So true. Growing up in one of the most sprawled cities in America I had no sense for how ugly and disgusting our city was to pedestrians and why that might matter. Then I lived in Washington DC where walking almost anywhere was a pleasant experience. Now I hate the sprawl and what we've given up.
Try an inductive proof. Assume that is true, see if characteristics under those circumstances match real world observations.
So, wards of the state on welfare were ordered by the state to move to the unwanted burbs which they hated and wished they could live packed together in giant ultra dense urban projects. There are no slums or poor/bad neighborhoods in cities because cities being more desirable than burbs means slums and slum dwellers are all pushed into the burbs. Starving college students and recent grads live in the burbs because they're poor and McMansions are less desirable, then if or as they get higher incomes and have kids, they move into downtown because thats nicer. All economic development in the city is via private investment because everybody wants to live there, whereas all burb development is taxpayer funded. The suburbs are full of burned out abandoned buildings and empty lots whereas continuous construction and redevelopment fills the cities. Crime rates are extremely low in cities because the less well adjusted members of society are all pushed economically into the burbs, which are overflowing with violent crime, resulting in more poverty in an anti-virtuous cycle. The cities, being more desirable, have the best public schools and the burbs, being less desirable, have 50% dropout rates and massive discipline problems.
It would make an interesting alternative history, but seems to have no relationship with reality. Therefore I think that's probably proven false.
Oh, I see it. I see "giving up" crowded, noisy urban areas while walking in a crowd that will make most people feel claustrophobic. I see "giving up" fast, hurried lifestyles with dirty air and people.
I like having room to breathe. I like being able to look around for a half-mile and see a few houses. I like those long drives to get places. I like not having to wait in line with 20 other people to get a bagel. I like being able to open my window in the morning and not hearing someone else's shitty conversations.
Get off the high horse. Some of us like it out here.
Anything that holds New York City--by which one presumably means parts of Manhattan and maybe hipster areas of Brooklyn--as a minimal bar would seem to be a rather demanding standard. Very few cities in the world have that kind of density.
>Tiny villages of 20 people can be made walkable.
At some level, this is true. I suppose by some definition, the center of my rural/exurban town is walkable. There are sidewalks, the town green/library/town hall, schools, church, some number of houses, etc. Quite pleasant. But there isn't so much as a restaurant or coffeehouse or store, so while quite pleasant, it probably doesn't fall under what the typical urbanphile would call walkable.
Oh come one! That's not even close to being true. I live on the west side of Los Angeles, and it's very walkable here. (I believe in those ratings sites that rate walkability from 0 to 100 Santa Monica is something like a 98, just like NYC.) I used to live in Atlanta, and even there certain parts were very walkable at the time (thinking Little 5 Points, for example). San Francisco is totally walkable. Chicago, too. I'd bet most large cities in the US are walkable. Boston was when I lived there.
No, the dream of car culture is that regular people can afford to live in their own detached house on a nice-sized plot of land. Which is what we have.
You can build dense cities in the US all you want, but there will always be a sizable portion of the population that says "I can pay $X to live in a small apartment in the city or a big house with a yard in the suburbs. Hmm..." It's an obvious choice for many people.
>You can build dense cities in the US all you want
No you can't. Dense cities have been outlawed by misguided zoning codes and traffic engineering standards.
This was celebrated by the architects; Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City celebrated the ideal of every home sitting on an acre of land. Contrast that with the Tuscan town of Pienza, Italy, which sits on a bit over 11 acres of land and which contains over 2,000 residents. Just looking at the numbers, Americans would think it must be some horrible slum. But it's such a fabulous place that it attracts close to a million visitors a year, if I recall correctly. It would be completely illegal to build Pienza in countless American towns and cities, and on many counts. In reality, Pienza would probably violate close to 90% of the conditions in a conventional Euclidian code.
Implicit in that dream is a reasonable (<1 hr) commute, which is increasingly out of reach.
And as another poster pointed out, those massive commutes apply to cities like LA, NY, and SF. Outside of those bubbles the dream of suburban living and short commutes is alive and well. Mine is 10 minutes.
Start modifying those things—single-use zone residential areas, require minimum yard sizes (rather than, say, maximum) and setbacks from roads, pretty soon you're back to requiring cars, necessarily, because everything's too far away to walk. Which means more and wider roads. Which pushes everything farther apart.
