I think you are making an actively counterproductive conflation between "banning random crap" and the automobile. I think they only happened together because of luck and timing.

Zoning became a thing during the height of the greatest generation's political relevance[1]. Pretty much everything that generation did was use government authority and planning as a cudgel. It's understandable that they would make this error considering that when they were young they saw central authority save the world. But they banned a hell of a lot of things that didn't need banning and they had the government meddle in all sorts of things that would've naturally turned out fine. This worked initially, but the problem is that democratic-ish government always leans toward stabilization and status quos and existing interests and whatnot. They are always re-active and never pro-active because it literally cannot be any-active until after the public cares so much as to vote based on it (whereas a dictator or whatever is substantially more free to take speculative action).

Now, here we are generations later with a substantially different society, different economic situations, different problems, the institutions those people created have run the usual course of expansion and co-option over time, etc, etc, and it's clear that what they built is acting as a force that tries to keep society stuck doing things that are no longer appropriate. What was fine to have the government regulate in favor of when there were half as many people, twice as much opportunity and everyone shared mostly the same values and desires no longer works.

Doing more of the same, having government intervene and micro manage cars, use zoning and other rules to encourage "the right kind" of development (which is exactly what they were trying to do back when they adopted zoning) or transportation or whatever won't work because the entire premise that we can do it this way and get good overall results is flawed. The whole approach we are trying to use does not work except for nearby local maximums and on short timelines. We need to get the government out of managing land use, out of managing transportation, or at least as out of these things as it possibly can be, and let the chips fall where they may. Developers will build slummy SROs, people will sit in traffic, but eventually it will all work itself out and reach equilibrium. But the longer we dam up demand behind regulation the higher the pressure the leaks we are forced to chase are.

[1] Dare I say it came about partly a reaction to the fact that they had to start sharing society with the quality of adults that resulted from their "quantity has a quality all it's own" approach toward producing children.