Surely the top way to avoid traffic congestion would be communities where it's possible to live near where you work, shop, go out, etc. and not doing everything else exactly the same but taking a slightly different highway in your car
The more your preferences or financial constraints come into play, the more you have to give up.
Most people settle in for driving because it allows them to pick from more job options than those that happen to be located near their house and more housing options than what happens to be near your job.
This didn’t matter as much 200 years ago when most people’s job options were limited to farming or something in service of farming.
It got much harder when the range of people’s jobs exploded and finding a company hiring in your specialty meant traveling some distance from home.
It gets even harder when there are two earners in a household trying to find two jobs.
Perhaps the problem is the lack of options for those people that want human-centric (versus car-centric) communities. Maybe if we let The Market™ decide, versus forcing low-density sprawl via zoning, more options would be available.
Right now, if you look on any real estate web site, you'll probably find walkable neighbourhoods have higher prices non-walkable ones: there is demand for them, but a fixed supply since they're not being made anymore, and so they get bid up. Perhaps if there were more of them, especially around commuter rail stations, it would help.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaU1UH_3B5k
For example deed restrictions, where, when a sub-division is created, the use case of the lots can never be changed. See also "residential buffering ordinance", parking requirement ordinance, historic districts, etc.
And the market doesn’t build the streets, sidewalks, or set up public transport routes.
I remember visiting my friend in an 400+ unit apartment complex in Houston. When I got up in the morning I was like “hey I’m going to walk down and get coffee.” My friend said to just Uber Eats it, I was like that’s insane. So I went down to the ground floor and found out there was literaly no way to walk to the coffee shop that was 0.1 miles away less than 30 minutes because of the absolute nightmare that is Huston streets and sidewalks.
Yup.
And even if you arent't picky. The amount of surface area you can cover scales quadratically with the distance you can commute (either by traveling longer, or by going faster). So as a first approximation, the amount of competition for your labour also goes up quadratically.
Job-hopping is one of the best ways to get better jobs. And it is a LOT easier if you can commute further.
Most jobs, not all, can take place inside a city. If you build your cities densely, people can live and work within the city and have all their needs met without the need for a car (see: the great cities of the world)
If you design economic hubs properly, businesses can be located within reach of homes without the need for cars.
If you instead prioritize the need for, I don’t know, a monoculture lawn and separation from lower class people, then you’re choosing to build suburbs. Once a city has built enough suburbs, businesses become out of reach without the use of a car.
Then there are all the social problems, bad neighbours that become more common in densely built areas. I don't want to deal with that. Suburbs are popular because they provide a superior quality of life for many people.
Of course in an ideal world everyone would be allowed to do fully remote work if possible, and people like me could move to countryside.
All these jobs had homes and shops within walking distance. But they are not within walking distance of each other.
Most people do not want to live in dense cities in high rises.
The number of jobs which cannot be moved into dense city high rises is much higher than you’re thinking. It might seem that way if your world is office jobs and email jobs, but there’s much more to the world of work than that.
Dense cities also have very high turnover as people grow up and want families.
It’s not about having lawns and staying away from “lower class people”. This feels like a poor attempt to cast moral shade on people who choose not to live in a high rise.
It is very clear you have never lived in a well functioning city before, and just have no idea what you are talking about. Take the L and admit you just don’t have experience with it. North Americans often don’t because North American cities are extremely bad in this regard.
Like if “the things that brings me most joy in life require owning lots of land” or “I don’t like people and every day I have to be near them drains me”, those are really valid reasons and there are many more.
What that tells me is either they have a caricature of cities in their head, or (more likely) being anti city is an identity and not based on anything actually about cities per-say.
There used to be natural agglomeration to central well connected nodes before the car. Many cities enacted height limits in the early 1900s with the specific aim to spread out development that was dense enough to make serving basic infrastructure, such as water, power, transit, and cleaning the mounting horseshit off the roads, increasingly expensive and difficult. Early real estate barons would buy marginal land and develop a streetcar line that ran into the job center, and sell plots off that line now that it finally had some utility in the form of a connection to jobs. Even if you worked in something specialized back then, chances are it was close to where most other people were working. Offices were downtown. Government buildings were downtown. Hospitals were downtown. Manufacturing was downtown. Ports and railheads were downtown. All of that snowballing enjoyed by cities exploded with the car.
Have you ever heard of trains, busses, bikes? The options for transportation are not binary car or no car. Maybe in North America where they refuse to provide even crappy public transport in most cities it feels this way, but in the rest of the world they are smart enough to build trains and don’t have this problem.
Per employee tax = $0.20 * commute_miles * 2 * (commute_miles / 10)^2 * mandated_office_days_per_year * (1 + 2 * share_of_workforce_over_10_miles)^2
Tech companies can have more distributed offices and assign employees based on geography instead of teams, go back to WFH, pay employees enough to live close to their mega campuses, or pay out the ass into adding more lanes.
Apartments can also have stuff you could never afford that a kid would like, such as a massive pool (try pricing out a new build pool these days).
And families do it in NYC, and Hong Kong, and Germany, and Spain (AFAICT, 65%), and…
Think about having to share a bedroom with your child, and when they're old enough to need their own one, putting up a partition wall and having each be less than half the size of a normal bedroom, very cramped. And you don't get a living room. (If you did have a living room, now it's your bedroom while the child gets the actual bedroom)
Okay, let's stop spending money on roads then.
How are you at riding your bike through mud? Pretty good? Got nice chunky tyres?
That's not actually true, and the paper that describes the "fourth power" thing even says that right up front.
If you massively oversimplify the model so that you've got all vehicles fitted with infinitely hard bicycle tyres on a perfectly smooth surface, it kind of works out, but not quite.
How do you plan on getting food?
How does food get to the shop at the end of your street?
Bicyclists were the ones to first push for paved roads:
* https://www.history.com/articles/good-roads-movement-bicycli...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_American_Bicyclists#...
Or a small town that is surrounded by farms.
Just avoid suburban housing as far as the eye can see with a limited number of roads everyone gets funneled on to.
Congestion pricing is a regressive tax.
Used car prices are more like 10k now anyway. Used Mercedes, probably 40k.
You could live where you work and suddenly your next job is a 30 min drive away.
How could you ensure that enough companies existing within a 10 mile radius to provided varied employment to all the residents?
I dont even know what this would look like in practice. It feels like an inner city thing, lifestyle priced accordingly.
What Socialists/Communists/Liberals/Conservatives/Local and State Governments/Weird Internet Tech Bros all seem to forget is that people have different priorities, and you cant build 1 house that suits every priority.
I am house hunting at the moment, and houses optimised for walking to shops are at the low end, when what I need is a big yard for my kid to run around in and a shed for my blacksmithing tools (and ideally neighbors far enough away that they dont mind metal being banged on in the morning) while also being within reasonable driving distance of a few of the sites I work at.