It works much better in European cities. Cars are not necessary to have affordable housing that is close to offices. You "just" need denser cities, saner zoning and decent public transport. In my office for example the large majority arrives via bike or public transport. There isn't enough parking space to accomodate even half of the workers.

I live about five kilometers from the office and ride my bike. I pay about twelve Euros per square meter rent. My apartment even has a big yard, I just have to share it with the other tenants. A grocery store is right across the street. The next one is ten minutes walk away.

Live can be pretty nice if city planning isn't completely screwed up.

The grocery store they were going to build next door to me was killed because the entire walkable radius around my apartment is the ancestral land of an Indian tribe, and their descendents would rather this site remain the parking lot of a restaurant than 150+ apartments and a bunch of retail. My nearest grocery store remains 2+ miles uphill.

Mountain View looks like a small town in order to protect the habitat of a burrowing owl.

There's always some reason not to densify where people have already settled. We sprawl because it's the only thing we can get away with.

Wow, 2 miles, that is almost walking distance. If you had a tram, that would be just minutes away.

And is definitely easy biking distance. If transit isn't an option, maybe residents could lobby for bike and pedestrian infrastructure as an alternative.

When density is so low outside a city's relatively tiny core, like in most American cities, it's no surprise areas with short commute times are so expensive. Maybe if we densified our cities prices wouldn't be so out of whack.

It doesn't have to be Manhattan like densities either. Many German cities, for example, are full of 4, 5, 6 story buildings. Dense enough to support frequent transit and common enough to not have astronomical rents.

Exactly. We should be doing this, and then driving will fall away of its own accord. Not directly attacking driving before/instead of doing this.

Much of Manhattan is not that dense either. I mean, it's denser than most places, but a decent chunk of it is the exact type of thing you're describing -- five to six story buildings.

You can achieve decent density with town houses & small yards. Like Queens, London, Montreal.

How does supporting driving by subsidizing it help those people over spending the funds on, eg, public transit or denser housing in urban cores?

It sounds like it just increases their health risks and lowers the quality of their landscapes over those other options.

In principle, if you can make a 1:1 atomic swap between driving subsidies and a Manhattan-level subway system, you should do it.

In practice, I think you're likely to eliminate people's current perfectly good option just to lift public transit from abysmal to mediocre. It would depend on the proposal.

No one has a perfectly good option today. They have a pollution-choked, collision-prone, 20%-workday-wasting commute.

This is exactly it - people are so used to thousands of road deaths a year, funding unpleasant oil-supplying regimes, polluting their neighbourhoods and traffic that they don't realise they are avoidable. As mentioned before, it's a lack of imagination.

Poor exurbanites driving unreliable cars an hour or more to get to work is not remotely comparable to rich suburbanites crowing them out of employment-accessible housing.