How do we measure if cities are more or less car oriented?

I appreciate Market Urbanism trying to bring some additional rigor to “are there any cities that are becoming less car oriented?” I can’t help but to think there needs to be some adjustments for income and the cost of cars.

As cars became less expensive and incomes increased, we may see a change in those who are car free out of an economic reality, while there could be a different change in how many people are car free by choice.

Of course, the real measure of car orientation may not be ownership metrics, but instead something like vehicle-miles traveled per capita (or even time in vehicles per capita, if we need to bring traffic into the analysis). That’s hard to gather most places, so maybe we’d be better off using data on trips by modality (walking, biking, public transit, cars).

Anecdotally, it seems to me like the last 20 years or so have seen many cities reduce public and street-based parking visibly, especially in the CBD, but an increase of parking built alongside new housing stock. But I’d still like to see someone do a rigorous treatment of this question across multiple different data sets.