Now you need useless "green space" to separate these wider, faster, busier roads from places where people are. Pushes everything farther apart, more driving, more cars. Parking lots that could each hold an entire 20,000-population old European city start popping up, maybe even by law, because everyone's driving and they need places to park. That pushes everything farther apart. Those parking lots and the big-box stores the service are hideous and dirty. More big buffers so the nearby neighborhoods don't turn into low-home-value ghettos.
The edge of the city is now several times farther from the center than before, and those in the center have to travel several times as long to reach the country. Public transit is now guaranteed to be awful for most of the city because there's insufficient density to make it work. As a "bonus" on top of all the wasted time and lower quality of life that stuff's causing and despite all the added greenery (mostly space to make up for being too far from parks and real human-oriented public green spaces, like lawns/yards, and gigantic grass buffers for ugly, noisy, dangerous roads and parking lots) the whole thing's far less green, in an environmental sense.
Do all that, then make all the urban schools terrible so middle class families with kids (can afford two+ cars, can't afford private school) can't (responsibly) choose to live there, and you've just invented most American cities.
As someone with a family who'd much prefer to live in the former environment, I don't feel like the suburbs and car culture are something we chose. They're the only realistic option, in most of the US—not because it must be that way, but because that's how it happens to be here. And yes, to preempt the usual retort (not to imply that you'd necessarily dredge it up, xienze, just in general) of course we could move overseas or to one of the handful of areas in the US where there are both jobs and nice (for our definition of nice) areas to live, but that's far from the only factor in choosing one's home. Doesn't mean it isn't frustrating to have such limited housing/lifestyle options.
The tricky thing is you can't have both. Once you build an American-style 'burb on the edge of a city, it gets much harder to expand past that with traditional urban neighborhoods. Ring the city with American suburbs and that's all you're gonna get afterward. It's like a barrier. No such thing as free lunch, and all that. Seems like city development options are either nearby-rural+decent-urban, or distant-rural+car-only-suburbs+awful-urban.
Sometimes we visit relatives in Atlanta. The mall is literally across the street from where they live. The only legal way to get there is by car. You couldn't even walk to the next crosswalk. It's a mile or two down, and then back up to the mall, but as there is no sidewalk, the police will stop you and ask you why you are walking. Crazy.
Of course, any demand for improvements will always be the usual mix of NIMBY, people who think almost any government spending is useless, people who don't like change of any sort, people who fear sidewalks will bring in "undesirables", or people who don't seem to understand what an easement is.
It really depends on the neighborhood culture, though. Personally around here (Tampa Florida) I think I've seen more concerns along the lines of "why can't my child safely walk to school". The statistics probably help shed light on the problem too... Florida cities in general has very high pedestrian fatality rates (due to the issue of being a traditional retirement area + poor pedestrian considerations in road design).
I live in a fairly walkable area of the suburbs. I routinely walk to the grocery store, hardware store, restaurants, etc. And yet, the infrastructure kind of sucks. The most direct paths are missing sidewalks in a couple of places. The main road only has a sidewalk on one side for most of it. Many of the intersections have crosswalks on only one, two, or three sides. There are a couple of businesses I almost never visit simply because getting there requires crossing three crosswalks of the same intersection, then doing it again on the way back. And it's a dangerous intersection to cross which requires great care, because people routinely blow through red lights to turn right on red. Naturally, there is zero police enforcement of this.
It even goes beyond a lack of infrastructure and sometimes involves intentional barriers. I used to take a shortcut through the neighborhood next door, which gave me some variety and bypassed one of the bits of missing sidewalk. Then they put up a fence and I can't go that way anymore.
So many places in this country are within a reasonable walking distance of things, but make it unnecessarily difficult to take advantage of that fact. Get rid of pointless fences, put sidewalks and crosswalks everywhere, and you'd improve things significantly.
The unspoken conceit of the argument is that all land is equally valuable. Which...maybe so! But if you believe that, I'd love to chat with you about doing a land deal...
Edit: Plus if you look at the comments at the link, there's some pretty serious criticism of the basic accuracy too...
cities are not inexpensive places to live and in some areas they aren't the safest either. still it should always be choice. we as a world are far from running out of space or arable lands
I just had terrible flashbacks from doing that drive multiple times when I moved from the east coast to Denver (and then back!).