You act like suberbia exists without infrastructure and to support the live-style you advocate nothing needs to happen, its just free.
And what I am advocating is somehow a privilege that all Americans should be granted and this privilege is a luxury.
This is the exact opposite. A society driving every time they have to buy basic items, large roads connecting to even larger connecting roads connecting to absurdly huge parking lots going into gigantic grocery store to buy basic food comes at an absurd cost.
Please actually inform yourself on the cost of those infrastructures, there is a reason most US towns are basically bankrupt. Why so many roads in the US are falling apart, because you simply can't afford it with the property taxes the city produces. The amount of infrastructure required here is a gigantic privilege and the results can be seen in places like Detroit.
However the more dense mixed use development I advocate for is actually a huge efficient. Its less pollution, produces more taxes then it consumes, less traffic and so on.
There are good data visualization that prove this beyond a reasonable doubt, check out Urban3 (they have lots of resources on YT and other places presenting these results to cites): https://www.urbanthree.com/
You are talking about city infrastructure and stuff that I'm not talking about. If you want to have a utterly completely different conversation about tearing down every single house and every single road, and do a big do-over, I guess we can do that.
But I'm just talking about how poor people can buy a tuna fish sandwich, dude.
> As I've said elsewhere, my relatives lived in the middle of nowhere, and had to travel 60 miles - an hour and a half each way - to go to the Costco to stock up on staples.
That's a very exceptional situation and not really representative of how most people live.
> You have to drive for 15 minutes to a grocery store??? Oh, misery. The world is coming to an end.
Well yes, polluting the world with inefficient land use forcing 100s of millions to drive everytime they want to buy milk is a problem.
This is specially a problem when you can only go when you don't have to work and maybe at those time there is also traffic. So you only go once a week or every 2 weeks, meaning you end up buying less perishable foods.
15min, lol, in 15min I walk to the shop, buy something and I'm back home already.
Also, simply complaining that people are how they are isn't helpful, its just a reality of the situation. You can either have an urban planning and infrastructure policy that supports what makes people lives better, or you don't.