The US is huge, and we could build anything we want. The problem is that we don't see what we have given up by not living closer together. The dream of car culture is that we as individuals can live in a huge area, with vast potential for interaction. But the truth of what we have built is that we are cut off from one another. The "square" that I pass through every morning is a massive intersection of two suburban highways. Behind our tinted windows, we wait in long lines for out turn signal. We drive to the gym and fight for that close up parking space so we won't have to walk. Why? Because the exterior environment we have built is horrific. This is not the life I want to live. I reject the idea that we can't live in nicer places. Americans learn the wrong lesson from visiting Europe. They think that a place has to be hundreds of years old to be livable. But we can build anything we want. Politics need to get out in front and not drag us back. Moneyed interests need to take a chance. Because when given a choice, people will choose a walkable, livable world.

> the exterior environment we have built is horrific

So true. Growing up in one of the most sprawled cities in America I had no sense for how ugly and disgusting our city was to pedestrians and why that might matter. Then I lived in Washington DC where walking almost anywhere was a pleasant experience. Now I hate the sprawl and what we've given up.

> The problem is that we don't see what we have given up by not living closer together.

Oh, I see it. I see "giving up" crowded, noisy urban areas while walking in a crowd that will make most people feel claustrophobic. I see "giving up" fast, hurried lifestyles with dirty air and people.

I like having room to breathe. I like being able to look around for a half-mile and see a few houses. I like those long drives to get places. I like not having to wait in line with 20 other people to get a bagel. I like being able to open my window in the morning and not hearing someone else's shitty conversations.

Get off the high horse. Some of us like it out here.

I think you are conflating New York with livable places. Which is understandable; New York is virtually the only walkable place in the US. But the same design principles work on any scale. Tiny villages of 20 people can be made walkable. I am certainly not suggesting that you be forced to live close to other people. But I would like to have the option. The other half of that is that since we all live a half-mile from all our neighbors, we don't know how to behave with consideration for each other. Without a culture of reciprocal consideration, there are bound to be conflicts. It is not obvious how we get from here to there.

DC is another example of a very walkable city in the US. I imagine there are others among the older east coast cities as well.

>Which is understandable; New York is virtually the only walkable place in the US.

Oh come one! That's not even close to being true. I live on the west side of Los Angeles, and it's very walkable here. (I believe in those ratings sites that rate walkability from 0 to 100 Santa Monica is something like a 98, just like NYC.) I used to live in Atlanta, and even there certain parts were very walkable at the time (thinking Little 5 Points, for example). San Francisco is totally walkable. Chicago, too. I'd bet most large cities in the US are walkable. Boston was when I lived there.

>New York is virtually the only walkable place in the US

Anything that holds New York City--by which one presumably means parts of Manhattan and maybe hipster areas of Brooklyn--as a minimal bar would seem to be a rather demanding standard. Very few cities in the world have that kind of density.

>Tiny villages of 20 people can be made walkable.

At some level, this is true. I suppose by some definition, the center of my rural/exurban town is walkable. There are sidewalks, the town green/library/town hall, schools, church, some number of houses, etc. Quite pleasant. But there isn't so much as a restaurant or coffeehouse or store, so while quite pleasant, it probably doesn't fall under what the typical urbanphile would call walkable.

I live in South Beach, and while we still have a car, we only drive it a couple times per week. The gold standard is being able to walk to the grocery. If you can do that, you can walk to a lot of other things as well.

Can you make a living where you're living? If so, that's awesome. Farmers obviously do that; fishermen often live in small fishing villages. Lumberjacks can live in the woods just fine. The problem is when people move to the country but still work in the city, and have to endure the traffic getting around every day.

> The dream of car culture is that we as individuals can live in a huge area, with vast potential for interaction. But the truth of what we have built is that we are cut off from one another.

No, the dream of car culture is that regular people can afford to live in their own detached house on a nice-sized plot of land. Which is what we have.

You can build dense cities in the US all you want, but there will always be a sizable portion of the population that says "I can pay $X to live in a small apartment in the city or a big house with a yard in the suburbs. Hmm..." It's an obvious choice for many people.

Regular people can afford a detached house in America, for some definitions of regular. I used to be part of the working poor, and having a car did not make me feel free, it was a constant stress. I went through a series of old clunkers, and the threat of it dying was a real threat to my continued livelihood. Millions of Americans live that way today. Car culture is self-propagating; it excludes other options via the built environment. The more convenient we make it for rich people to drive faster, the more deadly we make it for those who cannot reach that bottom rung.

> No, the dream of car culture is that regular people can afford to live in their own detached house on a nice-sized plot of land.

Implicit in that dream is a reasonable (<1 hr) commute, which is increasingly out of reach.

It's really not in general outside of a relatively small number of in-vogue cities. Yes, there are places that have bad commutes (that don't even necessarily involve driving into or out of a city core) but it's actually the exception in the US generally.

