The solution to car problems is not more cars. It's serious alternatives to driving. We don't need Chinese cars. We need trains, busses, and bikes.
It’s a battle worth fighting but public transport infrastructure isn’t going to happen overnight and people will need cars that won’t bankrupt them until then.
Trains need infrastructure, but a lot of the train infrastructure is already there, it just needs to be repaired and modernized. The USA freight network is one of the most comprehensive train networks in the world. The problem is that is has gone through decades of neglect, and trains are required to crawl through a large portion of the network so as to not derail. Urgent modernization of the rail network could happen in years instead of decades.
I agree Americans love their cars, but will they love them with oil prices above $100-$120/barrel persistently? To be determined.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-american-households-hav...
> Personal preference plays a significant role in changing attitudes toward parenthood. Among Americans under 50 without children, 57% said they simply didn’t want kids, while 44% preferred to focus on other priorities. Financial concerns also weighed heavily, with 36% citing the cost of raising children—three times the rate among childless people over 50.
https://www.socialexplorer.com/home/post/the-us-urban-popula...
> According to the 2020–2024 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, approximately 286 million Americans (roughly 94 percent of the population) live in metropolitan statistical areas. Just 17.7 million people, about 6 percent, live entirely outside any metro or micropolitan area.
> The popular image of America as a land of small towns and open plains is, statistically speaking, a minority experience. The story of 21st-century America is, above all, a story of cities.
Your 57% lacks relevance to the current conversation because it is 57% of a small percentage of Americans.
42 to 43% of Americans are either under 18 or a parent of an under-18-yo. Plus of course some outside that group will soon become parents. And some are empty-nesters who prefer to keep on living in the neighborhood they lived in when they were raising their children.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11537490/
https://www.npr.org/2026/04/09/nx-s1-5777587/teen-birth-rate...
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2025/09/older-mothers...
https://www.scrippsnews.com/us-news/number-of-americans-who-...
https://ifstudies.org/report-brief/the-demographic-dead-end-...
https://ifstudies.org/blog/theres-no-mystery-to-americas-fer...
https://ifstudies.org/insights?id=3886
https://ifstudies.org/blog/1-in-4-projecting-childlessness-a...
Desired family size is still 2.7 kids, and has been stable at that number for over 50 years: https://news.gallup.com/poll/694640/americans-ideal-family-s...
A growing gap between how many kids people want and how many they have militates against copying the dense housing patterns of Asian countries that have the lowest birth rates in the world.
https://ourworldindata.org/which-countries-have-already-pass...
https://ourworldindata.org/population-simulation-tool
Terra Incognita: The Economics of a Shrinking World [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49352811 - August 2026
The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)
The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival - https://www.suerf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/f_fa99ccdbe... - SUERF Policy Note, Issue No 197, October 2020
“Talk is cheap, show me the fertility rate.”
Sure, people are having less kids because we banned building housing and then filled the housing we have with government subsidized illegal immigrants. What’s your point?
~40% of annual pregnancies in both the US and internationally are unintended (per the Guttmacher Institute and the UN, respectively), so even with fertility rates down in teens and the 21-40 cohort, we still have a long way to go in preventing unwanted pregnancies and children (which translates into a further declining fertility rate curve forward looking, model accordingly).
Birthgap - https://youtube.com/watch?v=m2GeVG0XYTc (two hours, but substantiates every assertion I’ve made, provided as an additional supporting citation)
I assist thousands of folks a year seeking permanent birth control obtain it, mostly the childfree but occasionally someone who already has a kid or two, ama; this is the cheapest, easiest win as it relates to avoiding suffering around unwanted children, and the emotional, time, and monetary costs of unwanted children at scale is simply too high. The historical total fertility rate was because women were not educated and empowered; forward looking fertility rate is the true neutral rate.
> The historical total fertility rate was because women were not educated and empowered; forward looking fertility rate is the true neutral rate
It’s not possible for an outcome that would result one extinction of the species to be the “true neutral rate.” Rather, even if what you say is true (and I think it isn’t given people’s stated preference for 2-3 kids) what you’re seeing is a social contagion that will self correct when child-agnostic cultures die out in favor of cultures in which having children confers higher social status.
