The whole strong cities movement, which has many laudable goals, I think fails in the same way that many public health initiatives do. The proponents always assume they know more than everyone else, and therefore are better than everyone else.

Strong town supporters just have this smugness that they are right and everyone else is wrong, and its a big turn off from the movement. The problem is they don't have to convince me, they have to convince the 57% of Americans (from the title), many of whom are not in the online echo chamber about strong towns,

It's not that strong towns is wrong, its that their approach is "your whole life is wrong and you're just too stupid to know it", when it should be "we should develop better places for all of us to live".

Note that this is more a problem with internet commentators vs the actual source material. It's obviously (to me at least) right.

But on the other hand, I'm Canadian, I grew up in a car-dependent suburb. I lived downtown in my city in a walkable neighbourhood, and now I live in the car-dependent suburbs again with my family. I've been to Europe too, the walkable neighbourhoods there are great! But I also like my suburban house. Changing hearts and minds on this will take more than smugness though.