This is an extremely simplistic view of the situation. In reality, many of the largest cities are almost entirely unusable without a car while many small cities (in the extreme case, most college towns) have excellent walkability and public transit because of their dense layout. I have personally experienced these. This is not a problem of urbanization to large cities, but of overall urban design.

You assume those that live in small cities work there as well. A large number of people living rural areas or small cities drive to big cities to work. There are very few "small" cities on the coasts (<10,000 people) so perhaps that is what you are referring to by small cities for which this works.

If a large number of people all have to go in the same direction at a similar time, isn't that what public transit is for?

Cars are more useful when people need to go to random places at indeterminate times.

> If a large number of people all have to go in the same direction at a similar time, isn't that what public transit is for?

Yes, and in a sane nation, this would mean that people could live in small cities, take transit to work, then take transit back. But there are many, many places where this is not the case.

I lived on the outskirts of Dallas; it took ages for the rail system to approach usefulness, and individual cities along the route could opt out of having stations (and therefore, opt out of paying for them.)

They're all going to the same place, but all coming from different areas. Arranging for them to get to a common point to even board the public transportation you're offering would require them to take a car, since density makes and sheer time makes it prohibitively expensive. If buses did stop in convenient locations for the widely dispersed people in small towns, it'd take hours before they'd even approach their destination after having spent half the day just picking up people from all over.

The only way to fix the problem is to encourage people to move out of the suburbs and small towns and live in denser regions.

I don't even understand the need of physically being at the same place, for information workers at least (until remote surgery and hairdressing catch up). Working remotely is good for the environment!

I like cars, but I'd never want to use one for commuting. Random places at indiscriminate times — this is what cars are for indeed.

I recently wrote a lengthy counterpoint to that:

https://likewise.am/2017/05/19/in-response-to-the-cult-of-re...

I am a consultant in a small team of professionals, right. However, for me, "learning on the job" comes mostly from solving problems, not talking to people. Which is why I steered to consultant / R&D positions. And I had no problems in acquiring said knowledge (in trading systems) on my own.

If you are an independent and highly skilled professional who knows the business, you can definitely work remotely. Good for you!

But that's a far cry from, "Why do information workers need company offices at all, ever?"

For me, the need for commuting is such a great nuisance that I worked the hardest I can to get rid of it.

I agree that it might be a transitional phase, or something necessary to acquire the skills needed, but it needs to be rid of at the first sight of an opportunity.

While the normality of office work is responsible for a lot of oppressive commutes, it doesn't follow that commutes must necessarily be long or that this in itself negates the benefit of working in the office.

For what it's worth, I have zero tolerance for long commutes, and always lived close to my jobs. It took considerable expense, and relied on life situation flexibility I no longer have, but my patience for driving is maybe ten minutes.

>> If a large number of people all have to go in the same direction at a similar time, isn't that what public transit is for?

Public transit only works when people live in high density areas. It makes no sense to have a transit stop where very few people live in walking distance of it. People with cars don't really want to drive to the bus stop and then catch a ride downtown, though some do. But most companies are spread out just as much as peoples homes, so business isn't even high enough density to warrant public transit in most cases.

Build public transit, then build high density residences, then profit. This simple formula is applied extremely well in Japan.

Japanese zoning restrictions also contribute heavily here. It's not just that higher-density residences are available, it's that you can put them nearly anywhere. According to http://urbankchoze.blogspot.ca/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html, not only are there vastly fewer zones (12, nationally), Japanese zoning laws specify only the "maximum use", instead of exclusive uses. So anything zoned for commercial use, for example, could also have neighborhood stores and residential.

Yeah, there are some even more extreme cases of office parks where it's illegal to walk on the roadside, illegal to walk near the road, illegal to walk on the road, illegal to walk on the surrounding property. Basically places where it's illegal not to be on at least a bicycle, and more likely in a car.

One thing I miss about my college days is the commute. I lived about 300 feet from the math department. Sometimes I would refuel my car about as often as I would change its oil. (I still needed a car as I lived an hour from 'the city'.)

That's a self-inflicted problem though. Nobody put a gun to America's head and forced us to make our cities sprawl out. We collectively decided to do it that way because we thought it was better.

And for a few things it IS better. But there are a whole lotta costs, too, with the top 3 being being actual financial cost, grinding on the faces of the poor, and making us fat.

Not a gun but nuclear missiles: https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/why-sprawl-was-cause...

