People still live car independently but oftentimes its not by choice. Commuting on the bus in LA I would see a lot of old men and women and immigrants who would come onto the bus with groceries or children in tow. That sort of lifestyle is already possible, but we only see people with no other choice in transportation riding the bus for the most part. If we want to convince people to leave the car behind and walk and take the bus to the grocery store, we have to improve the convenience argument of the bus vs. the car. For instance, my trip to costco is an hour on the bus or 20 minutes by car, due to having to transfer to another bus line and the bus being not very frequent, not to mention stuck in traffic. If the bus ran in its own lane and was a lot more frequent, travel time to costco would drop dramatically and might even beat the car commute if the car lanes are clogged with traffic and the bus is moving at full speed without stopping at red lights.

It's not even a question of implementing expensive infrastructure like boring out a subway line. The bus lines in LA at least already go everywhere, but are so slow. Buy a few more busses, hire a few more operators, increase frequency dramatically to 5 minute headways all day, paint a lane and install a curb, set the lights to flick green when the bus is coming. Just doing that alone on major bus corridors would do so much good for improving quality of life in LA and be a model for cities around the world of how to incentivize transit in an area dominated by car modal share.