The only culture whose fertility rate isn't declining and converging around 0.5-1 is those in Israel, and they're going to have to figure out how to support themselves economically as the US tilts away from doing so due to political winds changing.
Good luck to those desiring "children confering high social status" as inflation continues to increase and the cost of everything increases long into the future due to climate change and structural demographics shrinking working age populations globally. Being poor sucks, everyone figures this out eventually, and the future will not be as nice as the recent past was. Kids have a cost, can those who want them for status afford them? We'll find out soon enough.
Hard to take you seriously as a “researcher” when you apply antisemitic tropes to math. Israel’s GDP is about $700 billion, and growing at 3% (that’s $20 billion) a year. US aid is about $3 billion a year.
It’s one thing to mime the meme for shits and giggles, but you’re now trying to use that in a rational argument.
U.S. Muslims and Mormons both have a total fertility rate well above replacement (2.2-2.5). https://news.rakwa.com/2025/08/29/muslim-and-arab-fertility-...
Muslim Americans are among the most highly educated demographics in the U.S., and Mormons are around the average. So it’s definitely possible without turning the clock back before women had education and choices.
The same is true for the definition of “childless” people. It counts my parents, who don’t have children living at home, but have my kids coming over to their house multiple times per week. Only 15% of women never have children. Most people arrange their living circumstances with the goal of eventually having kids. And once the kids grow up and leave, most people want to stay in the same area.
I'm sorry to shatter the dreams of most Americans, but the world has finite resources. Buying a car when you're poor is hard, because cars are expensive, because they are extremely resource demanding. Even with all the subsidies drivers receive, they still usually struggle with the cost.
By the way, you don't have to look at public transit schedules when your public transit works. I recommend visiting countries outside the US that have functional infrastructure.
I go to Japan once or twice a year. Even in Japan, many people take regional rail or (gasp!) busses, and those don't run every 5 minutes.
we pay our government to point guns at other people, so that resources become their problem and not ours
Never happens on the timescale of the next decade, maybe two. How far along is California high speed rail? When did they start?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail (construction began in 2015 and it won’t be operational until at least 2031, 16 years later) If you break ground today, you won’t see new public infrastructure operational for at least a decade. Brightline light rail was built in Florida and is approaching insolvency, even with 3M riders per year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline
We could provide subsidies to move the disadvantaged to major urban cores with public transportation systems, I’d support that. Have to find the funds to do it though. Cheaper than trying to build anything new in the US for sure.
https://dailyyonder.com/half-of-all-rural-counties-are-losin...
https://ecpmlangues.unistra.fr/civilization/geography/map-us...
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/poverty-area-measures...
(Where will those bikes, busses, and trains you mention be built? China, as they are 1/3rd of global manufacturing capacity)
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.”
Consider the US has $40T in debt and no will to raise taxes at this time, and therefore no will to spend on public infrastructure projects. Where will the capital come from?
How and when will we start? How many elections need to occur to appropriate funding? How much of the US electorate has to turn over for the right people to be elected to appropriate funding? Until shovels are in the ground, it’s vaporware and dreams.
The mayor of Carmel, IN thought traffic circles were better than intersections and wanted more mixed use development. They have that now, nearly every intersection in the city has been replaced over time as they were due for routine work.
In Detroit they are in the process of building out a 29 mile greenway around the city.
These city level projects are a lot more important than the national ones, when it comes to reducing car traffic in cities and having an impact on people’s most frequent trips.
Seeing this at a local level could inspire more rail connections between cities, which could also come from the private sector. We have already seen a couple examples of this.
For anything funded by the federal government, you’re right. They have a huge mess on their hands, and need to get serious about cleaning it up. They have no business kicking of any major public works projects until that happens (though that has never stopped them in the past). But at a local level, things can still move forward and we are seeing it happen to some extent, though it often still feels more like a hobby than a firm conviction.