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Comment by betandr | Hacker News Reader

We really do have to radically re-think our cities but the biggest issues aren't going to be practical but emotional. In London parents drive their children around in 4x4s, knowing that their vehicle causes the pollution that is affecting their own children's health. I'm not sure how you even start to get around that but to some extent you will never persuade everybody to reduce their damaging behaviour. You need to enable people to travel in non-damaging ways; cycling and walking primary. That should be the first priority, although fighting the ingrained car culture will be the hardest battle.

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The US is an extreme precisely due to these social and emotional reasons. It's shocking to me how this article fails to mention even once that a lot of post WWII suburbanization was due to white flight. The article states:

"Millions of soldiers had come home from World War II to overcrowded, run-down cities; their new families needed a place to live."

"Overcrowded, run-down": who all of a sudden "overcrowded" these cities? What's a "run-down" area? We can win WWII but not fix a broken roof? The issue was not so much lack of affordability or too many people, what meant was cities / neighborhoods with more black people. Those highways were not built immediately post WWII, but later, to separate black neighborhoods from wealthier areas of the city, in the post-civil rights era.

Suburbanization accelerated not directly after WWII but with government-mandated busing of school-children. If you didn't want your daughter to go to school with black boys, you went to the suburbs.

Architects & urban planners played handmaiden to white flight, destroying the fabric of cities, and generally harming the environment in the process. Precisely due to their active participation in this cluster- they tend to whitewash the history, move the timelines a bit etc. hoping no one will notice.

Even more basic than that, zoning and development regulation have strongly - in many cases explicitly - racist origins. For example many the first zoning laws in SF were designed to push back against Chinese immigration.

Those same tools have been used to the same effect, and strengthened, for generations. Yet for all the calls for social justice in society now, I almost never hear people calling for the end of zoning, when it may be the greatest perpetrator and enforcer of inequality today. In the Bay Area, zoning is the saw that has cut the bottom off the economic ladder. It’s surprising to me that more people don’t understand that intuitively, but alas.

It’s not entirely clear that racial animus was the primary motivating factor. Once civil rights legislation was passed to stop housing discrimination, for instance, there was also black flight, when middle-class black families also moved to the suburbs.

It’s also not clear how one is supposed to reverse the effects of white flight; when middle-class whites move into a majority-nonwhite urban area, this is usually condemned as “gentrification”.

My issue is the article doesn't once mention this as factor at all. I also object that one needs racial animus to have racist policies. "I've got no animus towards blacks, I just don't want to share large chunks of civic life with them" is racist. Blacks wanted to move to the suburbs due to lack of city & civic infrastructure in black neighborhoods - as the whites fled; so did polling stations, hospitals, banks, stores, and good quality drinking water. Lending policies for mortgages were explicitly racist; and many neighborhoods tried (successfully!) to prevent black people from moving in and "ruining the suburbs too!".

Also, rewinding only a couple of decades from civil rights legislation; denying blacks the vote, school entrance and outright lynchings in the hundreds qualifies as pretty strong racial animus. It's naive to argue that the same society & people "had no racial animus in mind" when choosing where and how to live.

I've always thought of gentrification as more of an economic class issue (which so often corresponds to minority status). In Boston, a lot of poor and middle class white neighborhoods get gentrified as well - nonetheless I take your wider point that gentrification is often a positive force for urban renewal; and I agree. One counter-example: Hudson Yards is the 1% being gentrified with the 0.1%, hard to argue helps the urban fabric with its non-human scale.

You are partially correct. Only partially because it only takes a small number of actual racist to make a difference. Even if 90% of a suburb doesn't care about race, that 10% can still make a difference by making the unwanted feel unwelcome.

I don't know how to solve this.

I guess the racial theory is still incomplete because it doesn’t explain why the socially dominant group (whites) were the ones to move. If you take the perfectly reasonable assumption that whites had the most power in society, the obvious question is: why did they flee to the suburbs themselves rather than just forcing the black population to move out into the suburbs? The answer must be that the whites perceived the suburbs to be a more desirable place to live. From that perspective, the racial injustice wasn’t white flight, it was denying black people the freedom to move to the suburbs themselves—which is exactly what they ultimately did when given the opportunity.

I’m not trying to dismiss racism as a causative factor. I guess I’m just saying it’s like living in a sawmill, and racism is the sawdust. The sawdust causes lots of problems by itself, but it also gets all over everything else. Suburbanization was something mid-century Americans of all races desired; it just happened in a racist way.