It was done for a very rational reason: making country more immune to a nuclear attack, especially the retaliation to its own nuclear attack (i.e. a nuclear attack that is coming in convenient time of day and week because you chose the time). It works perfectly to that purpose: it is whole lot better to keep all relevant population in separate houses with basements, with little combustible material around, than in multimillion cities with no way out of them.

If U.S. launched its missiles while all these people just came home from jobs say at 11pm ET/8pm PT, and people in the Soviet Union were on the way or at their factory jobs during Moscow morning on Siberia mid-day, it would be a slaughter for the Soviet Union and an easy win for the U.S.

Have a source for any of that?

Sounds like a completely made-up justification after the fact.

Surely someone would have raised the point that the soviet union could just launch it's missiles in the middle of the work day.

Also, Moscow is tremendously sprawled out.

Ah, I just did Google on it, and lo and behold:

"... While it is true that various factors contributed to phenomenal growth of the suburbs between 1945 and 1960, historians have thus far paid little attention to policymakers' fears of atomic attack as a significant factor in population dispersal. ..."

The Reduction of Urban Vulnerability: Revisiting 1950s American Suburbanization as Civil Defence K. Tobin, Pages 1-32 | Published online: 06 Sep 2010

I work in tech/finance. I am old enough to remember that, after the 9/11 attack in 2001, banks were required to set up their datacenter/DR sites at least 50 miles away from their main offices to avoid a complete wipe-out in case of nuke attack.

I'm going to recount this in person someday and get the "he's a nutter" response.

To me the simpler theory is that the US has been quite wealthy since World War 2 and has lots and lots of space.

Which doesn't mean that building sprawling subdivisions is a great idea, but space is a pretty easy thing to sell.

Those things enable sprawl, but they don't force it.

Moscow is also tremendously dense. It's sprawled out because it has so many people in it, but the vast majority of those people are packed into apartment buildings. The same goes for all other major urban centers. A typical Russian (or rather, ex-Soviet) cityscape looks like this, and can go for miles:

http://images.e-flux-systems.com/2014_04_Bric-III-Yugo-Zapad...

Now imagine an airburst nuclear explosion over this, just low enough to maximize the blast wave.

There's a reason why Soviets heavily invested into protecting the populace from such attacks - the entire Moscow Metro system doubles as a nuclear bomb shelter, complete with blast doors.

Federal Highways in the US are designed to increase national security. The best example is certain bridges are in certain places so that their destruction would cut off the easy path for mobilized enemy armor. They're designed to be easily blown up on purpose.

You got any credible sources on that? It sounds like one of those urban legends that people like to repeat. The Eisenhower interstate system was built in a post-nuclear world, and in a post-nuclear world it's hard to imagine there ever being a mainland invasion of the United States. The bombs would be flying before that, and there wouldn't be anything left worth invading (on any side in the conflict). Being able to utterly destroy the other nation and its military forces within minutes by launching thousands of ICBMs is a much more credible plan of war than blowing up some random bridges on your own turf, and indeed that is the logical course of action that we did go down.

I don't know about the bridges specifically, but that the interstate system had an explicit national security purpose is not just well-documented, it's literally right there in the name of the law that created it: National Interstate and Defense Highways Act.

My issue with the bridge thing is that it's easy enough to blow up bridges, especially as you're retreating from the territory they're in, regardless of their location or construction. It could cost billions of extra construction dollars to unnecessarily site a bridge in anything but its obvious ideal location (e.g. the shortest possible span).

My understanding was that it was created to mobilize the military and transport resources across the continent, not to make it easy to cut off enemy routes.

But likewise, I have no references either.

The military purpose of the interstate is moving friendly troops around (logistics).

Now this is a lot more true, and the military value of having good transportation within the boundaries of your own land has been known since at least Roman times, and likely much farther back.

It doesn't explain the bridge blowing up thing, however.

> The best example is certain bridges are in certain places

And you cannot utter their names or locations because?

I had never considered this and something else about it makes perfect sense to me.

It also explains the "white flight" of the time. What we now call the "inner city" was allowed to remain black and brown with the expectation that the country would be alright if they were incinerated while the more -valuable- people had been relocated to the suburbs.

The Soviets would be able to get their retaliatory body count while eliminating people that the US didn't really value in the first place.

There was a serious attempt to do that in the 1950s, although it didn't have great impact. It is, however, why IBM corporate headquarters moved from Manhattan to Armonk, NY.

'easy win' = the people in the area die more slowly rather than in the initial blast? Apart from the now-radioactive work centers (that are the wealth of your country), take out your city centers and industry, and you also take out your transportation network. Hello, famine.

Seems like Japan didn't get that memo having been bombed twice.

