A lot of progressive leaning regions are actively trying to slowly legislate cars out of existence, see the camera system in the UK that's being sttacked by the so called "blade runners".
Fact is cars are real freedom, and the next time the government declares a pandemic and determines that public transit is too dangerous, a car is your only movement option for going outside of bike range.
the gubbermint is coming to steal our cars so we have to live in their bicycle dystopia 
.
This irrational hatred of livable cities is fascinating to me. These people are so used to their government never helping the people that they assume anything a government does is automatically bad, and livable cities must be part of some nefarious government plot to...destroy cars and make people reliant on the government or something? As if paying rego for a car and having easily identifiable license plates doesn't make you easy to track in your movements. As if people aren't forced to comply by their government already? I've never understood this aspect of conspiratorially minded people. They're always worried about some potential "future government oppression" slippery slope if we ever do anything positive for society. Why are they so obsessed with society being run into the ground to prevent "oppression"? Insert Parenti quote here.
I honestly think that Trashfuture had the best theory of why the anglos are so irrational about this. If you are below the age of 60 and live in Britain, you've gotten used to the neoliberalism permeating government to such an extent that any time the government says it's going to do something to help you, they just inevitably make it 10 times worse. Like seriously, you can probably count on one hand the amount of times that the UK government has tried to help people and actually delivered a positive outcome. A bunch of municipalities across the UK (counties or w/e they're called) also used the supposed "15-minute city" moniker to justify their austerity, in a sort of advanced type of greenwashing.
So i reckon it's primarily because all these people have ever known is an unresponsive, unhelpful piece of shit government, where no matter the party in power, nothing ever gets better. Also enduring a brutal 1½ decade of austerity that basically removed the most public service from the people who needed it, and people rightfully are deathly afraid of anything that promises to change things for the better. They simply have no more trust in the instutions of the state, and just wants the government to fuck off, since it's perceived as something that destroys anything it touches.
Don’t forget that anti-walkable cities so-called support is likely astroturfed. These “people” voicing their concerns get an awful lot of media coverage
I think also there is the deserved feeling that the UK government is incapable of successfully accomplishing a task
If I was an evil government with unlimited resources who wanted to track everyone's movements, I'd use the already existing systems of license plates and registration, as well as those cameras toll roads and traffic light cameras use to see license plates and identify who's driving them, and just simply put more cameras up and use them to see everyone's last location. 15 minute walkable cities would be much harder, I'd have to have so many agents manually check every building or park they could possibly be in. Even within a 15 minute walking distance, it's still a lot.
Or just get the data from the GPS enabled device everybody willingly carries in their pockets at all times that either of the two massive cellular corporations will gladly sell.
I've seen more than a handful of people driving around these days without license plates actually attached & visible on the backs of their vehicles.
Does that not get them pulled over by the cops? I guess the cops would use some other method to determine whether someone should be pulled over over there.
What I typically see is they attach fake temporary plates to avoid scrutiny. They’re easy to fake, especially in the US where they can fake a state other than the one they live in and thus the cops are less likely to recognize them as fake.
I see. Over here the usual thing to do is to steal someone else's plates and put them on your car.
The government doing stuff is bad and always leads to 1984 vuvuzela, unless the stuff the government is doing is building a new interstate in which case that’s maximum 1776 freedom.