Why would not wanting to share your life with them be racist? Racism is the belief in the superiority of one race over another. It has nothing to do with who you want and don't want to have in your neighborhood. And people should be allowed to choose whom to associate with.

Banks would send black children to the homes of white people with pamphlets saying things like "you know who is moving in," warning about an imminent decline in property values due to black people moving in. Banks would come in after the pamphlets with agents who would low ball these white-owned houses, then flip them for profit by charging black people huge prices for the very same homes. It was entirely rooted in racism, no way about it.

Imagine not wanting to have someone in your neighborhood only because that person is black, without you needing to know anything else. That sole fact of their skin color makes up your mind that you don't want them in your neighborhood, without asking if they're a good person, an honest person, a friendly person.. they're simply disqualified without you asking any additional question.

You can imagine if someone doesn't want black people in their neighborhood how they might feel about their children marrying one.

I don't know how to read people's minds, so I tend to gravitate towards a functional definition of racism which measures it based on someone's action - i.e. if someone being treated in an unfair manner based on their skin color.

There's also a game-theoretic stalemate that you have to break with active policy change.

To the typical mid-century white homeowner, "a black family moved into the neighborhood" wasn't the beginning and end of it. There were only two equilibria: either you live in a segregated white neighborhood or you live in a predominantly black neighborhood. (I openly admit there's nothing wrong with living in a predominantly black neighborhood, but this was probably not the most common opinion among mid-century white homeowners.)

Why? Fundamentally because there was a structural shortage of good housing for black people. If most neighborhoods don't allow black residents, having a neighborhood that does allow them causes a surge of demand. Even if you're not racist enough to move out just because a single black family moved into your neighborhood, some of your neighbors are, and many of their homes will be bought by black families, which will trigger your slightly-less racist neighbors to move out, and so forth. This was deliberately encouraged by "blockbusters", who would buy homes from white families at a discount and then price-gouge the black families who ended up moving in for a massive profit. But blockbusting only works if you have the pre-existing shortage of unsegregated housing in the first place.

You end up in a feedback loop:

(a) Moderately racist white homeowners want to keep their neighborhoods segregated because otherwise they'll live in black neighborhoods. This causes:

(b) Most neighborhoods are segregated white neighborhoods, causing a housing shortage for black families. This causes:

The "solution" was to immediately, globally, across-the-board, outlaw housing discrimination so the pent up housing demand can disperse. I put "solution" in quotes because most American metro areas are still extremely segregated. They might be statistically segregated by 90/10 ratios instead of the 100/0 ratios that existed before, but people have to go significantly out of their way to completely reverse it, unless there's some other economic incentive. For example, gentrification has "desegregated" lots of majority-nonwhite urban neighborhoods through the sheer force of white hipsters wanting to move into them.

I don't see anything wrong with that. If I move out to a place without blacks, because it's a place without blacks and I am the one that moved, why should I have to accept them following me? That's not racism. That's wanting to be left alone. It's also not unfair. Forcing someone to move is unfair. Moving out on your own and preventing people you don't like from moving in isn't unfair.

“Racism” is an overloaded term. The idea you’re describing (racial separatism) is definitely in the general category of racism.

In fact, most racism gets expressed as racial separatism. Segregation was literally racial separatism.

One problem is that this literally turns into a question of ethnic territorialism, and can easily be extended from neighborhoods to entire states (Oregon was founded as a whites-only state) to entire countries (eg the notion of sending freed slaves back to Africa, which is how Liberia was founded).

It’s also just not that hard to express even the worst racism in mere separatist terms. In fact, that’s where most racism starts.

I recommend reading Ta-Nehisi Coates on this subject. He's done terrific work on the history of redlining, and also talks about the impact of educated, successful families moving out of historically black neighborhoods.

I'll have to check that out.

> also talks about the impact of educated, successful families moving out of historically black neighborhoods

Yeah, from what else I've read, that is one of the saddest parts of the story. Economic diversity is a hugely important part of a healthy community, and it's pretty uncommon in America.

I thought the race to suburbia was a deliberate attempt to spread out the population in case of Soviet nukes?

Though I guess there is likely more than one cause.

That's interesting. I hadn't heard of this before. The evidence is pretty well set out in Kathleen Tobin's "The Reduction of Urban Vulnerability: Revisiting 1950s American Suburbanization as Civil Defence."

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/Cold.War.Urban.Vulnera...

