Your area was rural very recently. Obviously in rural areas people are driving, but the fact that your area developed recently means they had the luxury of hindsight and a clean slate. The fact that you can’t walk or bike to stuff was an active choice, not an unforeseen inevitability.

They could have chosen to build out developments where even people in single family homes could reach some or all of their daily destinations without vehicles.

The fact that it recently urbanized means they have even less of an excuse than other parts of the country that built car-focused infrastructure for the first time as a mid-century project that was never done before.

Your town is like the millennial who now should know better not to post funny drunk pictures on Facebook or any other social media, but back in 2008 nobody knew what social media would become.

I.e., I fully understand and accept that undoing a bunch of 1950s-1970s infrastructure and property lines is impractical. When highways were first built through towns we didn’t know the impact back then. But we do know that now and your local planners ignored those lessons when they more recently developed your area.

Your municipality doesn’t really have an excuse. They already had the knowledge available of the negative impacts of car-centric development. They already have the case studies of the Netherlands building out car-focused suburbs in the 70s and then reversing and correcting that pattern. They just didn’t have the imagination to go look, they just figured it’s fine to build exactly like everyone else and toss up yet another big box store parking lot.

They could have done things like making sure split up farm parcels developed into neighborhoods follow a consistent grid, implement traffic calming and other measures that make walking and biking attractive, avoiding stroads by separating the use cases of streets and roads and designing accordingly, and zoning new development to make sure storefronts put parking lots in the back instead of in front where they lengthen walking distances.

There are a number of Google Maps examples of suburbs where people live less than a half a mile from grocery stores but the legal walking distance without cutting through private property or winding through non-grid subdevelopments takes multiple uncomfortable miles that include crossing multi-lane high-speed limit roads.

That makes no sense. How far did you have to drive for groceries before your area became "very suburban?" If you have to drive 20 miles for groceries, then you're not in the suburbs, you're still very rural.

In any case, if you don't like it in the suburbs, move. I'm sure there's at least one other family in the city who'd love to swap places with you. At least they would if they weren't required, likely unnecessarily, to commute to work every weekday.