Big point of resistance here is going to be public safety. I would live in a city alone as a single man. I wouldn’t live in a city with a family. At this point even suburbs are becoming a questionable option as many cities have little to no options that are both safe and affordable, so you have to go out to the exurbs instead.

What's your threat model? The number one killer of children under 16 is cars.

And where are they more likely to be hit by one? Probably in a denser populated area with heavier traffic. You can’t just wave a magic wand and make all the cars go away.

Regardless, you have to make cities a desirable and affordable place to live for this to work at scale. You can’t just fix it at the transportation infrastructure level.

If I’m looking for affordability, low violent crime, and good schools, I am not looking anywhere in the city where I live. It didn’t used to be this way, but post-covid housing costs are so high that I have to go 40+ minutes out of the city to get those things. If you don’t change that, many people with families are just going to deal with traffic being worse rather than moving into the city.

>And where are they more likely to be hit by one? Probably in a denser populated area with heavier traffic.

Most people killed by cars are in cars. How do you stay out of cars? Don't live somewhere you need one. Want to put yourself at risk? Live 40+ minutes out of the city and drive 20,000 miles a year.

The risk of being in an accident driving is not linear with miles driven.

> And where are they more likely to be hit by one? Probably in a denser populated area with heavier traffic.

Data doesn’t support this.

> For example, pedestrian and bicyclist deaths and deaths at intersections are more prevalent in urban areas, whereas a larger proportion of large truck occupant deaths and deaths on high-speed roads occur in rural areas. Although 20 percent of people in the U.S. live in rural areas and 32 percent of the vehicle miles traveled occur in rural areas, 40 percent of crash deaths occur there.

> Regardless, you have to make cities a desirable and affordable place to live for this to work at scale. You can’t just fix it at the transportation infrastructure level

I agree with this which is why my original post was talking about multiple points.

Need changes at urban planning level, zoning, getting rid of hostile building codes (ie, parking minimums), making roads narrow, reducing dependency on cars/highways, re-investing in high quality public transportation.

[1] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/urban...

I mean, that's your bias. I'm raising my family in a big city with no car. They're teens now. Spent the whole time in public schools. It's never really been a problem.

This used to be feasible where I’m at, but housing prices are too high now. Spending $3k a month on a mortgage isn’t realistic for the vast majority of people.

That doesnt work in a democracy where the vast majority of people live that way. They will and do vote out people who make their driving life miserable.

One mayor in a town i used to live in partly got voted out by adding a protected bike lane that made driving tight in a busy central stroad to give one example

You say that it doesn't work, yet there's numerous examples across the globe of how it does work. Sounds like another example of "'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens"[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...

It’s not that you can’t achieve the goal, it’s that you can’t force people into it by making their daily lives worse. Or at least that seems like that would be the least effective political strategy.

Less car dependency will make lives better, not worse.

OP suggested intentionally making commutes unbearable as a means of forcing people into cities to achieve this. That’s the wrong order of operations and would backfire politically imo.

Personally I work remote, so I would probably just go to the city less if it were made more inconvenient to do so. This has already happened to an extent. No free parking? I’m not going unless I have to. Public transit as it exists isn’t a good alternative either. It’s slow and I don’t want to be harassed by addicts at the bus stop.

Any plan that involves coercion isn’t something I’m interested in.

This is exactly it. You go with solutions that doesn't anger the car political class, like just building more rail vs. destroying car infra. You drag you're feet on maintaining the car infra. Traffic gets really bad, but man, the train is so much more convenient now, safe, clean and 3x faster than driving, your an idiot for driving man. You start running tearjerker ads about how an older person couldn't drive anymore, but now with a real transit system, they can still get around. Then people don't really drive that much and the car infra starts getting replaced by buildings because that makes more money, etc, etc.

There are places that have torn down highways and deliberately made a hundred million people’s lives so difficult they are compelled to move? In the name of transportation efficiency?

Which such places, could you be specific about that?

My understanding is the inverse has happened. Where there are now highways through the middle of cities west of the Mississippi, there used to be homes there.

I'm skeptical that US road engineers did anything other than add roads and lanes to improve vehicle throughput. Examples to the contrary would be very interesting.

Yeah, I’m skeptical of that claim as well. And if someone tried it on me I’d tell them and their city to go fuck themselves, not move there. I can’t be the only one with that attitude.