The vast majority of proposals are from before 1956 -- i.e. before the Soviets demonstrated their own high-yield thermonuclear weapons. The degree of decentralization required to mitigate against the multi-megaton bombs of the later 1950s would have been truly staggering.

> It's shocking to me how this article fails to mention even once that a lot of post WWII suburbanization was due to white flight.

I've never really understood this explanation of suburbanization.

Suppose you're a bunch of racist white folk wanting not to live near black folk. How do suburbs get you that any better than cities? What can you do to keep a black person from moving to your neighborhood in the suburbs that you can't do to keep them from moving to your neighborhood in the city?

It seems more like two phenomena that happened to occur at the same time rather than one causing the other.

Especially when at the same time the government had an explicit policy of encouraging people to move out of the cities, to reduce the damage that would be caused by a nuclear weapon.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_segregation_in_the_U...

That describes the process by which black people were excluded from a neighborhood, not the process by which the neighborhoods were chosen to be in the suburbs rather than the cities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown,_New_York#Discrimina...

Levittown was a quintessential model of the suburbs, one of the first examples of the suburbs we have now. Towns like this openly segregated against blacks and minorities, a dream away from the crowded city into your all white, picket fence house.

That was already happening. It was called red lining, and it meant as a bank you'd only approve loans for black families if they lived within the red line drawn by the bank on the map denoting the designated black neighborhood. Banks would also do something called blockbusting. They'd send panicked pamphlets to white people in urban neighborhoods, alerting them of black people moving into their neighborhoods and the damage that this could cause on their home value (the only asset many people had at this time).

Now suburbs were being built because in 1946, suddenly there were millions of young men with a huge government subsidy to buy a house. Banks would not approve mortgages for black people in these areas, so they became predominantly white. And as a white person you are happy to be in the suburbs where you are free of all the perceived fears from decades of racially charged propaganda, and surrounded by people who also have a white boy and a white girl, a new ford, a dog and a cat, and who go to the same protestant church. It was sold as a utopia, and in the case of Detroit, white people bought that narrative so hard the city lost 1.5m from its tax base and collapsed in fewer decades than it took to grow as a metropolis in the first place. To date, Detroit has lost over 60% of is population from its all time high in 1950.

Also I'll tell you why sprawl exists: Sound. Whether that is a car driving by or a neighbor having a party. Some people just don't want to hear shit from you, ever. It is easier to justify making work far away from home at the expense of our kid's future air quality when in one case you hear chirping birds all day, in another you hear BUMP BUMP BUMP every 2 minutes. Sound is the number one cause of stress and people don't understand that - it's actually invisible and I wish it was taken into account more than anything on this planet.

Subways are underground

Is this meant to contribute in some way? I honestly have no idea what this seemingly random phrase is supposed to convey.

Urban environments can often be less noisy than suburbs next to highways/freeways; due to extensive use of subway infrastructure - which moves the associated noise underground. Also, a suburban commuter spends a lot of time in a car commuting, being subjected to the very noise the parent poster is referring to.

I think that's the more minor part of the noise that the original comment was referring to. It's much easier to insulate one's detached house from suburban noise than it is to insulate one's apartment from noisy neighbors on the other side of a shared wall. It's also my experience that those noisy neighbors are a much bigger nuisance than the traffic noise in the first place.

On a tangential note, I'd be curious to know whether you have any links to back up the claim that urban environments are often less noisy. I don't disbelieve the claim outright, but it sure doesn't match my personal experience.

I was replying specifically to the "in another you hear BUMP BUMP BUMP every 2 minutes" comment which seems to imply that trains must be above ground. In Manhattan, NYC you can hear the subway from the street and the noise pollution is awful (eg. ear-piercing sirens and traffic noise at all times), but it's not like that everywhere else.

I'm writing this from the 11th floor apartment in an apartment town suburb 30 minutes by subway from Seoul. It is dead silent. Very little traffic, and everything is walking distance. From above ground you don't hear the subway at all. Sound insulation in this apartment is pretty good so I never hear my neighbors (actually there's only 2 apartment units on each floor).

Which is another great reason to get cars out of cities. The best time to be walking in a city is during a heavy snow storm when the cars are gone. Bikes and electric buses are fairly quiet, keep those.

Sprawl exists because its cheaper to build 100 houses on 20 acres of empty land than it is to build a 100 unit apartment in an urban environment. The only sound the developer cares about is the sound of trees being cleared for more land and the sound of someones check clearing for a new build.

