If we all adopted NJB’s mindset we’d just have our grandkids asking why WE didn’t do something.

For the most part, we win cities and towns, not countries (and especially not big countries like USA, Canada, and Mexico) and certainly not continents. It’s way easier to hear about national news than local news, and even moreso local news that isn’t from your city. Urbanist communities often portray stagnancy, but that’s often not the case, for better and worse. Houston still sucks but it’s better than it used to be. Philadelphia is still one of the better US cities for being carless but for a variety of reasons (shitty Democratic mayoral nomination that proves we need to end first past the post, crime related decline in public transit ridership) it is likely to get worse (and to be clear, Houston and Philadelphia are both relatively low-income cities. They do not have the money to make the big transformation Paris did, and that’s in spite of Philly literally being designed to be like Paris) Neither of these facts should have the response of “give up.”