Well the fact that many people willingly choose to have commutes that long kinda implies that the "one hour rule" isn't hard and fast.

And as another poster pointed out, those massive commutes apply to cities like LA, NY, and SF. Outside of those bubbles the dream of suburban living and short commutes is alive and well. Mine is 10 minutes.

Regular people are only able to afford their suburban lifestyle because the US has massively subsidized car ownership.

>You can build dense cities in the US all you want

No you can't. Dense cities have been outlawed by misguided zoning codes and traffic engineering standards.

Outlawed? I think that requires a citation.

Euclidian use-based zoning has been the law of essentially every city in the US beginning about a hundred years ago until the rise of form-based codes like the SmartCode mandates that uses be separated: housing into subdivisions, retail into strip centers & shopping malls, and offices into office parks. This means that you have to drive pretty much anywhere. So if you look at the gross density, just the space required for larger streets, collectors, arterials, and expressways guarantees a substantially less compact city. This is exacerbated by the large setbacks required by those ordinances.

This was celebrated by the architects; Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City celebrated the ideal of every home sitting on an acre of land. Contrast that with the Tuscan town of Pienza, Italy, which sits on a bit over 11 acres of land and which contains over 2,000 residents. Just looking at the numbers, Americans would think it must be some horrible slum. But it's such a fabulous place that it attracts close to a million visitors a year, if I recall correctly. It would be completely illegal to build Pienza in countless American towns and cities, and on many counts. In reality, Pienza would probably violate close to 90% of the conditions in a conventional Euclidian code.

Regulated out of existence.

Apartments aren't the only dense, urban/suburban housing. Sensibly-scaled suburbs and urban neighborhoods that maintain mixed use zoning and the right density to allow walking for many or most errands/shopping and are still close enough to business centers that they're a reasonable public transit trip away at worst are a thing. Often the houses are close together, if not attached, they have no front yard as we know it (garage empties directly onto street, if there is a garage), narrow mixed car/pedestrian streets on a grid leading to larger arteries, and very small back yards. See e.g. Tokyo.

Start modifying those things—single-use zone residential areas, require minimum yard sizes (rather than, say, maximum) and setbacks from roads, pretty soon you're back to requiring cars, necessarily, because everything's too far away to walk. Which means more and wider roads. Which pushes everything farther apart.

Now you need useless "green space" to separate these wider, faster, busier roads from places where people are. Pushes everything farther apart, more driving, more cars. Parking lots that could each hold an entire 20,000-population old European city start popping up, maybe even by law, because everyone's driving and they need places to park. That pushes everything farther apart. Those parking lots and the big-box stores the service are hideous and dirty. More big buffers so the nearby neighborhoods don't turn into low-home-value ghettos.

The edge of the city is now several times farther from the center than before, and those in the center have to travel several times as long to reach the country. Public transit is now guaranteed to be awful for most of the city because there's insufficient density to make it work. As a "bonus" on top of all the wasted time and lower quality of life that stuff's causing and despite all the added greenery (mostly space to make up for being too far from parks and real human-oriented public green spaces, like lawns/yards, and gigantic grass buffers for ugly, noisy, dangerous roads and parking lots) the whole thing's far less green, in an environmental sense.

Do all that, then make all the urban schools terrible so middle class families with kids (can afford two+ cars, can't afford private school) can't (responsibly) choose to live there, and you've just invented most American cities.

As someone with a family who'd much prefer to live in the former environment, I don't feel like the suburbs and car culture are something we chose. They're the only realistic option, in most of the US—not because it must be that way, but because that's how it happens to be here. And yes, to preempt the usual retort (not to imply that you'd necessarily dredge it up, xienze, just in general) of course we could move overseas or to one of the handful of areas in the US where there are both jobs and nice (for our definition of nice) areas to live, but that's far from the only factor in choosing one's home. Doesn't mean it isn't frustrating to have such limited housing/lifestyle options.

The tricky thing is you can't have both. Once you build an American-style 'burb on the edge of a city, it gets much harder to expand past that with traditional urban neighborhoods. Ring the city with American suburbs and that's all you're gonna get afterward. It's like a barrier. No such thing as free lunch, and all that. Seems like city development options are either nearby-rural+decent-urban, or distant-rural+car-only-suburbs+awful-urban.

> Because when given a choice, people will choose a walkable, livable world.

Try an inductive proof. Assume that is true, see if characteristics under those circumstances match real world observations.

