As others have hinted, the grid and the wide streets shouldn't be equated or necessarily tied together. They're not the same thing and they pose entirely different problems. There are other cities with similar sized grids (Melbourne, for example) that manage to make them vibrant and human scaled.
I personally like the grid and think that it can work just fine. Case in point, Barcelona, which has a fairly rigid, square grid but feels dense, charming and vibrant. We're hundreds of years from this, but I think it'd be a nice goal:
