Hang on though: I can't tell my neighbouring city to push for more housing because, while I want to live there in the future, the people that live there now like their lack of housing. Similarly, why can't the people that currently live in the city tell their local politicians that spending all this space for parking the residents don't need is stupid?
Ironically in a "you are the problem" sort of way, the demographics doing most of the complaining about parking lots and a general lack of density are the same demographics who are in favor of fine grained management and regulation of what people do on their land that causes this situation. You reap what you sow.
Big structures are expensive. Who is going to fund them save for the people who are incentivized not to?
"Yup, this big country was spread out by parking lots."
I will say that public transit in the US could be a lot better. However, over about forty years it has largely been how I got to work. (Washington, DC, area.)
And you think other other countries are not the same?
The story the other day about GM dropping CarPlay and AA support was alarming for their reason why. They want to know everything about how you use your car, so they can make you "subscribe" to things like climate control and power seats/windows. The future of the automotive industry in consumer hostile. In another decade or so, it's going to be really hard to find parts for the "dumb" cars of old and Americans are going to be screwed.
I can dream all day about having enough buses and trains to replace 90% of city commutes. That dream includes more work than simply emulating an island nation's infrastructure.
Suburbs became a thing after the car industry worked very hard to make sure subways and train cars can't be used. And this was also after the great interstate highway project and explicit city planning meant to mitigate the fallout of a nuclear attack by having a huge urban sprawl. All of this in the 50s and 60s.
What outsiders don't see is the massive scope and efficiency of the US interstate highway system which is the artery of the US economy. Discussions about public transport don't consider freight. You can't have freight trains to every big store and warehouse but you can get 18wheelers from any part of america to any other part of america (continental) within a day or two at most.
At the same time, explicit effort was made to make cities difficult to drive or bike in. A lot of this again goes back to the sentiment of the 50-60s where "white flight" was still a big deal and making suburbs inaccessible to certain types of people who live in cities but occupy the lowest social classes was also important.
It's expensive to be poor but cars means mandatory insurance and car payments, gas, repair bills and parking fees. And if you manage to overcome all that, cops can pull you over and search you without a warrant because you are driving and of course traffic fees and all that is nothing compared to one's safety. Childcare, food or rent? Which one should you sacrifice for that court fee? And somehow you must maintain mental fortitude to not use drugs or alcohol to cope with all that stress. Take out cars and suddenly so many problems are solved (including crime rates).
My point is, much of this is by design decisions made at a different time and era and the hostility is intentional. It is possible to have both a walkable and drivable city with much less parking lots, especially by having less single family housing concentrations (condos instead of large communities of houses that require cars to access).
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2015/5403... skip to page 15, and section 4
In the US everything international (except americas) comes by ship and you have large distances between population centers. It isn't just the size and the amount of freeways but the way they are interconnected that allows all kinds of truck routes between ports and production centers (e.g.: veggies and fruit in cali or florida) to not just big cities but middle of nowhere montana or dakotas as remote and underpopulated as they may be, they all have easy access to the same interlink.
If this was networking, europe would be like a very large campus network but the US would be a metropolitan area network with a similar physical size but connecting all types of buildings.
Honestly, I think you just have to drive around and see what I mean. Many americans also don't get this. I don't mean just the roads but go to random walmarts or targete in the middle of the desert or mountains that get the same goods as big city stores and they're just as large. You can easily spend half a day shopping in a walmart.
That's because you are looking from the outside in.
Every person who has grown up in the US has grown up in this situation. Having to drive nearly everywhere is our version of normal.
Public transit in the US sucks. In practically every city that even has it, it's the worst way to get anywhere. It's often a last resort: a tool for the desperately poor.
On top of that, most of the US is made up of small towns that public transit wouldn't make any sense for. A significant percentage of Americans must regularly travel between a major city and a small town. That means they must have a car, and a place in the city to park it. It's a fool's errand to convince most people that they should drive and take public transit all in one trip, even if it would save them time and gas.
There is more to this situation than the vicious cycle that perpetuates it. If we can be clear about how we intend to accommodate that reality, we might be able to do something about it politically.