Having recently moved to London I am a bit shocked at how poor the cycling infrastructure is. Granted, the city was never exactly planned out, but it seems to me it wouldn’t be hard to add dedicated bike paths given the fair amount of green space. Consider richmond Park as a prime location where dedicated bike-only lanes would be a great improvement. Instead you must bike along side diesel fumes on the roads that should be removed imo.

What are the primary obstacles towards improving the cycling infrastructure here?

By the way - biking here is quite different from the US. Unlike the US, I can taste the pollution. It’s a much heavier thing. Perhaps I’m not used to it, but I often find myself holding my breath to get through fumes.

It's all the diesel cars. They pump out a ton of particulate matter that you don't get from petrol.

After spending a lot of time in clean mountain air, it's gotten to the point where I can taste the fumes in the air in the United States. It's noxious. I run very early in the morning before anyone starts driving to avoid it.

  After spending a lot of time in 
  clean mountain air

May I ask where this mountain air was and why you had to relocate to a fume-ridden place in United States?

Is it for economic mobility? If that's the case shouldn't you consider taking a hit in that lone aspect, for a better quality of living? I'm sure you will be gainfully employed breathing clean, crisp mountain air provided your skills are in demand. You'll just make a little less.

As someone in a similar situation, I think you're underestimating the potential economic hit. I own a house in rural Oregon, but I also work and rent an apartment in the bay area.

First of all, my house in the clean mountain air is also at the very edge of the electric grid. I have utility-provided power and telephone, but I'm so far out that the phone company won't offer me DSL at any speed. So I'm stuck with satellite internet, which really isn't suitable for remote work.

Second, almost no one offers a flat pay-scale that ignores your home address. Incredibly, this has meant that so far renting an expensive one bedroom apartment in the bay in addition to my mortgage is a much better economic decision than finding a remote job that would let me leave the bay behind.

I usually drive an hour or so to spend the weekend climbing in the cascades. But during the week, I'm stuck in the city. And no, I won't quit my job to go live in the wilderness. Not yet.

>> You need to enable people to travel in non-damaging ways; cycling and walking primary.

And EVs? It will be very hard to convince anyone to get out of their cars when those cars are, potentially, less polluting than the available public transport options.

This also isn't just about commuting and pollution. There are a multitude of cultural reasons people use cars. Security is at the top of the list, the ability to be in your own locked box. You won't get people out of their cars until they are confidant in their physical security. Those parents driving their kids to work are constantly told that their kids are in danger and it is their duty as parents to maximize their children's individualized safety over all other concerns. Breaking that mindset requires far more than explaining to them why buses might be slightly faster than cars.

No. Car is not just the "culture", car serves our need. If you are young without kids, it may not make much difference for you to ride a car, or take a bus, or a train, subway, etc. But if you have a family, it makes a huge pain without your own vehicle.

If the city of future requires families to abandon their own vehicle, it is not the correct city of future. Just design a better one.

Where does the difficulty lie? I lived in SF fine with a toddler, taking public transit to local places.

1 kid who does not have his own schedule is relatively easy to manage. 5 kids who need to be in different places is more difficult.

Five kids is an edge case. Besides, it's impossible to shuttle five kids to different places simultaneously by car without five parents. Not so with good public transit.

Maybe try to have kids do stuff that are compatible with the schedule then, and not the other way round.

I feel that with 5 kids special provisions and certain difficulty will be necessary no matter what. You would be moving around with all children a lot less in any case. But I don't see why it's impossible to go car free; specially considering some kids will be older than others (not 5 toddlers simultaneously).

That's not typical though, nobody is saying that specific family can go without a car.

Many families in European cities live just fine without a car. My family never had a car and it wasn't "a huge pain".

In which country and city have you been living as a family with children?

I was a child to a single mother of two in Berlin without a car.

I asked because the ability to live without a car depends on where you live. In Berlin, which is one of the biggest european cities, it's definitely doable.

How many? How do you know they are "just fine"? How do you know without a car wasn't "a huge pain" to your mother when you were 2 year old?

I know families in NYC, Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland, Portland, and even Pittsburgh that do great car free! It is 100% doable, even in the US.

It's a bit more difficult in Oakland if the places you are trying to get to aren't by a BART stop. The AC transit buses are slow, dirty, sometimes dangerous, and don't have 100% coverage.