They are not compelled to move, they are compelled to vote out the politicians who enacted such things and vote in politicians that fix it in their eyes. Why do you never see debates about highway project costs, but in the USA there are a billion of them about transit project costs.

Did the bike lane remain after they were voted out? If so, that is success.

You need to think a few more steps ahead. Other politicians will see that political dead body and stop doing that, and might start doing or stopping things that would've improved things if the status quo hadn't been negatively effected.

On the contrary. You want politicians who will get elected and do the right thing, still knowing it will end their political career. The outcomes are what matter, not duration of tenure. The political twist of “I’m here for a good time, not a long time.”

I don't think the top comment is advocating this be foisted on everyone. This will work a lot better if everyone acknowledges it, makse a cultural shift and then policy will follow. Obviously that's not easy, but it can happen.

My idea of a hell hole is the neighborhood I would have to live in to afford a home in the city near my office.

What if we made cities more affordable, nicer places to live instead of making commuting even more expensive and miserable than it already is?

False dichotomy. Far from being conflicting, those goals are fundamentally aligned and you can't have one without the other!

you can definitely have nice affordable housing near work without making commuting miserable, and that's the only way to get people to not commute

Well, yes, if by "not making commuting miserable" you mean "build a lot of transit, convert roads and motorways to streets, and somehow cure people of their car addiction". But yes, you also have to cure people and planners of their single-family house addiction.

I didn't say that, and it's obviously not what a normal person would take to mean from that sequence of words.

The spending needs to be on building more housing, better housing, more affordable housing, housing closer to work. Single family or multi family? Whatever the people need, neither will exclusively work if people want both.

If you don't do that, it doesn't matter how miserable you make the commute, people will still do it because the alternative for them is not going to their job and becoming destitute.

What if we had cities, but smaller ones and made sure companies and business opportunities were not concentrated in a few points? We could enjoy the benefits of high demographic density that matters, while having walkability.

If we have zoning requirements for building residences, why not quotas for the number of companies allowed in a city, in a county, in a state? Why the fuck everybody needs to live in a ratcage in NYC, because every fucking oligarch feels like he needs to have his bank HQ in Manhattan? Why can't we have a few dozen smaller high density urban centers instead on this day and age?

something like "sorry Mega Company, we already have MegaCorp and MegaEnterprise here on this city, the quota is over, have you considered PleasantVille for your new HQ? I hear they have a free quota after MBA Business Machines finally fold down and closed their offices there. "

What about industry? Do you want megabuildings like they have in Taiwan, where the company owns the whole building with grocery stores, laundry, apartments, and a factory all in the same building?

How's the air quality in cities where they do that?

We ended up with this because SUVs and Trucks had reduced fuel efficiency requirements. When we have fuel efficiency requirements (mandated by aerodynamics[0,1]), SUVs bring their fronts down and curve them, improving pedestrian safety since more of the force comes from the hood instead of from hitting the ground.

0: https://airshaper.com/validation/tesla-model-y-wind-tunnel-t...

1: https://www.kia.com/us/en/ev6/gallery.exterior

We ended up with confusing fuel efficiency requirements because we failed to tax fuel appropriately. I mean for gosh sakes, fuel taxes only pay for a portion of road costs! We spend additional subsidies on top of that.

Higher hood-lines are often used to provide crumple zones pedestrian impacts, as required in some jurisdictions.

This makes absolutely no sense at all and flies in the face of all the statistics pointed out in the article.

Lower hood-lines save lives. You don't need a tall crumple zone.

I agree, but those rules require a crumple zone under the hood (basically between the hood line and top of engine). I didn’t write the rules, and I don’t enforce them.

Ridiculous. No jurisdiction requires > 40 inches (100cm) hoodlines.

On some global-market cars that had previously very low hoods, yes. But it's not why US market SUVs have high hoods.

Crumple zone and soft tissue do not really seem to go together. When a car hits a person, the person _is_ the crumple zone.

You are putting together 3 or 4 different things here.

> Make our infra as difficult as possible for these modern SUVs and trucks and suddenly the office workers commuting from age Styx will decrease

While personally attractive to me, this is a losing proposition. Lots of people have (unfortunately) locked in usage of these vehicles; and will vote out any changes to car-centric infrastructure.

