In city A, I walk from my apartment to the corner store

In city B, there's no corner stores in my subdivision. There's a gas station 5 miles away, about half a mile within the subdivision, but mostly on a major road or highway.

Both trips are "economic activity," but one is extremely inefficient. What should be a painless transaction is full of friction and is detrimental to other users of the major road.

City B often has significantly higher infrastructure costs[0] than City A, while generating fewer tax receipts[1]. This is only possible because City A is picking up the bill for City B; after all if you’re consuming more and paying less, someone else has to be picking up the difference. Those extra trips are generating sales tax and gas tax, yes, but usually not enough to cover the cost of the road.

Sprawl and the suburbs aren’t the generators of wealth and prosperity as you imply, but rather the thing we’ve decided to spend our wealth and prosperity on. You in fact have cause and effect backwards: it’s not that sprawl created enough economic activity to happen for a middle class to form, but rather enough economic activity existed elsewhere in order for the middle class to be able to live in suburban sprawl.

0 - https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-publ...

1 - https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/11/11/poor-neighbor...

> And you pay less per month than city A.

That's a consequence of us basically not building anything like city A for the last several decades.

How many years to we have to keep listening to the "stop living your ugly human lives" rhetoric before we realize that the "save the trees" activists caused insane amounts of pollution and death through uncontrolled wildfires, the "anti-nuke" activists directly caused global warming, and the idea of an individual carbon footprint was a creation of oil companies to distract from systemic solutions to systemic problems?

You solve problems of scale at scale. If people want something en masse, you figure out how to make that thing efficient. If people want something that is currently bad, figure out how to make it good. The more energy we can consume sustainably per capita, the better. Now make that energy carbon-free, at the system level.

If you want people to pack into cities like sardines, make it actually better, quieter, cleaner, and cheaper, even for people with kids and dogs and hobbies and kayaks. My years lived in various parts of supposedly good cities have been noisier, dirtier, tinier, slower (it takes up to two hours to go a few miles by any mode of transportation -- that's a lot of wasted fuel) and more expensive than elsewhere.

You don't tell people to lower their energy, you build desirable technologies that use less energy automatically, and most importantly, raise the energy consumption level that is sustainable by building more carbon-free power ASAP.

Yes. One good step would be to allow density everywhere so more people who want to live in dense environments can afford to do so. After all, there's more demand for walkable places than there are walkable places: https://cityobservatory.org/the-myth-of-revealed-preference-...

> make it actually better, quieter, cleaner, and cheaper

Trying over here. My local government is not very amenable to this, unfortunately.

> it takes up to two hours to go a few miles by any mode of transportation

In a city that actually cares about efficiently moving people seriously, that'd be absurdly slow. It takes far less time than that to bike a few miles. Yes, most American cities don't have the infrastructure for that. Again: trying.

But all that aside:

> You don't tell people to lower their energy, you build desirable technologies that use less energy automatically, and most importantly, raise the energy consumption level that is sustainable by building more carbon-free power ASAP.

This is an important part of the solution, yes, but time is not on our side here. I think it's foolish to think that we can reduce our emissions as much as we need to while maintaining our lifestyles exactly as they are. Maybe if we'd taken the problem seriously decades ago that would have been the case, but now it's going to involve at least some level of inconvenience.

An example: it takes a long time for all the cars on the road to turn over. Even if we assume that electric cars will become massively more popular and available in the next decade, and even if we assume that 100% of the electricity to power those comes from green energy, we still wouldn't be on track to halve emissions from passenger vehicles by 2030, because a significant percentage on the vehicles on the road would still be gas powered. Some element of this is going to have to involve less driving. And that's just one source of emissions.

I'm hoping the present climate disasters are at least beginning to change people's minds.

You're misguided. I appreciate what you're saying, but simply put, you're incorrect.

The video, and its channel, as well as its original source, are all fascinating and a highly recommended watch regardless. And they should put some of your fears at ease...

More money for roads? If the population increases but is pushed to the periphery, requiring new roads to support them, aren't we just digging ourselves in deeper? How does that pay for the existing roads?

I can't really speak to the existence of the middle class but I'll just leave this here: "An astonishing fact: 92 percent of Japanese [like many countries including the US] consider themselves middle-class, according to a labor ministry report published in 2019. That seems to clash with another fact: that nearly 40 percent of Japan’s work force is employed on a part-time or temporary basis, earning less and more vulnerable to layoffs than regular company employees."

Anyway, this is interesting: https://resources.realestate.co.jp/rent/what-is-the-average-... A 1K/1DK (1 bedroom) apartment in the Central Six wards of Tokyo averages 106,000Y per month. The other 17 wards average 72,000Y. A 1K/1DK apartment in Saitama (https://resources.realestate.co.jp/rent/what-is-the-average-...) is 49,000Y. That's ~30-45 min by car or 40 min to 1hr by train (according to Google); i.e. kinda sprawly.

I can't find a median wage for Japan, but the average seems to be about 300,000Y per month, meaning that apartment in the Central Six is out of reach, the other wards would be doable, and outside Tokyo proper would be very doable.

In the US, real estate is the dominant store of wealth for a plurality of Americans, which is why we see such fierce opposition to development. Dense accumulations of people affords great economic opportunities which attract more people, but people need somewhere to live, and if the supply of housing is held far below the demand, prices rise and push out people who can't afford said prices. So people who can't afford sufficient housing within commuting range of economic opportunities within their abilities can either A) forgo the benefits of metropolitan living, B) search the fringes of the metropolitan area for places they can afford/are allowed to build, or C) become homeless.

It would be great if we could just nationally eradicate the regulations, ordinances, zoning codes, etc that cities and towns use to prevent development, but I don't think the 10th amendment allows for that kind of law. And without more housing, there will be sprawl.

[0] https://www.rethinktokyo.com/2018/06/06/depreciate-limited-l...

[0] https://youtu.be/TaU1UH_3B5k [1] https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/