Most people shop for housing where there job and family are; international migration is a big deal. Japan is very hard to immigrate to if you lack Japanese ancestry.
>Continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity
>Then you need to change the laws.
Land use policy is made by a small, elite, politically active subset of incumbents. People looking for a place to live, and choosing the best of the available options for their circumstances, are not to blame for the abysmal nature of the available options. This is the whole problem. Market demand has little to no influence on what can be built. It's inappropriate to look down on people for moving to suburbia. The scorn is rightly placed with activists and politicians for crippling our cities so badly that suburbia manages to be better.
>Here in the DC area, it's extremely common.
The data say 32 minutes [0]. This is high compared to the national 25, but no, 1-2 hours is not the norm even there.
[0] https://wtop.com/traffic/2017/04/dc-area-has-2nd-longest-ave...
Try traveling to Europe or Japan sometime. They have dense cities with nice homes, great public schools, and a clean and safe environment. Japan in particular has basically zero crime. Cities in Europe are walkable and bikeable, and it's commonplace to have residential units on top of commercial space so that people can easily walk to a nearby cafe or restaurant or grocery store. You see this in NYC too to an extent.
>I hate sprawl and fast-casual architecture as much as the next guy, but it is the only thing that can grow at scale under our economic and political reality.
Continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. Sprawl doesn't scale, that's the whole problem: you're just going to get worse commute times, more traffic congestion, etc. It isn't going to help, it's going to hurt.
>So of course we are going to see a large and growing segment of the population in the only kind of housing it's both legal and profitable to build.
Then you need to change the laws.
>Commuting 1-2 hours each way is something transit riders do; for drivers it's very rare.
Here in the DC area, it's extremely common.