My ideal solution to this problem is to advocate that some hopping entrepreneur build a model of an alternative way of living that would actually appeal to most people.
A democratic prospect for the future would allow for the emergence of car-free communities and a true recovery of the great outdoors. To the extent that we literally vacate sprawl - a process already underway - we can begin to re-concentrate our population. People that sprawled over ten square mile can live in one square mile and walk to all the facilities and nodes that they used to have to drive to. Such a process of citification or villagizing (actually a combination of both) will enable the reclamation of presently toxic land and its gradual return to agricultural and park-like uses.
This pattern of development does not eliminate the prospect of individual dwellings of or roads (aka rights of way). It creates new options for both residence and transportation.
When we start lavishing the same fund of imagination on the macro world we live in as we lavish on creating apps and gadgets, we will move a few healthy steps away from the world of acquiescence to sprawl and oil toward a sustainable world where people recover a past that is slipping away.
