Really depends on where you live, but unfortunately true for much of the U.S. and Canada. Not true in the biggest North American city (NYC), though. Also not true in much of Europe.
Europe generally resisted the authoritarianism of the car, and lashed back against it fairly strongly. In the US, many cities were literally gutted in favor of making sure cars could move fast. Then we started designing with the assumption that anyone worth caring about had a car.
I wonder to what extent some of that is a fortunate combination of circumstances. Many European countries were quite positive on highways in the mid 20th century. But city centers mostly escaped having American-style freeways bulldozed through them, I think out of urban-preservation reasons more than anti-car or pro-transit sentiment. Same reason NYC ended up finally pushing back on Robert Moses's plans. So the freeways mostly stopped at the edges.
At the height of the uncontrolled car-ification of Copenhagen in the '70s the place was totally crawling with automobiles to the exclusion of other modalities, though. It's pretty weird to look at some photos from that era, with car traffic taking up almost the whole width of narrow streets in the city center, pedestrians confined to narrow ledge-like sidewalks, and bikes either absent or trying their luck in traffic. Now most of those streets have been either pedestrianized, turned into mixed-traffic, low-speed "living streets", or had the roads narrowed to one lane to make room for bike lanes and/or wider sidewalks.
"Really depends on where you live, but unfortunately true for much of the U.S. and Canada"
What is unfortunate about this? Americans on average are so rich that most of them can afford a car that allows them to both live where they want and still get to the job they want even if those two places are tens of miles apart and there is no public transportation.
You're kind of missing what was said. We're talking about the automobile being necessary to function in the majority of the US and Canada. If you don't have a car (whether you can't afford one, can't drive, or choose not to own one), you're going to struggle to get to work, get to the grocery store, visit people, etc. Even in densely populated areas where cycling is a better option, the infrastructure is heavily oriented towards cars, and cycling can be quite dangerous.
Yeah, it's great if you have a car. What's not great is that you need to have a car. And yet it doesn't have to be that way, as other countries have shown us.
I grew up in American suburbia and have lived most of my life there, and I generally found it unfortunate— one reason I left. I don't like driving, but in most of the U.S. it is a practical necessity, whether you like driving or not. It's not that I lived where I wanted to, but that there was simply no way to choose a place to live that wouldn't result in needing a car, because everything was too sprawling. If people who liked driving could choose to drive, and I could choose not to drive, that would be much less objectionable. (There are a few places where I could make such a choice, like Manhattan, but not many.)
So I had to commute daily by car, which sucked. I had to drive to get to work, drive to buy groceries, even drive to go to a coffee shop. Besides just being unpleasant, I also had to spend a bunch of money maintaining a car, which is a fairly expensive proposition, between purchase price, insurance, gas, maintenance & repairs, etc.
Now I walk and/or take the metro, and it's much less stressful. I never have to call a tow truck, either. (Contrary to the local norm, I don't really bike, but I could also do that if I chose.)