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Notes -
Focusing on just the cars & suburbs bit:
This doesn't necessarily mean that suburbs & cars are the best way to do things. First, there may be selection bias -- people who don't want suburbs and cars probably have a higher tendency to stay in the urban environments in their home countries, and not migrate to the US at all. Secondly, we do have somewhat of a subsidy on this kind of lifestyle, with a lot of tax money going to roads rather than public transit, and cars have substantial unpriced externalities, compared to other kinds of transit. So it's not surprising that with the incentives in place, a lot of people will choose this lifestyle. A supermarket with a loss-leader of roast chicken is going to sell a lot of roast chickens.
Cowen says:
Not every European city used to be the way that it is now. Some of them bought part-way into car culture, then changed plans after realizing the enormous cost (Amsterdam, for example). And there are American cities that have made some great changes in this direction too. It doesn't have to happen overnight.
And as for "just get [almost] everyone a car"... There are adolescents, elderly, visually impaired or otherwise disabled people who can't drive, and are often mostly locked out of participation in society if they don't have someone who can drive them around. To be fair, telecommuting has partially alleviated this for some people.
For everyone who can drive, cars are really not cheap to own or run, even discounting all the aforementioned externalities. While Americans tend to have higher income, I think a big part of why life is decent in many European countries for the average person is that you don't have this essentially mandated cost of car ownership.
Well, having just visited Amsterdam, I was super impressed - until I realized that the population of Amsterdam is less than a million people. That's shockingly tiny! I'm not sure that the bike culture scales beyond that.
But overall I agree that IF you pair more mass transit with infill higher-density housing, you can definitely make portions of American cities into European-like ones. And then you can connect higher-density areas with something like, I dunno, BART or something. Critically, you still need to do the infill housing bit to make it work, though.
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