The city council in Austin, Texas recently proposed something that could seem like political Kryptonite: getting rid of parking minimums.
Those are the rules that dictate how much off-street parking developers must provide — as in, a certain number of spaces for every apartment and business.
Around the country, cities are throwing out their own parking requirements – hoping to end up with less parking, more affordable housing, better transit, and walkable neighborhoods.
I’m not sure the rural places are actively hostile to people without a car - they’re as accessible as they were in the 1800s if you don’t have a car - a lot of hoofing miles to get somewhere. It’s a lot more practical there with a car, but I see plenty of people walking and biking where I live though usually for exercise. I’d like to see more uber / lyft but I have to guess they don’t proliferate for the same reason busses don’t go out there - not enough people using them to make it cost effective. Things like Casino complexes out in the boonies with enough draw do run special busses from cities.
Suburban is actually much worse - I’ve never seen people walking in a lot of places because that would be a death wish, same with bicycles. While I personally think Suburban is kind of the worst of both worlds, for some reason a large number of people like it but that is indeed enabled by cars.I imagine a lot of suburbanites would move to the city if cars were to go away. At least if the city was affordable.
An interesting read on the topic is The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein. The TL;DR is that an absolutely gobsmacking portion of the reason that a lot of people like the suburbs is that they were made artificially cheap and financed by government-backed loans to white people, by government policy explicitly formulated to keep minority groups out.
A lot of the rural roads have been made to allow for faster driving speeds, making these roads more dangerous for pedestrians. You also have the removal of mass transit linking these communities to cities, further cutting them off.