If this is what you want then you should look at cities that developed pre-World War II or look at creating your own. Cities that are "car centric" are less about some obsession with cars and more that people buying a place to live didn't want to live in dense urban areas: https://www.newgeography.com/content/004453-urban-cores-core... One comment that stuck out to me on this page was:
> The central cities with the largest functional urban core percentages have overwhelmingly suffered large population losses. Among the 25 with the largest urban core shares, only seven were at their peak populations at the 2010 census, and only two of the top 18 (New York and San Francisco). Overall the cities with large functional cores lost more than 35 percent of their population and 8 million residents.
Given this stark difference in preferences, why can we not have cities designed to be carless and cities that are designed to include cars as well as other modes of transportation? I live in Portland where I'm walking distance from the train station, have multiple bus stops around my house, and the average street speed is 30 mph. I can drive ten minutes down the road to get lumber, feed, etc and avoid paying an $80 delivery fee which probably doesn't sound like much until you need to reorder a single board and pay $86 for a $6 2x4.
Takes like this don't help, imo:
> Make our infra as difficult as possible for these modern SUVs and trucks and suddenly the office workers commuting from age Styx will decrease
This kind of message, intended or not, is hostile, divisive, and non-inclusive.
I find it hard to take any mention of "preference" at face value in these sort of conversation.
People arguing for suburbs never, ever, ever acknowledge that the only reason that costs are cheaper outside of cities is because huge amounts of money are taken from those cities to fund the suburbs.
Much of this money shifting is done at the federal level (subsidized HUD/USDA loans, huge grants, regulations that massively favor cars) so there is no escaping it by moving around in the US. Some states are better about the balance, but there is no getting away from it.
> huge amounts of money are taken from those cities to fund the suburbs.
Isn't this just a more crude representation of "we live in a society"? In my city I pay a tax that allows people to have child day care despite being childless. I pay a tax that funds local schools despite not attending one and not having a kid. I pay a tax that goes to make agricultural products cheaper. I pay a tax that subsidizes medical care. Would you object to those as well, or are those okay? Additionally, many of the things you've described as subsidizing suburbs also subsidize cities. HUD would need to exist even if we lived in dense urban areas. USDA, the US Department of Agriculture, would still need to issue loans to farmers unless you believe that only massive farm operations should exist, and grants still fuel much of city development: https://www.hud.gov/press/press_releases_media_advisories/hu....
In my view cities, suburbs, and rural areas are an intertwined ecosystem that cannot exist without each other. Try to remove one or expand one too much without the other and bad things happen. This argument that cities subsidize everybody else ignores that cities are largely reliant on goods, services, and workers from outside of said city.
> The central cities with the largest functional urban core percentages have overwhelmingly suffered large population losses. Among the 25 with the largest urban core shares, only seven were at their peak populations at the 2010 census, and only two of the top 18 (New York and San Francisco). Overall the cities with large functional cores lost more than 35 percent of their population and 8 million residents.
Given this stark difference in preferences, why can we not have cities designed to be carless and cities that are designed to include cars as well as other modes of transportation? I live in Portland where I'm walking distance from the train station, have multiple bus stops around my house, and the average street speed is 30 mph. I can drive ten minutes down the road to get lumber, feed, etc and avoid paying an $80 delivery fee which probably doesn't sound like much until you need to reorder a single board and pay $86 for a $6 2x4.
Takes like this don't help, imo:
> Make our infra as difficult as possible for these modern SUVs and trucks and suddenly the office workers commuting from age Styx will decrease
This kind of message, intended or not, is hostile, divisive, and non-inclusive.