You are so right. Just imagine having a physical community that wasn't completely gutted for the sake of transporting cars through non-communal spaces to other non-communal spaces. In America, we can hardly even imagine this, and if you try, you will experience something close to a mob backlash.
IT IS THE CARS. All of our communal space has been gutted to make more room for cars, which do the exact opposite of community building, as they abstract the human away from the world and you're left with an extremely dangerous, noisy, and angry public space.