In my opinion, a better and more practical way to do it is:

First, clamp down on the manufacturers with regulations. Set super low speed limits for these things -- safety and road damage are obvious rationales. No truck should be able to go above 60 mph; that alone will make them much more unattractive.

Second, increase registration taxes slowly every year on these large vehicles, to reflect the increasing burden that they pose to society. That will go the rest of the way towards making sure carmakers turn their focus back to smaller, more sustainable cars.

A massive rework of our infrastructure is attractive, but not necessary.

You don’t even need to go that far (and speed limit restrictions would never fly anyway), just increase registration fees for vehicles bigger/heavier than X unless the vehicle is certified (under penalty of perjury) commercial use only. If these drivers had to pay 5 grand a year for registration, they might rethink life.

“Mixed use” and “farm” also needs to also die.

> “Mixed use” and “farm” also needs to also die.

Have you ever lived in a rural area?

Don't forget traffic calming features, to help with slower speeds eg in suburban areas.

Not everything needs to be regulated in such a way as to encourage or require more policing, and the associated budget increases.

> No truck should be able to go above 60 mph; that alone will make them much more unattractive.

So people spend longer getting to their job site? I don’t get it. Sounds like a waste of human potential, keeping people on the highways longer.

> Sounds like a waste of human potential

So do pedestrian fatalities.

How many pedestrian fatalities are there due to collisions with trucks going more than 60 mph? I'd guess very few, because nearly all the places with speed limits above 60 mph in the US are also places with few pedestrians. Often they are places were pedestrians are prohibited.

1. reducing speed can improve throughput when congestion is happening

2. nobody should be speeding, especially not in a extra large and heavy vehicle

> reducing speed can improve throughput when congestion is happening

no, consistent speeds improve throughput, jackasses can, and do, tap their brakes at reduced speeds.

I'm sure "Truck speed limit 60 [mph]" is fairly common in the USA, so it's easy to see that could be extended to other vehicles larger than cars.

On the off chance this is misinterpreted by non-US people.

truck here means semi-truck (18 wheeler). aka, these things: https://www.macktrucks.com/trucks/

these limitations are common in the US insofar as many places, particularly more rural areas, it's not safe for these types of vehicles to be going faster. These vehicles require a separate license to operate and have completely different concerns, such as riding their brakes on a downslope causing the brakes to get so hot they stop working and you get runaway semi's that cannot slow down and become dangerous.

That these types of vehicles have specific laws applied to them does not naturally stretch to applying them to 2-axle vehicles since these same dangers flat don't apply to them.

Semi's are required to have properly functioning mud flaps, this in no way implies a corolla should ever be required to have mud flaps installed.

Anyone curious about the brake thing: https://www.thetruckersreport.com/truckingindustryforum/thre...

In the EU it's generally not signed, as the limit applies to the vehicle regardless of the road.

For example, 80 km/h for lorries on the motorway in Germany, otherwise 60 km/h.

> Yet this country continues to throw their hands up in the air and do nothing.

It's not that. It's that most people in the US like car-centric culture, and like suburbs. They don't want to live in dense spaces and have to rely on transit.

I disagree with these people, but politicians are not going to be able to enact the things you've described without getting kicked out of office by the people who don't actually want them to do these things.

I love living in the suburbs and have zero desire to live in the city. Being accessible by car, I can get to anything I need in 15 minutes. The people promoting 15 minute cities completely miss the mark here. I, and many others, already live in "15 minute cities" since we can get to anything in 15 minutes by car.

For me, it is great to be able to drive to Home Depot, then Target, then stop and get lunch, and finally return home with a load of goods that would have been impossible for me to carry alone.

As you mentioned, I will strongly vote against, and even campaign against, any politicians threatening my way of life.

Have you ever lived somewhere where you can walk to get lunch for example?

I really detest having to get into my car and drive 15 minutes each way (30 minutes round trip) to do any errand.

Not the parent, but I lived 17 years in the heart of SF before moving to the country. I loved it in my 30s, but was pretty over it by my 40s. Now I love cooking at home, letting my kid play outside, and throwing parties without worrying about neighbors.

People like different things. The things people like change. Give the parent (and people like him/her) the benefit of the doubt.