Ah, that's a good point. Still, it seems the design pattern has outlasted the attitude that created it.

It's probably not even a decision so much as a probable consequence of having a much smaller population and opening of new frontiers to settle over the course of the country's history, ending up today with about half the population spread across about the same total area, and not uniformly. What has been our decision is to respect individual and local preferences (NIMBYism) and to ignore certain infrastructure improvements.

Given that sprawl is not a new phenomenon but obesity is I don't see how you can claim this is responsible for making us fat.

Sprawl IS a new phenomenon, though. We didn't see the kind of suburban sprawl that we see today until after WW2, when cars became THE way to get around. It became more and more dominant and entrenched as the interstate highway system developed.

Remember, we're talking about relative density within a metro area, not how close each metro area is to the others. If you look at cities that were more or less fully developed prior to WW2, like Boston, you find that they're more compact, as opposed to, say, LA or Phoenix.

That said, I don't think it's the only thing making us fat. But I do think it's one contributing factor.

True, but even in Boston they can't get public transportation and infrastructure right. Boston is almost certainly one of the most vibrant economic hubs in America and one of the most compact cities, but the subway absolutely sucks, is completely outdated, and can't adequately service proximal cities like Somerville. The city is also desperately in need of further tunneling and infrastructure expansion to service the Cambridge / Somerville area as well as the Sea Port but I can't see that ever happening. It's taken us over five years to fix a single small bridge with two lanes in each direction...

When I read about proposed public transit projects in Boston that were never built, most of them had actually been _court mandated_ by the Big Dig mitigation lawsuits, but they still didn't get completed. Very mysterious.

To be fair about the 'single small bridge', it seems like smaller projects suffer proportionately larger delays due to being considered low priority, ridiculously lax work scheduling, etc. Although the financial scales are completely different, it takes my city (Toronto) approximately the same time to build a subway extension as to renovate the bike trail that runs near my house.

This single small bridge, the Longfellow Bridge, is a crucial artery connecting Boston with its surrounding cities and towns across the river. I should have emphasized in my initial comment that it is a high priority project.

The patterns of the LA basins development was set by the Pacific Electric Railway, in the 20's and 30's - the freeways if you look almost all parallel former PE lines.

How can we better quantify the costs? That's where, I think, many people have a blind spot.

Don't have an authoritative answer for you, but I thought this chart was pretty great; it shows the profit/loss for the local government (so, taxes vs spending) for different neighborhoods for a city in Lousiana: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...

You don't think people in Europe live in suburban or rural areas?

The difference is networks of buses and trains that the countries and cities invested in over decades.

America went in another direction, and looks no closer to changing it's mind.

Most of Europe doesn't live in what Americans would call suburbs, but villages. They're dense where people live and have train and bus service conveniently, because in postwar Europe there were a lot fewer cars. They also zone such that there's a dense living area surrounded by farmland - when that farmland becomes all housing thenyoull have American style suburbs, but few in Europe want that because it's harder to get where you want to go.

You'd better update your knowledge.

Suburbs now spread for miles around towns and even former villages, for ten or twenty miles around major cities.

And small towns and villages lost their railways and stations 40 to 80 years ago.

Not in a lot of Germany, or Austria from what I saw driving the countryside for a week

This is pretty much the norm in orher places such as China and Japan.

New developments havebeen getting more sprawl in China though, as cars have become more popular.

Post-war Europe didn't have cars and cities are surrounded by farmland? Nope.

Even in San Francisco, widely known for its public transit system, not having a car some of the time sucks. It's much more convenient to get around by car. That's why Uber and Zipcar are ultra popular here.

Is San Fran really known for its public transport system?

New York, sure. Everyone's heard of their subway.

The first time I'd ever heard of BART was when I visited briefly, and in doing so I learnt 2 things:

1) BART is pretty bad: noisy and a small network 2) Talking to people during my short stay made it pretty clear San-Fran and the bay area was considered 99% car territory, and traffic/congestion/commuting around SF was a significant problem commensurate with that fact.

Edit: understand this is a genuine question asked as a foreigner who has only formed an impression from short visits.

The first time I'd ever heard of BART was when one of it's officers killed Oscar Grant.

I couldn't see myself ever wanting to take that mode of transportation.

Those rural towns only exist because they are subsidized by everyone else through taxes. Close the loss-making post offices and roads servicing those towns and everyone would be forced to move. Problem solved.

Taken for a ride - https://youtu.be/p-I8GDklsN4

It can be changed by collective action lke rezoning and legislating incentives. People can move.