I have lived in NYC for two years with 1 small kid. I know how painful it is. Many subway stations do not have an elevator, I had to carry the baby and stroller through stairs. Even with elevator, all elevators smell extremely bad. Would you call this "just fine"?

Some things with kids are easier on the bus than on the car. For instance, you can just roll a stroller onto it, rather than dealing with the car seat dance which is so particularly annoying in the winter. And once they're past the stroller phase, the kids love not being strapped down in a 5 point harness and having a parent that can interact with them rather than concentrating on driving. And the train is cool.

But of course we do have a car, so can have the best of both worlds.

I imagine that if we didn't have a car we would be using delivery a lot more often. Hard to do a Costco run without one.

I can imagine life with kids but without a car. But of course that life would heavily rely on Lyft & taxis, so is that really car free?

Yes. We can certainly survive without a car, but that life will be different. Uber & taxis are difficult when you have small kids, because it is much easier to have carseats installed in own car. Also it is much much easier for a family to go out for picnic, riding bicycles, swimming, or doing all sorts of outdoor activities.

> If you are young without kids, it may not make much difference for you to ride a car, or take a bus, or a train, subway, etc.

We have a toddler and a large dog. We own two electric cargo bikes and get around perfectly well without owning a car. There's car/truck sharing and rental if I really need to transport something large and heavy (> 100kg).

> Just design a better one.

I'd very much prefer if all that parking space and all that space used by 4-lane roads would be used to make the city more dense and walkable. If I can walk to the kindergarden or school, there's no need to even take a bike, if close enough a kid can even walk on their own. The only things that makes such a thing infeasible are cars.

Maybe you live in SF? Not every city always has good weather. Cargo bikes are useless for most cities because of weather (rain, snow, winter cold, summer hot). It's useful for fun when the weather is great, but not as a main way of transportation.

How do you explain that cargo bikes are very popular with parents in Copenhagen? It's a wet windy city.

I live in Berlin. It’s been raining for a week and cold. Bikes both have a canopy, I have suitable clothing. Granted, it’s less comfortable than sitting in a car, but OTOH I don’t have to go jogging after returning from work. Worst case there’s still Bus and Subway.

Cities like Oslo and Copenhagen aren’t exactly known for good weather either, but have substantial policies around clearing bikeways from snow first, before all other roads. It’s more of an infrastructure problem than anything else: good cycling infrastructure begets cyclists. Walkable cities conjur pedestrians. Look at the Dutch, living in the land of eternal sunshine and mild temperatures.

I would love to be able to walk or ride my bike regularly. However, in the southeastern US it’s 80F+ (27C) with 70F+ (21C) dew point for 4 months of the year. If you travel by foot or bike, you need a shower at each destination to wash off the stench and sweat. It’s so hot here, often times your clothing becomes sweaty as soon as you step outside.

I would gladly live somewhere like Denver, Seattle, or San Francisco if money and family ties to the East coast weren’t an issue. Many of the cities with comfortable climates in the US are very expensive. The remaining, affordable cities have undesirable climates.

Pain starts at the third child. Ideally families should have over nine kids each. Unfortunately, we are a dying society that on average doesn't even reach replacement level of children. If you want to think about a city of the future, it might be worth thinking about whether anybody will be around living in those cities.

Millions of people around America get their kids around the neighborhood just fine without a car. If you continue to insist that cities be designed around your limited vision, then you should be forced to pay for the full externalities of your car-centric lifestyle. The rest of us are tired of paying so you can waste our resources.

You need to cite a source for that.

Infact if anything, despite the very very recent free-range kids movement to liberate kids from the dependence on parents, its the opposite - kids get ferried everywhere, from high school sports practice sessions to neighborhood store visits.

http://www.pedbikeinfo.org/pdf/Community_SRTSfederal_Trends....

How do you know they are "just fine"? How do you know their feeling? Have you asked them?

The US currently has about 50 million households with children under 18 and over 250 million cars. There is room for an 80% drop in the number of cars without families with children going car-free.

You see plenty of families with kids making it work on public transportation. I wouldn't have seen very much baseball growing up without the train.

That is demonstrably not true. All over the world, people raise families just fine without cars. As a matter of fact, I saw a truly dystopian scene of a group of children, on some school outing I assume, crossing a road at a crosswalk, all holding on to a long ribbon with two flag-waving adults (teachers?) on both end. When I was the age of these children I was walking around and crossing the streets on my own because the city I grew up didn't have such patently idiotic things as unregulated cross-walks with 30mph speed limit. But no, we'd rather risk running over children and make them walk in a chain gang, than inconvenience the metal murder/fume box people.

