This is not comparing apples and oranges and ignores all the existing sunk costs.
Promote trains when we (in the US) build a rail system as well run as Japan's.
Driving: 3 hours: 51 minutes (plus pee breaks) Amtrak: 3 hours 55 minutes
Boston to DC you have much better tracks on the NYC to DC segment
driving: 8 hours (plus pee breaks) Amtrak: 6 hours 45 minutes
as for a wider range of activities, only if you don't get motion sick. When I'm on a train, my only activity is staring out the window (and taking pee breaks)
But this isn't really the case. Suberbia was is a created artificial environment propped up by massive subsidies and supported with lots of other policies, on the local, state and national level.
Sure its easy to live further out in suberbia because the friendly government plowed threw a minority neighborhood so you can have a highway to downtown. Those people not wanting highways across where they lived was not considered when people wanted to have a lawn. And of course those nice lawn didn't even pay for the highway either.
The US was built for and with the train. And by 1940 US cities were not very different from cities in other places. In the 1950s something crazy happened and pretty much all of a sudden every town sprawled out 5x as far as it did the previous 200 years despite population growth being slower then before. But I guess that was just totally natural as people wanted larger yards.
And people didnt like it
> In the 1950s something crazy happened
This was the response to not liking crowded cities while having access to cars
> Suberbia was is a created artificial environment propped up by massive subsidies and supported with lots of other policies, on the local, state and national level.
Sure, but those subsidies arent going away because the people who benefit have political power. The highways arent going away either.
I certainly dont think suburbia is "natural." It absolutely is the result of the desire of the population though.
I read this sentence more like this, "And people didnt like it because the marketing told them they'd like the suburbs better".
In Japan, people will not stay in the countryside / suburbs, young people do everything they can to move to cities. There is absolutely zero marketing, they just find cities attractive. More money, better careers, better social scene. This is why I disagree that it's "natural" because if it was true, why are cities so popular in Asia?
Cities have existed for a very long time and people love living in them.
Most people I know live in Suburbs because the idea of investing in property is considered a wise one, and buying a house in the suburbs is a way to get into property ownership at a more affordable level, not because living in a suburb is a romantic idea.
Rural living is a different thing altogether though.
That just false and even if it was true Suberbia wasnt the right answer and yet that is the answer that was politically picked.
> This was the response to not liking crowded cities while having access to cars
No it was a response to massive amount of government intervention and racism. Public housing and other subsidies were given in huge quantities to enable that type of development. And at the same time massive investment was put into widing roads, building highways and so on.
At the same time that was happening you had zoning and redlining. Redlining destroyed or harmed investment in the city centers. And zoning made continous development outright illigal.
So your whole stick of 'its all just naturally because of people desires' is just factually wrong.
> Sure, but those subsidies arent going away because the people who benefit have political power.
And they certintly wont go away if people like you contine to spread lies and propganda. And it wont go away if the people who live in the poor neiberhoods or the city proper don't even know they are being exploted.
And they wont go away unless cities start to correctly account for the cost of the development they are persuing.
Many cities are bankrupt and that a direct result of bad development patterns that dont pay for themselves.
But the thing is highways can actually go away. Removal of Urban highways has been a thing, many have done it and more communities want to do it. Go and actually inform yourself.
At the same time many town actually try to understand their finances and try to figure out how they can develop a real urban center and have sustainable development.
Go look at the work of Urban3 is you want see the real finacial data.
Opinions change over time. Of course not all highways will go away. And of course some people will want to live in suberbia even they had to pay their own cost.
However neiter of those things mean that baseline policy should or couldn't change.
You can look at all sorts of metrics indicating this change is happening.
An attitude of things are as they are because of the inherent unchangable desires of the population and thus things can never change is the kind of argument I would not expect on HN.
> It absolutely is the result of the desire of the population though.
Governemnt sububsidy lead to a situation where it was cheaper to get a loan and buy a house in the suburbs compared to even public housing in the city. Of course only for white people, Jews, Negros, Asians and even some italians were excluded.
So the minorities pay for everything a lot and dont get any investment, the. redlined and destroyed their neiberhood and they could even privatly invest. Then everybody realized that living in the suburbs was shit and all the jobs and entertainment was in the city. So you plowed a highway threw the minority communities so Joe Miller can drive to his job threw the former minority neiberhood.
But yeah that outcome is what 'the people' wanted and therefore its totally and exactly what should have happen.
Do you not realize what the problem with your whole narrative is?
In terms of justice or whatnot sure. But the world isnt fair. Arguments based on fairness will never work. Americans do not want to live like the japanese, they want to be in suburbia. And they have the political power to make that happen, so it will.
You thinking I said highways cant go away makes it hard to believe youre talking to me in good faith. Obviously they can, but they wont, because voters dont want them to. And they never will in the vast majority of the US.
> An attitude of things are as they are because of the inherent unchangable desires of the population and thus things can never change is the kind of argument I would not expect on HN.
I certainly dont think desires are unchangeable. I just realize that Americans deeply value personal space and there is absolutely no change of desires anywhere on the horizon, however much you and I may wish there was. Things change when people want them to, but most americans do not want suburbia to change.
Because 40 years of policies have made that the primary option and most Americans don't even understand other forms of living. They think of urban as New York City or poor cheap Appartements where poor people live.
You literally have made alternative forms of living illigal in most of the US, thus most people don't even have the option.
The few places that do exist with good urbanism generally are very expensive and often can be expanded because of zoning laws and other legal issues.
> I just realize that Americans deeply value personal space
Funny how somehow Americans weren't that special in valuing social space into the 1930s and then somehow starting in the later 30 and then increasingly in the 50/60 they did. Crazy continence that this happened right at the same time as a massive state drive to subsidize that style of living. Its almost like its not inherent but rather constructed.
Funny how living in Russian cities and living in US cities in the 1920 weren't that difference and then the two states started subsidizing/legally mandating radically different models. And then, just by coincidence I'm sure, most Americans mostly now live exactly like US government policy wanted and most former Soviet people live exactly like Soviet policy wanted.
So your explanation for this that some how around 1920-1930 the US and Soviet culture radically changed and all of a sudden US culture preferred more space and Soviet culture preferred modernism. Crazy, its almost like culture responses to incentives and laws.
Simply because people like something doesn't mean it happens. The world has constraints.
And those constraints negotiate between what people want and what makes sense in the real world.
When you literally steam roll the constraints, make alternatives worse and literally flatten whole parts of cities to make things happen. Then that not a simply outcome of 'desire for more space'.
Roads in subburbs aren't so absurdly large because of a desire for more space. Absurdly oversized lawns aren't actually that practical or useful (not to mention costly and environmental disaster).
Your story of 'space above all else' simply doesn't hold up. Yes people want space, but they also want lots of other things. Its a balance. And if you do radical intervention to shift the balance you influence the result.
The simply reality is that one of the driving forces of many suburban developments was that it was simply illegal for black people to move there. In fact, after a wguke prices in parts of the city were so low that you could get a whole lot more space for not so much money. And yet still many people moved to suberbia.
Its almost as if massive investment in on thing and massive disinvestment in the other leads to people wanting to move where the investment is.
Make it easy to build ADUs or upsize detached single family houses and you can double the number of people living in many neighborhoods in a decade or less simply by not preventing existing demands.