And different people like different things. I live in the suburbs and there's somewhere on the order of 20+ restaurants I can get to within 15 minutes (and probably about 10 within 7-8 minutes. And I can also, like the poster you were responding to, go to several different stores, pick up a carload of stuff, and get back home.

If I want to do city things, I jump on the train (or drive) into a city and do city things for the day/night. But I don't want to live there.

"Restaurants."

Yes. I used to live in an apartment in the middle of city. It was easy to walk to lunch/dinner/drinks. It was great for those activities but absolutely awful for many others. Grocery shopping? Still need a car. Going to another part of the city where my friends are? Still need a car. Etc.

I enjoyed city living for a short period of time but it got old, very fast. It is NEVER quiet. Your selection of restaurants and bars is actually quite limited, or you’d need to taxi/Uber. And overall I felt my quality of life much lower.

Now I have a yard and a garage, extra storage in my house, and don’t have to deal with renting.

Life is MUCH better, for me, in the suburbs.

> Grocery shopping? Still need a car. Going to another part of the city where my friends are? Still need a car. Etc.

I think that we also need to understand the whys of some of this.

Grocery shopping or going to another part of the city to see friends should not require a car. If it does, that means the city's transit infra isn't sufficient for residents' needs. And the reason that's the case is because car culture is prioritized above all else in the US.

For larger grocery 'trips' I usually do delivery these days. But we also have a small grocer a couple blocks away (very well stocked, huge variety of stuff, great produce, etc.) that easily meets daily/weekly needs.

I do have a car, but I drive it only a few times a month. I fill up the gas tank once every couple months. I probably shouldn't own a car, but I can't kick the habit. It's great for long trips outside the city when we're doing some light traveling, at least. But overall I really dislike driving at this point in my life (absolutely loved it back in my 20s); I'd much rather take a train or bus, or walk.

The lack of quiet is an absolutely valid point. I personally just got used to it. I grew up in the suburbs and didn't move to a city until I 29 years old. That was almost 15 years ago, and I still love living in a city. But everyone's tastes differ here, certainly.

> Your selection of restaurants and bars is actually quite limited

I guess you picked the wrong neighborhood, if that's what you were looking for? Within a 10-minute walk I can choose among 15 or so restaurants, and seven bars. If I widen that to 20 minutes, I can add another 10 restaurants and three or four bars. And I don't live in a particularly dense or "party scene" neighborhood. At this point my partner and I pretty rarely leave the neighborhood for food or drink. And when we do, it's usually to meet up with friends who live in a different neighborhood, or to treat ourselves with something fancy/different.

> Life is MUCH better, for me, in the suburbs.

I'm genuinely happy for you! I personally don't care so much about having a yard, and we have all the storage space we need. (Frankly I prefer to constrain my storage space a bit, so I don't accumulate more stuff than I need.) We also own, so no need to deal with renting.

But I'm not trying to say you shouldn't live in a suburb, if that's what you want to do! My point is that I do think that some of the things that make cities unlivable for some people are the way they are because of decades of pushes toward car culture. Maybe fixing those things wouldn't sway you, personally, but I think there are lot of suburb dwellers who think, "I wouldn't mind living in the city except for X", and that X is actually something that's not hard to fix, if there was political will to do so.

You're comparing living in a car dependant city vs living in car dependant suburbs. It's not going to be meaningfully different. You mention the constant noise, but what do you think causes it?

To see what everyone means by car dependency, you'd need to see the few places that aren't.

Here's what a 100% car-free island looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWDFgzAjr1k

Here are some progressive European cities that have started to undo the damage that's been done by cars:

• Freiburg, Germany: https://youtu.be/6Vil5KC7Bl0?t=36

• Haarlem, Netherlands: https://youtu.be/ztpcWUqVpIg?t=90

• Paris, France: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSQSBoHmG8s

Check out these background noise levels:

• A very busy mixed-use street in Amsterdam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQSwQLDIK8

• Exiting the train station in Delft, Netherlands: https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?t=289

• Cycling streets in the Netherlands: https://youtu.be/bMJaMy-0ChA?t=242. You can even hear birds chirping at 4:29.

Anecdotes are anecdotes. The fact is everyone loves their own preferences, because that's what preferences are.

When I lived in the suburbs it took me 28 minutes to drive to the grocery store. When I lived in a city it was a 4 minute bike ride to two different grocery stores.

