"I find this fear of city denizens exists almost exclusively in people in rural areas"
I saw Deliverance, a documentary about life in rural America, and have the same worries about that part of the country. I don't want to squeal like a pig.
It's impossible to design a community at any reasonable cost where a large fraction of people are expected to drive cars unless you make all other forms of transportation impossible or impractical.
The space needed for most people at an office or business to park free is greater than the total space the buildings will occupy. The buildings need to be father apart to limit traffic density. The roads need to be wider and run faster and therefore be louder and more dangerous than pedestrians will like. the walking distances increase and increase to accommodate the buildings farther apart and the empty space needed to control traffic. Transit routes and stops cannot get close enough to destinations in those conditions and transit times explode. Denser centers surrounded by less dense land uses become impossible when parking is necessary; density has to even out and that makes efficient transit routing impossible while hub-and-spoke systems drastically increase wait times.
Transit stinks in America and it's not the result of bad transit planning or lack of effort to build more or bad maintenance and operation practices. (Though we do also have those problems.)
On the other hand, a transit oriented community will have land values to high anywhere you want to go that ordinary people will never be able to afford to pay to park even with massive parking subsidies. The transit community makes widespread driving as impossible as individual car-oriented design makes transit.
In the USA, personal motorcars are the rule everywhere because it's the law. The (second) Roosevelt administration propagated rules to the banks and communities that required car-oriented development everywhere in the nation. Then traffic engineering and urban planning and zoning 'professions' emerged to implement and force those rules on every property developer. It became an iron triangle: drivers won't pay for parking, city planning councils won't upset drivers, engineers force pure car-oriented development on both to keep the peace, and transit users don't have political power by definition or they'd have used it to get themselves cars already. Today you can't build in America unless you can prove that even on the busiest hour of the busiest day, there will be extra free parking for every person that might want to use or visit the property. You can't build unless you can prove that the roads are big enough to accommodate every single person who might come in a car or pay to expand the road.
The result is that quality transit, outside areas built up before Roosevelt, is impossible and cannot develop.
This is the essential reason that San Francisco and New York are so expensive. Car oriented space is awful to live in. [0] There is a limited amount of legacy walkable urban space grandfathered in America. They aren't making any more of it. Millions more people want to live there than ever can.
If it were allowed to redevelop Peninsula or East Bay cities at low urban density like SF (75 people per hectare), then developers would do it and it would be possible to rent a spacious apartment for US$1500. At medium urban density like Tokyo (150) or high urban density like famously liveable Paris (300), you'd only need one or two cities to change the rules to relieve the regional problem. You'd have to build a transit system and accept the lack of free parking, of course.
The reason most of the world doesn't have the same problem is that the American system demands extreme Soviet-style centralized command-and-control dictation of land development. Parking minimum requirements are the most powerful rules making things bad [1] but floor-area-ratio maxima, separate use zoning, wide feeder streets and traffic engineering, and 'green area' buffers hurt, too. More free-market oriented development patterns prevail in less regimented societies without such dense thickets of rules and car-oriented development cannot gain a foothold against free organic urbanity.
It's about 10-15k homicides v 40-50k car crash deaths per annum in the past decade.