I like how you casually take a dump on being environmentally friendly. Yes, city dwellers do have less of an impact on the environment. Like all animals we like as much space as possible. But unlike other animals we don’t need it to survive.
If more of us fit in cities, there would be more space that could be left for wild animals. Maybe that equilibrium will help the planet flourish for longer. That’s actually a good thing, even if your condescending comment won’t acknowledge it.
- rewilding
- fast and expansive rail network
- right to roam
Get these things right and we can lower our environmental footprint whilst maintaining - or even improving - quality of life for the average individual.
Heck, trains don't even have to be fast for much of it: Simply making passenger trains a priority would be a huge improvement - right now, passenger trains have to wait for freight trains.
If the settlements are very small then the number of people driving to the nearest station will be low anyway.
I’m optimistic for services that are halfway between bus and taxi.
My county is rural but not that rural and has a density of 12 per km². It's a 2 hour drive to a small city.
As an example, the Midwest has roughly the same population as France, and the TGV network overlaid kind of lines up with major population centers. https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/04/04/european-urban...
Some people who constantly advocate for dense urban often would also rather small towns just didn't exist. Dense urban for everybody! They imagine utopia to be a hand full of dense cities, surrounded by wilderness untouched by human habitation, with high speed train tracks crisscrossing that wilderness to get people from one dense city to another. No roads, no cars, no suburbs, no towns or rural villages. Just pack everyone into these urban islands. Things like bus service, and "last mile" are not needed in this utopia.
Three narrowish three-story houses replacing one McMansion is still a tripling of density on a single lot. Take this Dutch village for instance: https://www.melbtravel.com/edam-netherlands-village-preserve...
(I have planted potatoes though)
Consequently, it's not something we consciously think about. We just assume everyone has seen the night sky. I certainly never thought seeing the stars and the milky way would mean so much for an 11 year old. She wanted to stay outside so she could stare at them all night. But the mosquitoes, bless them, put a stop to those plans.
Only one side in this debate wants to make laws that encode their particular housing preferences in law. It’s the side that wants to prevent new construction, not the side that wants to allow people to make free choices in an open market.
So we optimize to put people close to their jobs so they get lots of leisure time with their family.
If they don't want that they can always live farther out. That way everyone is happy.
The political situation and the relative expectations of the local communities are sufficiently different so as to cause European style urban planning to fail here. You have to engineer to the human and political constraints as well.
US towns and cities are drunk on debt and bailouts and that is a competitive constraint on growth.
As someone who grew up in such an environment, 90+% of my peers spent the entirety of our adolescence doing as much as possible to get away from suburban hells like that. And you know what's ironic? I have way more access to actual nature now that I live in a city close to some national parks than I did when I was younger and was trapped in endless suburbia.