Edge City and Suburban Nation

So I happened to be at the Border in the Domain today, and I read Suburban Nation for a bit. It's a polemic, published 2000, against the suburbs and all the evils the suburbs have wrought. Like Jane Jacobs (to whose book this has been compared) the authors bemoan a lack of diversity in suburban zones, claiming this detracts from diversity. As Jacobs attacked single-use housing projects and business-only downtown buildings, so Duany et al attack the single use suburban division of housing subdivision, bigbox shopping mall, and office park. A particularly damning graphic shows a "bubble map," an entire suburb divided lazily into six zoning sections. As a whole it is a well-written and cogent critique, if not as thorough or insightful as The Death and Birth of Great American Cities.
My problem is this: suburban sprawl is depicted entirely as a result of social trends, decrees from on high, and the bad choices of urban planners themselves. The FHA and interstate highways take the rap for cities spreading out, and the aforementioned zoning codes are blamed for making suburban life itself nightmarish. But the people who choose to live there are never brought up. They are portrayed as the passive victims of a badly designed system, who are powerless to change it. But we know from Edge City that this isn't true. Garreau stresses again and again that Edge City is the result of choices Americans made. Suburbia may be nightmarish, but people embrace that nightmare. People like driving just to get groceries, or circling for the best place to park at the mall. Sometimes malls are better than downtowns and big box stores better than Main Street. I myself was reading their book in an Edge City mall (mixed use, yes, but I only use the shopping part) in a big box book store. The point is that planners can plan better, make useful open space instead of water easements, make many, narrow streets, etc. but we can't make people walk and not drive, or play outside, or live in dense housing. More fundamentally, as long as Americans will move beyond the edge of the current city just to get a house or a bigger house, there will always be sprawl.
Jane Jacobs says in the preface to her book that she likes walking cities more than driving cities, and her book is less useful if you prefer the latter: Duany et al need a similar caveat.