Not a solution, just an observation. If cars weren't really a thing, people would live in denser communities with walkable services (I include rural communities in this. Pre-car villages are pretty dense, and have, you know, things like shops, etc.).
That's also about what people can walk in a day (Appalachian Trail through-hikers do about 3 miles per hour).
Now, trained trail horses can go far further in a day, but they require specialized training, food, and care, making them a very expensive plow-horse or cart-horse.
None of this can be done immediately, but it can be phased-in over a sensible amount of time. Shame we didn't start 30 years ago.
Also, it's certainly fair to be in favor of something and to have an opinion. It's a different matter to get a bill written and passed by democratic legislators. When it isn't (because let's be real, America is not restructuring it's entire lifestyle), is that fair?
E.g. the damage to communities from being in isolated residences in unwalkable communities where kids cannot freely play outside has no dollar amount.
That rather depends on exactly what we're talking about. CO2 can be stripped from the atmosphere, for example. It's just somewhat expensive.
>E.g. the damage to communities from being in isolated residences in unwalkable communities where kids cannot freely play outside has no dollar amount.
Sure it does. Even deaths have reasonably well established values, legally speaking. And things like expected future medical costs or lost productivity are much more straightforward to assign a value.
For global warming, the cost of the damage is astronomical.
I wonder why people aren't jumping at the chance to move into dense cities?
America is totally governmentally dysfunctional and I have no solution (I'm not American, I live in the UK, which is not that much better.)