I think you hit the nail on the head about being cenetered around the car. Cities are built at "car-scale" where every store has a massive parking lot (usually the size of 5-6 soccer pitches) directly infront of the building. It's usually outright hostile to pedestrians. Unfortunately this is a byproduct of our cities being built in the age of the Automobile and not in 1000AD like Oslo.

Unfortunately the only way to fix it would be to have city ordinances which specify parking maximum and maximum offset from the street for a building.