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I've never driven, or owned, a car.
I hate "car culture" as it developed in the years after 1945 because of how ugly and unlivable it made nearly every American community. Six- or eight-lane arterial roads, lined with strip malls, fast-food places, Walmarts etc. (interspersed with car-related businesses such as gas stations, auto dealerships, tire stores, muffler shops, etc. which take up huge amounts of space), every one with an enormous parking lot that one has to walk through (I can't even count how many hours of my life have been wasted just walking through parking lots) while keeping an eye out that some distracted moron might run me down.
The sidewalks are invariably empty except for the homeless, the poorest of the immigrants, or once in a great while a dog-walker.
All that wasted space which could have been used for housing.
Bus stops, most without a shelter, for buses that run every half hour or even every hour (less than that if it's snowing or raining).
Neighborhoods with nothing but houses, on winding streets (many without sidewalks). For mile after mile after mile. No corner grocery stores, no corner pubs, nothing to walk to unless you're buddies with all your neighbors.
In the US, there is no such thing anymore as an affordable, safe, walkable urban neighborhood. There are smaller cities and towns with affordable housing - but with no jobs, very little shopping or cultural institutions, with a huge fraction of their population bombed out on opiates or meth.
If I want to visit any "outdoors" destination - beach, mountains, national parks - that's just out of the question because there are no trains or buses that go there.
Thanks a fucking heap, Henry Ford and postwar urban planners.
I agree. But in America, the car is the main method of insulation from the domestic underclass. If Los Angeles and San Francisco, let alone Chicago and Philadelphia, let alone St Louis and Baltimore and New Orleans, were as clean and safe as Hong Kong and Singapore, and had their quality of public transport, this debate would be unnecessary.
It's not even that Americans can't build public transport - Los Angeles has built out its subway and light rail network pretty vigorously since the late 1990s, and it has some of the worst imaginable 'natural conditions' for mass transit given its sprawl - it's that inevitably it is taken over by scum and governments do not appear willing to prevent them from ruining it. The only major exceptions are NYC, which is still pretty grotty but 'saved' by the sheer volume of regular passengers, and D.C., which is by far the cleanest system in the US because it's patrolled very heavily (particularly downtown) and was built largely by the federal government.
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For what reason would we want to tile the land with housing?
There's actually plenty of buses which go to such places. They're slow and inflexible, but such is the nature of public transit.
Yes. What good is paradise if there's no place to park? People want to go places, and not only do they want to go to different places, they're coming from different places and they want to go at different times. This makes the problem of mass transit difficult, and the usual solution of a 3-seat ride (low-speed collection, high-speed trunk, low-speed distribution) for more popular destinations (and worse for less popular ones) is terrible.
Because there's a severe shortage of affordable housing in every city in the US and Canada which is worth living in.
Somebody needs to build the walkable equivalent of a thousand Levittowns, starter housing which can be easily paid for on the salary of a single working-class adult - and not a highly-paid one, either.
There's plenty of housing available in the existing "levittowns". The problem is that there are a small number of cities in US and Canada that you and many others consider "worth living in", and a relatively small amount of housing within those cities, hence high prices. Eliminating commercial development in the suburbs and building housing there only makes nearby suburbs less desirable (because people need places to buy things); it does nothing about the cost of housing in the places you consider "worth living in".
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Without onerous zoning regulations, the office buildings could simply be built outside those cities, making the cities superfluous.
Dense, expensive urban centers are dead. The true vision of the future is an unending low-density sprawl of cheap single-family houses interspersed with office-building complexes.
Well, no, the evidence is clear. The richest people in the world, who could live and conduct business from anywhere, choose to live disproportionately in expensive urban centers rather than in sprawling suburban or exurban estates. They would rather a five bedroom penthouse over central park than a hundred-room gilded age mansion on Long Island or in Westchester. When they ski, they have chalets in dense, walkable, chocolate-box little towns like Gstaad and Courchevel. Even many of the most 'elite' warm destinations, like St Barths and Monaco and Cannes and even parts of Miami, are pretty dense. One of the great innovations of the American upper class - in Newport in the late 19th century - was building their mansions close together, not because they had to but because it seemed to make more sense.
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