> When I lived in the suburbs it took me 28 minutes to drive to the grocery store

Wow. That sounds more rural to me. I've lived in 5 or 6 different suburbs (of three different cities, 2 "major" ones) and never been more than 10 minutes from a grocery store; even when I had corn fields in my back yard and drove by cows and apple orchards on the way to the store.

Admittedly, it's possible I'm "dense suburbs" and you're "sparse suburbs"; there's a range. It's just.. 30 minutes is a REALLY long trip for a grocery store.

I think there's a pretty wide gulf between true "rural" areas and the most dense of the suburbs.

A 30-minute drive to a grocery store in a suburb doesn't surprise me all that much. In the 'burb I lived in during my teens, 15 minutes to the grocery store was essentially the best you could hope for. Add some traffic (pretty common most of the time) and that could easily creep up to 20 or 25 minutes.

(And yeah, I live in a city now, and I can walk to a very well appointed smaller grocery in about 3 minutes.)

Yes, this is the issue I often ran into in the burbs. Traffic management in suburban neighborhoods can be pretty non-existent in some areas.

And that's a very privileged position to take that makes you incredibly reliant on the benevolence of the trillion dollar oil gas, auto and insurance industry that have to pay constant microtransactions to play. It sucks for pretty much everyone else who isn't as privileged or wanting to be a pay pig for the multi-billionaires in comparison to being able to walk, bike and hop on a train.

I think some people do like the suburbs (and they're allowed to), but the sky high housing costs in "nice" or "popular" cities indicate that there is unmet demand to live in dense walkable areas.

The car industry has been very very successful with equating driving with freedom though which makes this a hard conversation to have with people.

It should all be priced accordingly, you want to drive your private vehicle into my city? Then be prepared to pay a fair value for parking and road maintenance.

> The car industry has been very very successful with equating driving with freedom though which makes this a hard conversation to have with people.

It can't possibly be a "hard conversation to have" because people disagree with you, huh? It has to be that the car companies brainwashed them?

I see this everywhere on social media. "I have an opinion, my opinion is the right one, and if you disagree with me, you didn't actually come to an independent conclusion, you were just brainwashed or had an emotional response."

Nobody makes ads that make walking look cool or get you to where you’re going in style, because there’s nothing to sell you in that case.

They do make ads of cars taking shortcuts, going to nature, driving really fast, looking really cool etc (closed course, professional driver, do not attempt)

Demand as seen by prices and lack of affordability in walkable areas in the US is sufficient evidence that it’s an underserved market.

BTW You sorta proved my point at how convinced people are, and how it's such a hard conversation to have.

> if you disagree with me, you didn't actually come to an independent conclusion

it goes in line with taking rights and responsibilities away from the individual. You want to go somewhere? take the government's approved method of getting there. You dont like smelling urine or seeing trash or getting accosted/threatened by homeless at the train station? too bad, should have voted for my guy, he's 6 votes away from funding the next "program" to help fix it. Sorry we can't fund police, they don't respond to property crimes any more. we need to raise taxes again to fund the next $CHILDREN program, get with the times. and on and on.

You're right, it's about freedom. The freedom of not having to use a car to get literally anywhere.

Fuck that I love driving, it's one of my favourite hobbies. I can and do drive for hours, 26 hours is about my max.

With my truck I know I can handle anything on the way and be self reliant. I can take lots of water. I can take almost all my tool for any repairs on the road. I can sleep in it. I can traverse off road terrain with the large off road tires. The 4wd can help with icy road conditions. I have a winch to self recover or help others in trouble. The large and bright lights and higher sitting position give good visibility of the road.

These things are popular because they engender self reliance which contributes to practicality and convenience for the driver.

Not everyone has a boring daily commute to a cubicle job in their tiny ev that has 100km range and coming home to put on nature videos while they run on their treadmill. Stop trying to make everyone fit into the same box as you

> Fuck that I love having my lifestyle subsidized by other people

Interesting that you're actually the one trying to make me fit in your box, when I said that it's fine for people to like what they like. Nobody's saying you can't drive your truck, go off road etc.

I would like to be able to travel the 1/3 of a mile without having conflicts with drivers when I'm trying to walk. Additionally I'd like the freedom to be able to get places with dignity without paying many thousand per year in costs associated with a motor vehicle.

