Wouldn’t it have cost even more to build a bunch of Manhattans to pack everyone into? The issue is that North America has tons of space available. People aren’t going to spend the big money to build large buildings if there’s empty lots on the cheap just across the street. And so it goes that sprawl spreads across the landscape like microbial culture across a Petri dish.

And for similar reasons we don’t expect the microbes to grow into a tower at the centre.

That's a false dichotomy. Walkable cities existed for millennia before we figured out how to build Manhattans.

A millennium ago cities were overcrowded, smelly, dangerous, disease-infested slums with no plumbing or electricity. People living in the country were much better off, even if they were peasants who had to pay extortionate shares of their crop to the local lord.

And somehow even people in the countryside had no cars. I don't see your point.

They had horses, mules, donkeys, and oxen.

How many miles per day do you think they traveled using those?

The point is that now we have cars and we have lots of space to grow and people don’t want to huddle together, so we don’t. Furthermore, people like trees and fresh air and natural spaces. You won’t find any of that in dense urban areas. The best you can hope for is a couple of trees lining the sidewalks and a park here or there.

You can "not huddle together" without moving the necessities of daily live twenty miles away and only connect them with a six lane highway to were people live.

Says the guy who just complained we spend money on car infrastructure.

Newsflash: we spend money on all infrastructure, buses, rail, ports, etc.

You can ague that the proportions are wrong (and I would be inclined to agree) but come on, at least make a token attempt to act like you're arguing in good faith here rather than just saying whatever you think will promote your particular beliefs that minute.

Yeah, and all those other types of infrastructure are so much more ridiculously efficient than cars. The crazy thing though is that actually designing cities better (not just for cars) can make things far, far better for cars too, because only people who have a specific need or desire to drive are using the roads and car parks at any one time, as opposed to everybody having no other option and fighting over the limited space on the road and for car parks!

Until quite recently cities were organized such that the things people need are close by. Then the car was invented and someone had the idea that we should separate living, recreation, and working spatially and connect those locations with highways. In hindsight it turns out that this idea wasn't very good. Replacing highways with subways improves the situation a bit because subways are more efficient than highways, but real solution is to re-mix cities so that you don't have to travel 10km in five different directions each to get through your day.

Trashbin your ideology for a minute and zoom out to the big picture. You may as well complain that we have inland cities now. Productive things are always located things as far away from other productive things they need to interact with as the equilibrium between cost (time and money are fungible with each other here) of transportation and value of the interaction permits. The medieval farmer sold his surplus in the local market because it was the best deal after transportation costs. Fast forward a millennium and an industrial revolution and you get cars. Cars presented a massive drop in the time cost of traversing distance for individuals and allowed people to separate housing from working. The fact that some busybodies enshrined this in law in some places is incidental. The fundamental difference here is akin to how rails made it possible to raise animals for slaughter on marginal land far from ports. The car currently fills a similar role for the random commuter as the rail did for a rancher in Nowhereville Wyoming in 1873 and will likely continue to do so until something better comes along.

Trying to force people to live near where they work is a fools errand akin to forcing commodities production to happen near ports now that we have technology such that we don't need to do this. While there are certainly plenty of low hanging fruit to be picked (getting rid of zoning, investing in public transit infrastructure) but on a fundamental level the cat is not going back in the bag. Cities are just going to be ringed by some amount of sprawl because we have the technology to do that. You can play with regulatory policy to screw with the width of this band of sprawl but barring some black swan technological change it will always be there because there is always going to be some zone where that works. Things like self driving cars and a proliferation of electric bicycles widen that zone. Things like high energy prices contract that zone.

You're trying to fight civilization sized trends with public policy here. I'm not gonna say it won't work but on a longer than "until the next guy is in office and it's his problem" timeline the odds are long. Metaphorically speaking, you're looking at an early industrial workplace and saying "this is dangerous, these machines are gonna eat people and these carts of heavy stuff are gonna crush people, we shouldn't do this". That's not how things work. People are gonna come along and put guards on machines and invent traffic patterns to keep workers safe and life will go on. Stop focusing on miles driven or cars on the road and focus on the things that are the actual problems and figure out how to minimize those in a way that isn't a non-starter. Nobody in 1900 was going to shut down a factory that supports hundreds (or thousands) so a dozen people can be not dead and a several dozen can keep their appendages where they belong. Likewise society is not going to just accept the quality of life hit that would come with getting rid of sprawl for a benefit of similar order.

You point would be much stronger if we didn't very strictly regulate what you can build where in cities and cities still grew organically. Why do you for example need parking minimums if demand and supply could figure it out? Why can't I build higher buildings in my neighborhood even though demand is really strong? Laws create demand for cars because they shape the city to be more car friendly than it might be if left to anarchy. The positive feedback loop of car friendly laws leading to more cars leading to more demand for car friendly laws is very obvious and hard to break. The problem is that cars don't scale very well and more and more cities reach the end of what can reasonably be done with cars.

Of course cars won't go away. They have legitimate uses. They are just obscenely overused today because of the way we chose to shape the incentives.

I would appreciate it if you dropped the word "ideology" from this discussion, or at least prove why your opinion can't be legitimately called an ideology.

>You point would be much stronger if we didn't very strictly regulate what you can build where in cities and cities still grew organically.

Take a look at the developing world. There are plenty of places where zoning is minimal and can be ignored if the right palms are greased (the US was like that too at one time). They still build highways and buy cars in droves (despite the latter being a much larger fraction of people's income) though they do build more public transit as well (developing countries build a lot of everything).

>Why can't I build higher buildings in my neighborhood even though demand is really strong?

Because people with exactly the same hubris as yourself who just so happened to have been born 75yr earlier also thought they knew best.

>Laws create demand for cars because they shape the city to be more car friendly than it might be if left to anarchy. The positive feedback loop of car friendly laws leading to more cars leading to more demand for car friendly laws is very obvious and hard to break.

Yes, American sprawling suburbs are over the top but in their time they were actually what people wanted and worked quite well. Now we're reaping what we sow.

>They are just obscenely overused today because of the way we chose to shape the incentives.

I thing regulating what one can build on their own property (vs what one can emit off of their property) is a violation of property rights but that's about as far as our agreement goes here. Attempting to incentive our way out of the problem is doomed to the same failure without some fundamental change in human nature

Nope. I lived I a transit-centric city for a while. Cheap, plentiful public transit for all.

And you know what? Once people could afford a car they bought one. They didn’t need it, they wanted it.

It's almost like a car is a status symbol or something.

I lived in Seoul for a time, and still frequently visit. The public transportation there is arguably one of, if not maybe even the, best in the world. It certainly puts anything in the US to utter shame. It's one of the few cities I would gladly (instead of grudgingly) utilize the public transit system fully.

Yet all of the Seoulites I know desire a personal car and work towards acquiring one.

I live in a city who's streetplan predates the invention of the car by a millennium.

You know roads/highways predate America right?

Roads, even highways, have very little to do with car dependent city planning.

Yet I bet you would categorise my city as designed around the car