But in the alternate world where we didn't design for cars first, you'd be more used to other forms of transit, and a lot of things would be closer together. In our universe, where most businesses are surrounded by large parking lots, whole cities get sprawled out and everyone's travel times are inflated (regardless of mode of travel).
You don't need an alternate world as you can just look at history. Then we would have to consider why the people chose to adopt and promote cars to bring us into this age.
Come on, dude. A suburban home with a yard isn't a "nightmare," they're actually very desirable to a lot of people. They market themselves. Of course, there's a set of wannabe central planners that dislike that preference because it conflicts with their "vision" for how the plebs should live, so they try to deny that truth.
And those are the communities which were invented and built by central planning, by people saying: "these businesses all need to meet a large parking minimum, and these areas are _only_ allowed to be single family homes, and this other area can _only_ be commercial, and these arterials will then need to have 45 mph speed limits so drivers can get from their homes to the store in a reasonable period, and since they're going fast the lanes should be wide so I guess we won't have room for a bike lane, and only one side of the street can have a sidewalk, and hey what do you know, that really fits with our intention to not put crosswalks except at those intersections every 1/2 mile ...".
Suburbs don't happen without planning, and don't pretend it's only city-dwellers that have a vision for what society should look like. The design of the suburb _coerces_ people to drive by threatening the lives of cyclists and pedestrians, and invariably having poor or slow public transit.
Those aren't nightmares either. Or rather, they're only nightmares if your idea of a nightmare is "alternatives to urban living exist."
Also the selective use of "cookie cutter" as a pejorative is interesting. Everything is cookie cutter, especially dense urban development (e.g. all the rail-adjacent apartment complexes I've seen built in the last decade or two). But of course it's only a problem when we're talking about the trendy-to-hate suburbs.
Almost all those other requirements you complain about follow directly from a desire to live in a quiet neighborhood, and the rest are almost certainly a function of traditional American excessive cost-cutting (e.g. the sidewalks on one side, which are not universal). If people didn't actually want to live in quiet neighborhoods, they'd have stayed in the cities.
> Suburbs don't happen without planning, and don't pretend it's only city-dwellers that have a vision for what society should look like.
You missed my point: suburbs are desirable, but your urban advocate central planners lie and claim they aren't (e.g. they're "nightmares," people only moved there because of "marketing", etc. that have been repeated in this thread).
In that context, it's absurd for you to act like suburbanites are the brow-beaten victims of city-dwellers telling you how to live. People living in the city who don't own cars are paying higher housing costs because of planing policies that demand that developers build more parking, or disallow multi-unit projects. It's the car-folk who are telling everyone else how to live, and have been for decades. The city-residents are also subsidizing the road construction and maintenance and the less efficient emergency services for suburbs in our counties, and the whole planet has to deal with the higher carbon footprint.
For you to frame this as all about individuals just happening to prefer driving and living in suburbs is disingenuous when the policy problems are _all about_ car-centric policies _forcing_ unnecessary constraints onto people. The LA guy in the article that wanted to open a deli but spent 6 figures and multiple years blocked over showing that he was meeting the parking requirements, and then giving up -- why is his desire to open a business less important than your desire to drive and have ample parking wherever you go? Suburban drivers are not the victims here; they are the problem.
That was the second alternate universe scenario. You can make different tradeoffs, and that's one of them. I for one, would not prefer either of the alternate-universe tradeoffs I mentioned, and I know I'm not alone or even unusual in that preference.
It's a bit surprising this is news/debatable to some, but here it goes:
* Traffic is very heavy on those urban highways, making them highly inefficient in transporting people, their main objective; they result in massive amounts of time wasted
* The neighborhoods bulldozed for those urban highways, or near them, suffered immensely. Of course this being the US we're talking about, it was disproportionately poorer and "non-white" communities that suffered, as well as historic/picturesque parts (e.g. some US cities have highways on waterfronts which are super nice places to have as parks).
Ugly, noisy, polluting highways that wall off the undesirables while also being shit at their main task? Yes, urban highways were generally a failure.
Precisely what you see now are wealthy cities (outside of the sunbelt) tearing down old and crumbling urban highways like the Embarcadero in SF and poor cities like Baltimore being stuck with 83 which it can neither afford to maintain or tear down. In the case of 83 it cut right through a thriving working class neighborhood called Old Town which is now abandoned and little more than a skid row. Whereas the neighborhoods around the water that were slated for razing for highway construction but spared are the most thriving neighborhoods in the city. Urban highways were always a giveaway to people who fled to the suburbs at the expense of people who did not. They involved monstrous acts of government takings through imminent domain and eradicated the wealth of generations of people who had their property stolen with only token compensation. And now in the case of Baltimore, no only were multiple neighborhoods destroyed, but the schools that remained near the highway have worse performance which has been repeatedly linked to air pollution from the highway.
My better idea was for the government not to steal peoples' homes and businesses to build highways for people it also subsidized to live elsewhere. This create a double drag on the economies of American cities by depriving them of tax revenue and destroying economic activity.
My grandpa told me about this. Government troops driving him and his family out of their tenement apartment at bayonet point. Marching them, weeping, to a tract home in a suburb with a car in the garage. No one wanted to go, and they all wept for weeks. My grandma was home-bound for years because she refused to step into one of those infernal automobiles, and government forces had bombed all the trolleys. The 1950s was a a very traumatic time for America.
But the policies I’m referring to are around federal home lending programs that only lent money for suburban developments, the construction of interstate highways, paying for “slum clearing” in the 1950, and so on.
But why bother knowing anything about history…
You're too fixated on one variable. You can decrease transit times by increasing density, but then you're cramming people into sardine cans.
Should I hate driving because sometimes my car is filled full of people or items?
You misunderstand. It's an alternate universe headline.