Sometimes it feels like the people on this site have only lived in SFBA/LA/NYC and nowhere else in the United States. Cars/suburbia work pretty well in most places
I live in a small town but in a very spread out relatively densely populated country. Still with the closing of the old bakery and little grocery store due to the people who ran it retiring I have to go to a nearby city or supermarkets on the outskirts for stuff.
I'm not saying this out of spite or annoyance because of that. It's not that far. Hell i'm even moving soon. But I do see it for what it was. A good thing to have around. It made for local economic activity, it had locals meeting up and having talks there, not driving all the way out if they were missing something minor and very local events were advertised there. There's no reason, 0, nada to do spatial planning to purposefully have people driving more and longer. It's not good for the environment, it's not good for the people, economically, what have you. If you love driving you can do so without a reason. And no by advocating for having spatial planning that allows for local small stores people aren't pushing for everyone to live in a big city either.
At least for the time being.
Suburbia doesn't mean "have to have a car", it is just many like having cars.
This sort of speaks to the prior poster, stating that many here are from big cities. Suburbia isn't low-density. It's only low-density compared to 'downtown'.
Try living in actual, real rural areas. Where I live, houses are a mile apart! Yet bizarrely, we have fire stations, police, high speed gigabit internet, and more.
And it isn't super expensive either.
I acknowledge that it is, indeed, a gradient. But lots of points on that gradient are huge negatives to the people living there.
I've lived in lots of cities where minimum lot size was an acre, which is 200x200ft. Public transit all around, grocery stores all in walking distance (few blocks at most), with loads of corner stores, etc.
I think that as I mentioned in another comment, zoning laws are important. Too much? Too little? It becomes broken.
But for example, large-scale developers typically can't build here, without dedicating some space to park, to retail, without making an actual community out of the place.
And people in most rural areas I've lived, typically aren't bad off for it.
This may be a cultural thing, or a historical thing such as, how cities were build, and therefore, how they are now.
edit:
An added thought here.... when I visited the US, I noticed that a lot of grocery stores were often larger. I've seen some where it's literally a few minutes to walk end to end, when inside.
Maybe this is the difference?
Most of the grocery stores here are smaller. Maybe we just have smaller grocery stores, but more of them?
The article is calling for the exact type of mixed zoning you're familiar with - occassional shops mixed in with the houses. It's not like that, but it should be.