The thing that gets me is that urbanists are really into this mindset that so called “car dependency” is solely built upon a foundation that the robber barons of the early 1900’s came up with to sell oil and automobiles, in between kicking puppies and bludgeoning orphans to death. The reality is that the reason why infrastructure is so car centric is because cars simply have numerous advantages compared to all other forms of transportation, and as such the people simply like them, but urbanists don’t want to admit this simple fact because it is easier to sell their ideas to the public (and themselves) under the auspices of some grand conspiracy. For how often these types complain about “conspiracy theories”, their ideology (be it urbanism or leftism more broadly) is just as built upon conspiracy theories as whatever some whackjob on /pol/ is ranting about being the fault of da Jooz.
There isn't even a conspiracy theory, most of their history that they claim is simply wrong. Streetcars, growth of suburbia, induced demand, most of that is made of false data or exaggerated.
Oil in particular stems from the demand for indoor lighting, which is what the first big product oil companies came up with. If you look at the history of these things, fossil fuels existed for fuel. In the 18th century, petroleum-based fuels existed but weren't really economical. Unless you had piped-in coal gas, you had to resort to oil lamps, and coal oil was too smoky to use indoors. You know what did burn clean and was relatively cheap? Whale oil.
In the mid-1800s, geologist Abraham Gesner came up with a new process to distill oil shale and coal into a new product called kerosene (initially trademarked) which burned clean. Others came up with similar processes, and in the process had a new industry that was cheaper and less dangerous than whaling, which fell into decline (and saved whales from extinction). There is some controversy that the other leading oil, camphene, was
forced off the market by taxes (thanks to a new government agency to help pay for the Civil War, the IRS) but camphene was a product of the logging industry, which wasn't a long-term solution either.
The benefits of a car are pretty obvious compared to horses (no shitting, no full-time groomer required, no "will suddenly freak out if it sees a snake or something that looks like a snake", etc.) and it's not like they believe any other widely-accepted technology (television, radio, Internet, etc.) was a result of some grand conspiracy, so why are cars so hard to understand?
country so ugly" being reappropriated to "why are all the people from the 