Also since you brought up "self reliance" almost any bicycle is going to be way more repairable than a motor vehicle, and _much_ more reliable, more capable off road etc. Literally children can repair and maintain them.

> make me fit in your box

Not really...

> I would like to be able to travel the 1/3 of a mile without having conflicts with drivers when I'm trying to walk.

Why? Are you flipping off all the SUV drivers you see?

> Also since you brought up "self reliance" almost any bicycle is going to be way more repairable than a motor vehicle, and _much_ more reliable, more capable off road etc. Literally children can repair and maintain them.

Yes and you can still fit tent and stuff in your backpack or take a little trailer if you need. Way less tools needed. Travel lighter, less impact, access more places via skinnier tracks, it's cool. And you get a workout at the same time!

I modify and maintain my own vehicle, so making it back from a 6000km trip on road and off road is very rewarding experience as it proves your abilities at (technical) driving as well as at spinning spanners and camping conveniences. Can cover more ground in a vehicle, visit more places, see more sights. Take a few more creature comforts.

We only get so much time off work.

Both things can be true though. I agree that there's unmet demand in urban centers, but that doesn't mean that there wouldn't be a massive revolt if laws and regulations made the suburban lifestyle much harder or more expensive.

This is absolutely correct.

Suburbia is subsidized —- the cost of infrastructure is often 10x the property taxes.

Millions of people are accustomed to paying $1,000/year in taxes to live on a street that costs $9,000 to maintain. “Asking” them to pay the true cost of their decisions is considered politically untenable —- until the city itself goes bankrupt.

> It's that most people in the US like car-centric culture, and like suburbs.

To put a finer point on it, people who like suburbs live in them. People who dislike them move elsewhere - forfeiting any voting rights they might have had where the problems are most acute. So who's left to fight the NIMBYs and car-lovers where it matters? Too damn few, by a long shot ... and this outcome was obvious to anyone who was actually thinking about society or the long term instead of just themselves and the next few years.

If you want to solve anything, instead of just shifting the problems around, you have to solve them where people are and will remain. Stay and fight. Unfortunately that's hard so almost nobody does it.

Ask the Dutch if they like their bicycles and the Japanese if they like their trains. They'll say yes. Funny that.

People like the environment they grew up in, it's part of their identity. Americans are no different.

Very few people go out of their way to meaningfully explore different approaches to life around the world and form an informed opinion on what they like.

Anecdotally I regularly run "virtual" marathons (via YouTube) and hiking/biking tracks in Europe. The vehicles that woosh past me are 80% large SUVS.

The SUV problem is not just an American one.

Around 15% of registered cars in Germany are SUVs, and 40% of the new cars bought in H1/2023. So yeah, the SUV plague is very noticeable here, too, though I don't think SUVs make up 80% anywhere in Europe, yet.

And also, SUV in Europe often refers to compact or sub-compact SUVs. Ie. the best selling SUV in H1/2023 in Germany was a VW T-Roc [1]. Ridiculous super-sized cars like the F150 and its ilk are still quite rare, fortunately.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_T-Roc I was "upgraded" to one when renting, once. The visibility was shit due to its fashionably small windows and the trunk volume was pathetic compared to the hatchback I had ordered. Otherwise, very little difference.

Make the cities safer and cleaner, just like my suburb, and I’ll move back. If I have to step over shit, needles, and bullet casings when I go outside, forget it.

The problem is that in the past companies tended to have to flock together. You're a financial conglomerate, you had to be on NYC, you are a OEM manufacturer for the automobile industry, well, the idea is that you sort of had to be on detroit. You're a startup founder? you need to be in the bay area.

So, you end up with those giant clusters of activity and people had to somewhere be able to live close to them. As people started making more money, starting families and having kids, they wanted to move into more enjoyable living, not everybody is a fan of living in a rat cage in a soviet urban project like most HN and urbanists seem to love. So, they voted for those freeways, they found the freedom to live in more humane settings in the wheels of a car that allowed them to escape the nightmare of living on Gotham.

I believe we can have both things. We can have cities, but we don't need to have only a couple of giant, nightmarish big cities. We just need to spread the business activity.

