In fact, if you don't have to commute during rush hour, living in remote suburbs is the best of both worlds: you're far enough that the prices are low/rent is cheap, but the city is close enough to casually drive there off peak. Sure, if you had to endure 1 hour commutes one way every day, that would be terrible, but since you don't drive at the same time as everyone else, you won't have to experience that.

Assuming someone can or wants to drive, and owns a car, is a massive assumption in today's world.

Many people who live in urban areas neither own a car nor want to drive.

Also, suburbs are boring as hell. There's literally nothing to do outside except stare at parked cars and locked houses. Taking a walk for more than an hour is impossible because there is nowhere to go to the bathroom, unless you want to do your business in someone's bush. There are no drinking fountains, and if you get hungry on your long walk, you're screwed. It can get (seriously) depressing, compared to cities, where most of the stuff you pass by on the street is generally open to walk into and explore, and food/water/restrooms are readily available.

> Many people who live in urban areas neither own a car nor want to drive.

By "many", I understand you mean "few". I live in Seattle, which has one of the better transit networks in the country, certainly better than average. Yet, 85% of households own cars. In the suburbs, that percentage is even higher.

> Also, suburbs are boring as hell. There's literally nothing to do outside except stare at parked cars and locked houses.

That hasn't been my experience. There's lots of things to do in suburbs, you just need to drive there. The rest of your comment is about some difficulties of doing walks in suburbs, which are quite foreign to me -- for one thing, I'm quite sure that almost everywhere in Seattle metro area, you're not more than 1 hour walk from a convenience store. Given how millions of people love going hiking in places even further from convenience stores, gas stations and water fountains, I don't see this as such a huge problem. The rest of your complaints are simply matter of your preferences: I for one thing couldn't care less about presence of places to walk into and explore. I'm not a tourist in my own town, I need to get places and get things done, and idly walking around the business districts is not one of my hobbies.

> By "many", I understand you mean "few". I live in Seattle, which has one of the better transit networks in the country, certainly better than average. Yet, 85% of households own cars. In the suburbs, that percentage is even higher.

This may be a US thing. I've lived in about 10 countries now (but not the US), and I hardly knew anyone who owned a car in any of them.

The US has order of 5 registered vehicles [edit: previously said “cars”] for every 4 adults.

That can be hard for Europeans to wrap their head around. (I live here and am a car enthusiast and it’s hard for me to wrap my head around.)

I googled it up and 209M adults vs 183M passenger vehicles.

In the USA registration wildly varies by state and the actual stat is a quarter billion "vehicles" but in my state every non-rowboat boat is a registered vehicle (although essentially unenforced for small sailboats and inflatables) and every boat trailer is yet another vehicle and every RV is a registered license plated vehicle and every trailer and etc. My parents never owned more than one car although they had five "registered vehicles" at one point. Also any commercial vehicle that drives on public roads, in my state this includes SOME farm tractors and other farm equipment. Needless to say every motorcycle and moped is a registered vehicle, and in my municipality, resident bicycles are technically required to be registered although never enforced.

Nationwide there's about 70M "things that move and pay registration tax and are not cars" that are registered as vehicles. Very near one per adult.

As a check on the figures, note there's only 105M "housing units" in the USA, so when you see strange figures reported about 300M to 400M vehicles its obvious that the average house does not have four cars parked in front of it, and that figure includes scrapped cars in junkyards and railroad cars and minecarts and things like that.

I don't understand why everyone here talks like the only options are cities or featureless suburbs.

Don't you have towns and villages in the US?

> Don't you have towns and villages in the US?

Are you European by chance? We have these things but they tend to be very spread out due to our wealth of land, especially so as you move further west. Further a lot of them have basically slowly turned into boring suburban sprawl.

Active urban space, sleepy suburbs, and country-living are pretty much your options in most of the US.

Have you ever been to somewhere like Half Moon Bay, near San Francisco? That's a town isn't it? I know it's a 'city' (everything seems to be a 'city' in the US) but it's town-sized. You could walk to everything there. It seems to have a bustling main street. I see lots of these little towns in the US. Carmel? Morro Bay? These are just the ones I can remember being in myself and thinking these are perfect little walkable towns.

Why drive when you can live where the action is?

Outside of a very small number of admittedly very large coastal cities, the action is in the burbs, not the city.

Metro areas that are under, perhaps, 10M people, generally have nothing to do in the legacy cities. Everything fun has been built in the burbs for half a century. NYC is fun to visit, but only 8M people live there compared to 319M not living there. 98% of the population will never participate in "new urbanism" and so forth.

You're flat-out describing an alternate reality than the one that actually exists. Go down the list of largest American cities and tell me the first one you can find that you think has more fun things to do in the suburbs than in the city proper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

Well, yeah, I think we're aggressively agreeing with each other that life is quite a bit different for 5% of the population in megacities vs 95% of the population outside those cities.

Take for example the location of the 2020 democratic national convention, Milwaukee. I know for a fact there's literally nothing to do in the city other than drive to the burbs.

Generally fun follows the people who pay for it, and anywhere there's no geographic constraint or travel time constraint, people always do the burb thing, and the fun follows them. I visit family in that area, and there's just nothing to do in the city, all the action is in the burbs.

You can have a burb 20 minute drive from Milwaukee so all the fun moves to the burbs to follow the money. You can't have a burb 20 minute drive from downtown NYC, so without the people moving to the burbs there's no fun in the burbs.