I suspect this has more to do with fact that walkable areas are much more likely to be located in city centers with higher overall real estate prices than with the desirability of walkable neighborhoods.

One also has to consider that new families with young children are high on the list of demographics looking for suburban homes, and are likely to have less money, so suburban homes are cheaper by necessity.

Cul-de-sacs wouldn't be so bad if they had well-maintained pedestrian lanes that cut between them and neighborhood shops instead of big box stores.

In England at least, a poor area still has little cafés [1]. The menu is similar enough — fried breakfast etc — but it will be served on an actual plate, rather than a chopping board or slate. The choice of restaurant might be a larger pub, or a place that also/only offers take-away (McDonalds or a small Cantonese place, for example). The market probably has less promotion of organic produce, and will sell produce as well as cheap clothes and household goods.

I used to live in a poor area of London, which I think was built in the 1960s. There were cul-de-sac roads, but most of them continued with footpaths so journeys wouldn't take too long. On the main road there was a school, church, doctor's office, dentist, library, small grocery store, beer/wine shop, bakery, cheap café, pizza take-away, Chinese take-away, Indian take-away, fish and chip shop, pharmacy, newsagent, youth club and 'village' green including play equipment. The pub-with-dining had recently closed, I'm not sure if that's still the case. All of this is within 5-10 minutes walk of most people, beyond that distance and they are close to the next cluster of shops.

There wasn't a market, but there was a market selling fruit and veg in the nearest 'town', which was about 5-10 minutes by bicycle, or 10-20 by walk+bus.

[1] http://www.constructionphotography.com/Details.aspx?ID=11957... — "builder's caf" or just "caf" is a slang term for them.

Most places, the closest thing you're going to find to a little cafe is your local 7-11 or Dunkin Donuts. Or the local package store. Generally, people go to the supermarket once a week, and they stock up enough that they don't have to go to the market every single day - when I spent a few months in Germany, this was one of the differences that struck me most oddly. Art is generally... not held in great esteem.

All of these things end up being plentiful, cost-sensitive, and profitable when the space you live in supports and encourages plentiful foot traffic.

But sure, the real test would be non-walkable neighbourhoods next to city centres.

I can't believe some of the outrageous stuff this Kuntsler guy says:

>We have about, you know, 38,000 places that are not worth caring about in the United States today. When we have enough of them, we're going to have a nation that's not worth defending. And I want you to think about that when you think about those young men and women who are over in places like Iraq, spilling their blood in the sand, and ask yourself, "What is their last thought of home?" I hope it's not the curb cut between the Chuck E. Cheese and the Target store because that's not good enough for Americans to be spilling their blood for. (Applause) We need better places in this country.

Really? We have a lot worth fighting for, and it's not any physical city, nor should it be. Rather, it's the 300 million people that call this place home, your family and friends among them. It's the idea--the reality--of mankind living in freedom, of opportunity for all, of equal justice before the law, of the dignity of the individual.

>We are entering an epochal period of change in the world, and -- certainly in America -- the period that will be characterized by the end of the cheap oil era. It is going to change absolutely everything. [...] We're not going to be rescued by the hyper-car; we're not going to be rescued by alternative fuels. No amount or combination of alternative fuels is going to allow us to continue running what we're running, the way we're running it.

This guy is just plain wrong. There's no reason why plug-in electrics, and a power grid running on nuclear & renewables, can't replace our current reliance on oil and internal combustion engines.

I've lived in suburbs and in cities, and my take is that the current zeitgeist (that suburbs are evil) is way off the mark. In suburbia, I had boundless privacy and freedom in my home. In the city, I can't play my speakers loud without getting a noise complaint. In suburbia, I could hop in my car and go wherever I want whenever I want. In the city, parking is expensive and public transit is not fun. I have to take several buses, at particular bus stops, at particular times. My door to door morning commute is twice as long by bus as by car. In suburbia, I might have heard a few cars passing by at night, or the occasional loud outdoor party. In the city, I have to choose between burning alive and trying to sleep to the tune of my neighbors' loud conversation on their balcony. There's a lot of great things about the city too--I choose to live in one! Different strokes for different folks. Or even the same folks at different points in their lives.

