EV bikes sure. price and weight of good EV bike dropped for last 5 years.
Road tripping. Visiting far away family. Day at the lake or beach. Going camping. How do you convince people to give all of that up and just be content with whatever is 15min away.
The USA subsidizes the suburbs to an absurd degree, pushing most of the costs into the future and making city dwellers pay more than their share for the rest.
Living in a relatively large house in the suburbs should in principle cost several times more than living in a flat in the city, because it requires vastly more infrastructure and the amortized cost of services is much higher. But our broken economic system has flipped this around and made suburbs extremely artificially cheap, while making most of the building practices that make denser walkable neighborhoods possible illegal under building codes and local ordinances.
All for a back yard that’s rarely used and worse in just about every way than a nice park.
What they are is a cheap imitation of the wealthy enclaves near cities that only work because so few people can afford to live in them. You can imitate such buildings cheaply, what you can’t do is build or maintain the support structures which made such places so appealing.
Social norms also vary widely, first graders in Tokyo take public transportation to school alone. This isn’t inherently unsafe or unreasonable.
Sorry if the question is naive, I don't live in USA.
Building around roads results in everything being pushed farther away and that includes other people’s homes too.
Do kids attending the same school really live that far apart? Seems like a very long distance, especially in a suburbian neighbourhood.
Typically, those old suburbs were originally built around train stations or street car lines, which influenced their design. The newer ones were designed around access by car and zoning prevents any non residential land uses nearby.
Wealthy parts of cities have vastly better schools and less crime than the average suburbs, but the American middle class abandoned cities. Air pollution again can go either way, suburbs often have surprisingly terrible air quality made worse by long commutes.
Of course the suburbs don’t make sense, you have a half mile of road out to a neighborhood and another half mile of street in the neighborhood itself. The percentage of property taxes going to the road is probably just a few percent points. With only a few hundred houses, it would take decades to raise the 1-3 million to replace the road.
My suburban neighborhood also has a metro tax district that funds the roads sewers etc.
In either case, the suburbanites (especially near the beginning of the construction cycle) and initial construction companies are getting a huge subsidy from everyone else (and from future generations) to promote an inherently unsustainable and destructive living arrangement.
It's a kind of Ponzi scheme, and like any other Ponzi scheme, at some point the music stops and then the whole system is in an extremely precarious place.
And underused parking lots. Dear god the huge, empty parking lots.
The upside of how sparse American suburbs are is that we can repurpose all the junk/wasted land with normal market incentives. Roads can be thinned and the land handed back to the owners of that land, along with the setbacks that are used to force people to maintain water-intensive lawns[1]. Upzoned buildings can be redeveloped to higher density or turned into small commercial stores as market forces dictate. Anyone who wants to hold out can still do so.
None of this requires absolutely banning cars[2]. People will stop driving as cars become less necessary for daily suburban life. Road trips can still happen. So instead of families with three or four cars, maybe they only have one or two. As car infrastructure is used less, it can be repurposed for transit networks that don't suck - i.e. BRT, light rail, or tram systems with dedicated rights of way.
"15 minute city" doesn't mean "you should only ever travel 15 minutes on foot and anything further will be stopped by the pollution police". It means "building a city so that everything you need is closer and more convenient".
[0] Surface street / highway combos, i.e. roads with 3 lanes on each side, highway speed traffic, no pedestrian infrastructure, and business access. They try to do everything and fail at everything.
[1] Incidentally this was sold as a way to stop communism, somehow
[2] OK, but can we still at least ban the giant Escalade mega-SUVs that let you run down like ten kids without even seeing them
You could also rent a car for the 5 or so days a year the average person is doing anything other than commuting, shopping, and other local activities.