Where did you get the "just fine"? You read people's mind on a mass scale, Professor X?

You can get easily insulted for proper choices. Homophobic comments on cycling and veganism are common. I rather believe that we are doomed - that we will destroy nature sufficiently for it to stop producing enough food to sustain us as species - than that we will change.

Humans tend to make changes when there are no other options... and often, after significant damage has been done. Presumably if we "stop producing enough food to sustain us", a lot of humans would die off, but some would survive on the reduced food supply, and make changes to prevent further loss of food. Bear in mind, it's incredibly unlikely that all possible human food sources die off simultaneously.

A good example of change in behavior to ensure survival, is that major powers used to go much more openly to war for territory and resources right up until those powers got the ability to utterly destroy humanity. While there are still countries who are enemies of each other, and who fight small proxy wars and the like, nobody in their right mind would stage an invasion of another major power, likely ever again.

> nobody in their right mind

...until you have a world leader who wonders why we can't use them if we have them.

Often what gets overlooked is the sad state of public transit even in Tier 1 global metropolises. There are far too many annoyances and outright hazards in using public transit, for individuals much less whole families with kids to boot, to list here.

So families even in Europe are opting more and more for SUVs and larger vehicles in general -- which was a total surprise to me and caught me unawares, I have to admit.

Hygiene, safety - from both the riff naff & new developing security threats, peace of mind, convenience, dependability [1][2][3] and more rider options are all major pain points.

Unless cities opt for a class-tiered approach to public transit -- the likes of first class carriages and premium waiting rooms at transit terminals, of yore -- and make public transit safe and even enjoyable to regular people I don't see this trend reversing.

[1]

BART announces what caused massive morning power outage last weekend

https://abc7news.com/traffic/bart-announces-what-caused-mass...

[2]

Single Computer Switch Failure Triggered Saturday’s BART Shut Down

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/03/11/computer-switch...

[3]

BART still unclear on cause of service outage, waiting to hear from tech support

http://www.sfexaminer.com/bart-still-unclear-cause-service-o...

Today's environmental causes suffer from a credibility problem imposed by the mountains of failed breathless malthusian doomsday predictions from yesterday's environmental causes. I've seen the science and believe it, but the boy who cried wolf was also correct, in the end.

Please don't be a credibility problem for tomorrow's environmental causes.

A few decades ago there were hoards of people breathlessly demanding that something be done about the hole in the ozone layer or else we're all doomed. Then we banned CFCs and now the ozone hole is starting to heal itself.

But if we hadn't banned CFCs we would have been doomed. The ozone layer actually is really important.

Now the danger is climate change and what we need is to stop burning carbon. The lesson from past experience is not that everything will be fine if we don't do anything, it's that everything will be fine if we do what is necessary. Everything will not be fine if we don't do what is necessary.

Except for your extrapolation, that's an excellent example, and it needs to be brandied about a hell of a lot more than it is because doing so builds credibility!

My high school science teacher telling me that we were running out of oil and that gas would be $10 a gallon by the time I entered the workforce did not build credibility.

This is an iterated game. The takeaway is that it's important to be right, important to not be wrong, and important to make sure people know it, not that it's important to lie your ass off (sorry, overstate your cause) in a misguided attempt to help.

It's not helping that politicians give lip service to an existential crisis and then bury it in the bottom half of a huge agenda. At this point I'm pretty sure I'm more worried than they are.

Kids is actually a tough case, especially when they're infants. You actually need to haul around a bunch of stuff to take a kid out and transit is rarely design around the needs of parents. Strollers are a pain to get into a bus or train, and often worsen crowding because they're so big. And it's just not practical to have to get car seats in and out of car-shares or cabs. Even in places with well considered transit options, like urban Japan, most people who can afford to have a car prefer to get a car.

Or live in an area (design and build areas) with good childcare options within walking distance. (Where "walking distance" is up to a mile away, not what Americans have gotten used to.)

Modern car seats and LATCH anchors actually make it fairly easy to bring a child car seat with you. I agree with you though, all this stuff is bulky and adds up to a lot of baggage. It makes sense to have a car for your child. But those cars create enormous problems, and car owners should be required to pay to fix them.

For nearly essential services (like child care, groceries, etc.) having a population that must go to one or a few particular establishment(s) out of geographical necessity is a recipe for rent seeking and other bad behavior.