I hate suburbia. It's isolating and bland. It's always a 10 minute car production to go fetch something quick from a 7-11 or equivalent. It encourages obesity and a lack of walking because you always have to get in a car. It encourages long commutes and rush hour hell on the highway. With a long train commute, I can read a book or do something productive with my time.

If I want to play my music loudly at 11pm, then I will get a unit that was constructed with soundproofing. If a city is hampered by inept NIMBYs that prevent new construction with soundproofing being made, then that has nothing to do with urban vs suburban.

I think you haven't experienced a proper metro system by saying public transit is a bus. Go to new york, and see how there is no 'traffic' delays in taking the subway. Where everything is avialable 24/7 and the city is alive.

My main point is that technology is now changing and I think that de-centralized mass-transit through fleets of automated cars is close at hand. And it can use the infrastructure that we already have. So building super-expensive fixed-line transit infrastructure within cities is not a good investment anymore. Even more so when you consider the turnaround time from initial planning to opening to the public is probably a decade.

2. There is already about one car per person in the US.

3. Automated car fleets would presumably have a cheaper carpooling option, where the car picks up other passengers on the way to the destination. Like UberPool today.

4. Fixed-line transit costs millions to billions of dollars per mile, and easily takes a decade from planning to completion. Building roads takes a fraction of the time and money. And the roads already exist.

Look at this image for example: http://imgur.com/gallery/v3ff7FY

Building & maintaining roads and highways does take a lot of money too. Building new roads vs building new railroad track on new land isn't that much different cost wise.

You can replace gasoline powered cars with electrics, but you can't build enough roads to handle the traffic -- there's going to have to be improvements in public transportation and smart planning to let people live closer to where they work and play.

Retrofitting cities with pub transit is expensive today, but it will be even more expensive tomorrow.

So I kind of agree with parent. Doing something today might be outdated given tomorrow's technology enabling better solutions. But that is always a risk in infrastructure investment.

So to ignore something that is pretty much a sure bet to redesign your city over 20 years, when what you are building is meant to last 50-100 years, is kind of stupid. You do what you can with all information available.

10 - 20 years is more likely for true self-driving cars that can operate completely without human control.

Highways that become automated-only will not have this problem. The cars can communicate with each other and change speed in unison. You don't even need to convert a whole highway, you can just reserve a single lane for automated cars and get most of the same benefits.

And don't say "But self driving cars will fix everything! They don't even need to park, they can drop you off at work and drive away". If the cars aren't parked, they are contributing to congestion. And since commutes aren't generally balanced, it's not like the self-driving car will leave Walnut Creek at 8am, drop you off in SF at 9am and then pick up a new passenger to head back to the East Bay - that car is going to be loitering around SF somewhere, waiting to take someone back home to the East Bay.

SF Muni carries 600,000 passengers/day. BART carries 400K (though not all to SF). Caltrain contributes another 50K. How could you possible accomodate all of these people without transit?

Like I said, building effective transit in existing cities is very expensive -- the BART system cost around $1.5B when it was built (around $20B today), but few would argue that SF would be better off without it.

You're right, traffic patterns are not balanced, so the cars returning to the hot areas for pickups will not be contributing to the traffic in the most-congested direction.

Also, SF already has BART, Caltrain, and SF Muni. I'm not familiar with the specific history here, but transit and housing are the limiting factors for where people live in the first place, so the number of commuters will expand when capacity increases. The better question is, what if SF didn't build those systems? It wouldn't be San Francisco today minus the trains, it'd be a totally different San Francisco. So you can't really take the ridership numbers from today as evidence that city couldn't cope without trains.

Also, this was all happening when self-driving cars were not around the corner. It's a different story today.

Except that in a city, all traffic contributes to congestion,there is no single "commute direction".

>Also, this was all happening when self-driving cars were not around the corner. It's a different story today.

That "corner" is decades away, meanwhile, people need to get to work today -- and you still haven't explained how self-driving cars can replace a million+ trips/day on city streets that are already at capacity during rush hour. They may be self-driving, but they still drive on roads.