> not everybody is a fan of living in a rat cage in a soviet urban project

> more enjoyable living

> freedom to live in more humane settings

> nightmarish big cities

You appear to be arguing as if this was an axiom--cities are this way, and you struggle through it until you can leave. As if the goal is to make bank and leave the city. But this is the cycle, not the cause. It does not have to be this way, and in many places (many European cities, Japanese and Korean cities, and more) it isn't this way. Tokyo is huge, for example, and it is very much not "nightmarish". Nor London, or Paris. Certainly in all these places there are space tradeoffs, but that is very much different than the only reason to be there being to suffer through.

At least in part, cars cause American cities to be this way. Cars are too big for city streets; cars push people out of cities at night making for different concentrations of activity, and so on. This article is a decent enough jumping off point, top of mind because I read it literally today: https://thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/keep-on-trucking

I believe we can have liveable, walkable cities, and it has nothing to do with "spreading out business activity".

"a rat cage in a soviet urban project", "nightmare of living on Gotham", "giant, nightmarish big cities"

Your words show a huge amount of bias and are pretty uninformed by actual history.

The idea that suburbs are better for families is betrayed by the fact that those suburbs are a pretty recent invention and the fact that housing in cities has much higher demand than suburbs.

>> "a rat cage in a soviet urban project", "nightmare of living on Gotham", "giant, nightmarish big cities"

> Your words show a huge amount of bias and are pretty uninformed by actual history.

So did the ones that they were replying to, making it clear that they believed everything about suburbs is bad.

> The idea that suburbs are better for families is betrayed by the fact that those suburbs are a pretty recent invention and the fact that housing in cities has much higher demand than suburbs.

There are a LOT of people that have no urge to live in a city. And, in fact, there's a lot of people that live in cities because that's where the jobs they want are (I doubt the same is true of people living in the suburbs).

Wrong. Most people used to live in rural zones. Suburbs are just an attempt to replicate this. Maybe not the best way of trying that, but the way that was possible after industrialization moved most people to giant cities.

> Make our infra as difficult as possible

And make sure you offer no alternative public transport options.

If this is what you want then you should look at cities that developed pre-World War II or look at creating your own. Cities that are "car centric" are less about some obsession with cars and more that people buying a place to live didn't want to live in dense urban areas: https://www.newgeography.com/content/004453-urban-cores-core... One comment that stuck out to me on this page was:

> The central cities with the largest functional urban core percentages have overwhelmingly suffered large population losses. Among the 25 with the largest urban core shares, only seven were at their peak populations at the 2010 census, and only two of the top 18 (New York and San Francisco). Overall the cities with large functional cores lost more than 35 percent of their population and 8 million residents.

Given this stark difference in preferences, why can we not have cities designed to be carless and cities that are designed to include cars as well as other modes of transportation? I live in Portland where I'm walking distance from the train station, have multiple bus stops around my house, and the average street speed is 30 mph. I can drive ten minutes down the road to get lumber, feed, etc and avoid paying an $80 delivery fee which probably doesn't sound like much until you need to reorder a single board and pay $86 for a $6 2x4.

Takes like this don't help, imo:

> Make our infra as difficult as possible for these modern SUVs and trucks and suddenly the office workers commuting from age Styx will decrease

This kind of message, intended or not, is hostile, divisive, and non-inclusive.

I find it hard to take any mention of "preference" at face value in these sort of conversation.

People arguing for suburbs never, ever, ever acknowledge that the only reason that costs are cheaper outside of cities is because huge amounts of money are taken from those cities to fund the suburbs.

Much of this money shifting is done at the federal level (subsidized HUD/USDA loans, huge grants, regulations that massively favor cars) so there is no escaping it by moving around in the US. Some states are better about the balance, but there is no getting away from it.

> huge amounts of money are taken from those cities to fund the suburbs.

Isn't this just a more crude representation of "we live in a society"? In my city I pay a tax that allows people to have child day care despite being childless. I pay a tax that funds local schools despite not attending one and not having a kid. I pay a tax that goes to make agricultural products cheaper. I pay a tax that subsidizes medical care. Would you object to those as well, or are those okay? Additionally, many of the things you've described as subsidizing suburbs also subsidize cities. HUD would need to exist even if we lived in dense urban areas. USDA, the US Department of Agriculture, would still need to issue loans to farmers unless you believe that only massive farm operations should exist, and grants still fuel much of city development: https://www.hud.gov/press/press_releases_media_advisories/hu....