So, wards of the state on welfare were ordered by the state to move to the unwanted burbs which they hated and wished they could live packed together in giant ultra dense urban projects. There are no slums or poor/bad neighborhoods in cities because cities being more desirable than burbs means slums and slum dwellers are all pushed into the burbs. Starving college students and recent grads live in the burbs because they're poor and McMansions are less desirable, then if or as they get higher incomes and have kids, they move into downtown because thats nicer. All economic development in the city is via private investment because everybody wants to live there, whereas all burb development is taxpayer funded. The suburbs are full of burned out abandoned buildings and empty lots whereas continuous construction and redevelopment fills the cities. Crime rates are extremely low in cities because the less well adjusted members of society are all pushed economically into the burbs, which are overflowing with violent crime, resulting in more poverty in an anti-virtuous cycle. The cities, being more desirable, have the best public schools and the burbs, being less desirable, have 50% dropout rates and massive discipline problems.

It would make an interesting alternative history, but seems to have no relationship with reality. Therefore I think that's probably proven false.

There are lots of assumptions about complex interactions here. I'd say this is more speculation/thought experiment realm than an inductive proof. Not that I disagree with the sentiment in your post per se, just whether or not it actually proves anything.

Driving is nice there, but I think you've taken it too far. Why are there no sidewalks in the suburbs? People actively campaign their local government to stop them from building sidewalks along their street.

Sometimes we visit relatives in Atlanta. The mall is literally across the street from where they live. The only legal way to get there is by car. You couldn't even walk to the next crosswalk. It's a mile or two down, and then back up to the mall, but as there is no sidewalk, the police will stop you and ask you why you are walking. Crazy.

I agree that America has in the past de-emphasized safe pedestrian paths way too much in favor of car culture (the South in particular is pretty bad... Atlanta's not great, but I don't think their walking-unfriendliness compares to Houston or Dallas). I think the culture is changing somewhat though. I think there's a much greater desire for pedestrian friendliness than there used to be.

Of course, any demand for improvements will always be the usual mix of NIMBY, people who think almost any government spending is useless, people who don't like change of any sort, people who fear sidewalks will bring in "undesirables", or people who don't seem to understand what an easement is.

It really depends on the neighborhood culture, though. Personally around here (Tampa Florida) I think I've seen more concerns along the lines of "why can't my child safely walk to school". The statistics probably help shed light on the problem too... Florida cities in general has very high pedestrian fatality rates (due to the issue of being a traditional retirement area + poor pedestrian considerations in road design).

Exactly this, there is no reason you can't have something that's good for both cars and people with some effort, but so much of the US is just a giant middle finger to pedestrians.

I live in a fairly walkable area of the suburbs. I routinely walk to the grocery store, hardware store, restaurants, etc. And yet, the infrastructure kind of sucks. The most direct paths are missing sidewalks in a couple of places. The main road only has a sidewalk on one side for most of it. Many of the intersections have crosswalks on only one, two, or three sides. There are a couple of businesses I almost never visit simply because getting there requires crossing three crosswalks of the same intersection, then doing it again on the way back. And it's a dangerous intersection to cross which requires great care, because people routinely blow through red lights to turn right on red. Naturally, there is zero police enforcement of this.

It even goes beyond a lack of infrastructure and sometimes involves intentional barriers. I used to take a shortcut through the neighborhood next door, which gave me some variety and bypassed one of the bits of missing sidewalk. Then they put up a fence and I can't go that way anymore.

So many places in this country are within a reasonable walking distance of things, but make it unnecessarily difficult to take advantage of that fact. Get rid of pointless fences, put sidewalks and crosswalks everywhere, and you'd improve things significantly.

There are empty parts of Italy too - it's not like the whole country's the same density as Florence. The point (and it's an inherently subjective one) is how much nicer it is to live in Florence than in Atlanta.

It's not that you've give up the (unscarce) land, it's that you've given up the ability to walk through town on foot.

I'm Italian, I LOVE Florence and I upvoted you. Indeed, nothing was given up to build that interchange. If you want to build a new Florence in the US, you won't be room-bound. OTOH, one of the factor of Florence's charm is its history, and one cannot build several centuries of history out of a blueprint.

Yeah. It's a fascinating comparison, but it's being presented as a clearly problematic tradeoff, but it's not clear why.

The unspoken conceit of the argument is that all land is equally valuable. Which...maybe so! But if you believe that, I'd love to chat with you about doing a land deal...

Edit: Plus if you look at the comments at the link, there's some pretty serious criticism of the basic accuracy too...

still very many countries have incredible amounts of land going unused, usually owned by the state. with technology we no longer need to live on top of each other and should be free to choose to or to not too.

cities are not inexpensive places to live and in some areas they aren't the safest either. still it should always be choice. we as a world are far from running out of space or arable lands

Visitors in the US can't help to notice just how much emphasis was put on cars when designing cities (e.g. LA). I wonder if that design has paid off, given that today's technology can be used to significantly lower city traffic.

A lot of that emphasis only dates from the mud 20th century, with the unholy trinity of urban renewal, the interstate highway system, and tearing out commuter rail/interurban/streetcar lines.

> Drive from Kansas City to Denver sometime, it's a mind-numbing exercise in endurance.

I just had terrible flashbacks from doing that drive multiple times when I moved from the east coast to Denver (and then back!).