I agree that the tone of arguments of many proponents is not helpful. That obscures the fact there are relatively easy things that can be copied from the Nether

I agree that the tone of arguments of many proponents is not helpful. That obscures the fact there are relatively easy things that can be copied from the Netherlands to make a city more walkable that are not expensive. Chiefly: start making a division between "streets" and "roads", where one is just for destination traffic with shops and houses, and the other is a through way to get from one neighborhood to another with as few traffic lights as possible. People love to get rid of traffic along their house so it's easy to get buy-in from the public to convert their area to a neighborhood without through traffic, even when that means they have to navigate a few blocks to get in and out of their neighborhood. This results in more traffic pressure in the surrounding area, but that's not as bad as you think because you can remove a lot of traffic lights if there are fewer roads in and out of a neighborhood. Slowly build up to more and more of these areas. If the only cars in a neighborhood street are from people who live there then traffic intensity is low enough that no bike lanes are needed there and kids can play in the street. Finally, if all that works, you can start stringing neighborhoods together with dedicated bike lanes, away from streets with cars. Bike lanes that are not part of a road are surprisingly cheap because road wear scales with the third power of vehicle weight so those rarely need resurfacing.