I have recently moved from Maine to California where I am living car free, and there are big differences between what I would wish for in one place vs the other, however, looking at it from the 50,000 ft level, the one big issue that I have with both places is that the infrastructure is designed to be car-centric. There is pretty decent public transit here in San Jose, and they do allow you to take your bike on board the trains, and buses have bike racks. However, there seems to be a prohibition on level grade crossings of the commuter train tracks (Caltrain). This makes the Caltrain line like a great wall for cyclists with very few roads which cross the tracks, and those mostly being major highways. Similarly there are freeways all over with few crossing points which make those appear as major barriers to local transportation. In my mind, highways are for transporting traffic between urban areas, not within. That said -
1) I would eliminate all freeways within city limits - have them skirt the edges of the town, with one or two exits to get into/out of the city but use the highway system as a network to get between cities, allowing the cities themselves to become much more friendly to bicycles and pedestrians.
2) Eliminate the subsidies that we have for personal automobile travel everything from foreign policy which is designed to assure our oil supply, to use of general tax revenue to pay for roads, to the lack of charging for the consequences of burning fossil fuels in our healthcare and quality of life. If the public feels obligated to subsidize transportation, then it should go towards public transportation.
3) Eliminate on street parking. On street parking makes driving more hazardous by reducing the sight lines, it forces us to design and build wider streets which makes communities less walkable, further, the cost of roadway construction is huge, and using our streets as parking lots is a large subsidy for motor traffic. With no on street parking, overall lane widths can be much less since the 'door zone' does not need to be accommodated.
4) Treat driving as a privilege, and take that privilege away from those drivers who have repeatedly proven that they are incapable of driving in a safe and courteous manner.
Note, I put down 4 replies when asked for 3. I assume that this is OK since driving 35 in a 25mph zone seems to be considered normal.....