent are the ones that run parallel to airplane runways.
More seriously though, I do not disagree, that different environments call for different types of solutions.
I love my gas engines and vehicles. But sooner or later, we will run out of crude, maybe not in our life, or our childrens, but soon. It is not an infinite resource.
Regardless of the popularity and/or availability (edit: of public transportation), the personal transport is also here to stay, though what it looks like and how it operates will no doubt continue to evolve.
Regarding governments and infrastructure. At some point, governments will be faced with either creating or subsidizing the infrastructure, if only for the simple fact that they will need it to move their military forces around. Like running out of crude, this may not be in our direct future, but it will happen sooner or later.