You can’t do public transit right in areas that are insufficiently densely populated, like the vast majority of the US. There’s simply not enough people to be able to pay for the costs.
Suburbia on the other hand makes us all worse off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVUeqxXwCA0&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ...
I don’t think dense living energy usage is only marginally less due to the extra distance all the mass has to travel. And with current technology, the energy used is basically a proxy for pollution.
The more mass you move (water, sewage, gas, waste, supplies, people) longer distances, the more you pollute. I.e. the more space you use, the more you pollute. Just like using most other material resources.
It's not marginal at all, but a huge difference. Rich inner suburbs ("Democrat suburbs" you might say) are the worst polluters per capita, and urban and some truly rural areas the best, but the truly rural case absolutely doesn't scale.
I'm sorry, but your boats-the-shed fantasyland is slowly killing us all.
Getting rid of cars would solve that problem regardless of density.
> large public parks
Denser everything else frees up more space for parks. (I sometimes think of a "fractal density" which is high on average but has tons of variation to keep things beautiful.)
You are saying at best make them less bad, but used just as often? Forget other universe, what about the other countries that successfully do what I speak of?
If your lifestyle is inherently non sustainable or non scalable, then you only get to live it because you're at the top of a pyramid scheme.
But we're already running over budget on the resources we do have, https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/past-earth-overshoot-d....
Unless we want to accept some kind of extreme depopulation events (either by choice or by systemic failure) then we have to learn to live a lot more efficiently than we do now. And the long term costs of running suburbs are not fully internalized to the people choosing to live like that.
Expecting perpetual economic growth without densification is equally absurd.
A good example is ST3 in the Seattle area. Seattleites and their neighbors overwhelmingly supported the expensive and radical expansion of the rapid transit system in the area and were more then willing to pay the increased taxes for it... Opposition came mostly from the eastern parts of the state even though the taxes are only to be collected in the proximate areas to the expansion.
In fact I can’t recall any examples of people calling for the cancellation of existing public transit. The backlash is usually against planed expansions from distant areas.
I’ve seen a few places on the East coast where voters resonate with political candidates that decry the subsidies to public transit, and call for increases in fares or decrease in frequency of bus/train service.