In my view cities, suburbs, and rural areas are an intertwined ecosystem that cannot exist without each other. Try to remove one or expand one too much without the other and bad things happen. This argument that cities subsidize everybody else ignores that cities are largely reliant on goods, services, and workers from outside of said city.

What we pay in efficiency we gain in freedom: I can go wherever I want whenever I want however I want.

Do I want to drive to Yosemite on a Wednesday afternoon in my F-350? Yeah. Do I want to drive down to the Safeway one late evening because I just ran out of eggs? Yeah. Do I want to drive down to Costco this Saturday to buy the next month's worth of foodstuffs and supplies? Yeah. Do I need to drive down to the pharmacy to pick up some prescriptions? Yeah. Do I want to drive across the country in my motorhome over the course of a month? Yeah.

Being tied to public transport means you are beholden to them with regards to when, where, and how you travel. That ain't fun in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Of course, that's just why we all drive our own cars. I haven't touched on why trucks and SUVs in particular are also seeing higher popularity.

The answer to the latter is simple: Bigger/heavier cars are safer when crashes happen and can transport lots of cargo, and being higher up means we have better line of sight and thus awareness of our surroundings. The bigger engines usually found in SUVs and trucks also means the car accelerates more quickly, which is indispensible for hopefully avoiding dangerous situations should they occur.

> I can go wherever I want whenever I want however I want. Except of course if you like walking and caring about all the health benefits that come from not needing a 5,000 pound vehicle to do the most basic elements of life like going to a coffee shop, a local diner etc.

> Do I want to drive down to the Safeway one late evening because I just ran out of eggs? Yeah. Do I want to drive down to Costco this Saturday to buy the next month's worth of foodstuffs and supplies

By simply from the brands referenced above, you seem to live in a very templated suburb that has been copied and pasted verbatim across the country. Being around nothing but epitomes of generic large-scale cookie-cutter grocery stores, where each location is indistinguishable to each other, fast food restaurants serving factory-made food, retailers at strip malls lacking any character etc. is the exact opposite of "freedom" to me. It's dystopian and conforming at its very core.

> The answer to the latter is simple: Bigger/heavier cars are safer when crashes happen. Except unless you are on the receiving end of these monstrosities, or worse yet, you happen to be a pedestrian. This argument that bigger/heavier cars are safer is incorrect even at the most fundamental level for drivers, because taken to its logical conclusion, if everyone drove bigger/heavier cars for safety as a reason, the net effect would lead to everyone being worse off and unsafe, as two large cars colliding are far more dangerous to both parties than otherwise.

>you seem to live in a very templated suburb

I'm actually on the side of a small mountain, can't see my neighbours through the thick forest around me. It's anything but a templated suburb here.

The town is just a few minutes' drive away, though, with most of the common modern amenities one could want. If I want to go shopping at Costco that's a 30 minute drive away on the freeway to the neighbouring city.

Incidentally, the "cookie cutter" stores are all quite distinguishable. The people around here are all wonderful, so they give each store their own little identity and flair.

You're arguing against urban policies in cities from the point of view of rural areas. Nobody's trying to make remote villages walkable.

A heavier vehicle is only safer in a crash when crashing into a smaller object. All you're doing is increasing your own safety at the cost of everyone else's.

>You're arguing against urban policies in cities from the point of view of rural areas.

Keep in mind that a "city" can be more rural than most people realize.

For example, the town that's 5 minutes' drive away is legally designated as a city (it's the county seat, in fact) despite the population being just under 40,000 and the surroundings being as rural as it gets. In terms of physical size, I can drive across the entire city in 5 to 10 minutes assuming I don't get stopped by traffic lights.

A neighbouring city in the same county, and I believe it's the second-most populace city in the county, has a population of just over 2,000 and can be driven through in less than a minute. Yes, it's legally designated as a city.

>A heavier vehicle is only safer in a crash when crashing into a smaller object. All you're doing is increasing your own safety at the cost of everyone else's.

Yes, and I have no qualms about that fact. We all take steps to better our own place in life, sometimes at the cost of others. I'm doing it to someone, and someone's doing it to me, no big deal.

It's not like bigger and heavier cars are restricted only to the wealthy either, so you can't even argue this is wealth inequality.

We are stuck with it due to the labor shortage providing no route for the massive infrastructure work required to change.

A slow fix over the next century is the goal.