I think they're referring to how vehicle-centric planning for cities is more common (as opposed to walking or human-powered locomotion, like biking or skating)

Ditto. But the rest of the travel we do need to do to interact with people, amenities, and services, is still worse than it should be due to poor inter-city and city-rural transit. At least here in Canada. My time in Europe showed me how bad we really have it. Even with the unavoidable foibles that happen in the best of cases/countries.