"We are a walkable city, increasingly home to bicycles," Nutter declared. "We want to preserve our urban form. We do not want the automobile and its design requirements to dominate the landscape."
That's the issue explained very succinctly. If developments are designed around the requirements of automobiles then you cannot maintain a walkable and desirable city. That isn't to say that cars should be completely exclued or ignored, just that they cannot, as they have been for so long, be the primary consideration.