Take a look at a typical suburban shopping center. The stores are single-story buildings and yet there's still significantly more acreage devoted to parking than to the store itself. Yes, it's good for the economy of a city when people from outlying areas commute in for work and shopping. But there's a huge opportunity cost when you size all your infrastructure to accommodate a car for every commuter and then render the city so inaccessible to pedestrians that most of the city's residents also need to get cars and the roads and parking lots need to be expanded even more to accommodate that. If those commuters were coming in to the city by public transit or driving their cars to a parking deck and carrying out their business mostly on foot, they'd provide the same economic benefit to the city as a whole without making the urban lifestyle impossible and requiring even the minimum-wage shop employees to own a car.

The commuters aren't the problem. Their cars are.

For certain trips like residential cluster A to residential cluster B. Add in a realistic scenario like commuting to work from your residential tower to a warehouse job in a low density light industrial zone and cars will be faster every time. I live in a place with supposedly world class public transportation and it still makes very little sense to take public transportation outside a few scenarios. Most realistic trips you're looking at 2-3 times the travel time you would have by car, even during rush hour.

Here's the thing: public transit does not function in a vacuum. You can't build public transit solely based on current traffic patterns, because the presence of good transport (say, a new rail line) will irrevocably alter traffic patterns.

This means that, if you build a new rail line, you pretty much have to (eg.) change zoning near stations. Is rezoning to allow denser housing "an instrument for various social policies"? Most likely yes, but it's also the sensible thing to do!

Why not? Cities were redesigned from 1940s-60s to be compatible with cars. It took an enormous amount of capital, but it was done because of the promise of a new technology.

Most of the infrastructure in suburbs currently under construction will be tear-downs in 30 years. The only redesign that needs to happen is letting current developments age out, removing restrictions on denser and multi-use architecture closer to the city center, and pricing utilities by effective utilization (suburbs use more utilities but don't pay more for them). Denser architecture and urbanization will naturally re-emerge because it is more economically competitive.

Mass transit can then be added in piecemeal, first with busses, then light rail and street cars, then underground trains.

This isn't quite right. There are many reasons people use public transit besides convenience (poverty, disability, inebriation). My home town is very spread out (1000 per square mile) and many of its buses run only every hour or two. This doesn't mean there are no riders, it just means that people who can drive do.

Density impacts the costs of operating transit and makes it more cost effective to provide higher quality transit. Higher quality transit means more people will use that transit.

> Nobody wants something which is worse than what they already have.

I want something better than what we have, which is walk-able city centers and less space wasted on mandatory parking. Just because driving has been subsidized for decades doesn't mean we can't stop subsidizing driving and shift that money to subsidizing mass transit instead.

The urban rich and powerful can afford to live within short walks of their offices, or right next to stations on the best parts of (small) existing transit corridors. They are most assuredly not sitting in rush-hour traffic.

>low density, partly to accommodate cars

Figure 1000 people work downtown, half of them park in 200sqft spaces, the other half live in 400sqft apartments.

Convert all the parking to apartments. Now downtown can support only 750 workers. Great for me if I'm one of the 250 who no longer has to drive, but what if I'm one of the 250 who can now neither drive nor live there?

Statistically, it was worth ~$9,000/year to me not to ride a bicycle or use public transit. Unless that was purely ignorant, starting to do so will be a bad time.

>bad zoning laws,

I'm with you there. We need to massively increase the height of buildings in the small walkable cores and along transit corridors so that more people can live in them. Over time, employers could also spread out, so that there is not a single downtown that everyone's trying to get to. And of course it is ridiculous that any one lives far from a grocery store by fiat, rather than by economics.

>It's one where nobody owns a car, and everyone shares the benefits of that.

But if we do that and, the contention for housing along the transit corridors will be so intense that only the wealthiest can remain, even with free-for-all zoning and a huge construction boom. I've no doubt that the proposed new state of the world will be awesome for the few people who can afford it, I merely doubt that I will be one of them, and I'm not looking forward to 3+ hour/day commutes, no matter how safe the streets.

Sprawl, the automobile, and the highway are fundamentally housing affordability devices. Land value isn't so important if you can traverse 10 miles in 10 minutes. When 10 minutes its half a mile, it suddenly matters a great deal.

> The issue here is latency, availability, and comfort. Cars are great for these three. Can transit compete?

It's not that simple: cars are great for those when nobody else has them. When you live in a place with enough people to get traffic, they're terrible on the first two and the third is a question of how bad the outside is and how much you enjoy sitting for long periods of time without moving. Similarly, you need to factor in things like parking: car availability and latency both take a huge hit when you can't park in front of your destination, and comfort takes a hit if that means walking in uncomfortable weather, too.

That makes the underlying decisions more obvious: if you reserve lanes for transit or build separate right-of-way, taking the bus is a lot better than driving because the 50 people on the bus don't have to wait behind the 3 blocks of 50 people driving cars but if you focus on cars, the bus will be stuck in traffic as well.

> But then, you will have to convince people who put most of their personal net worth into tiny cramped downtown condos that it’s ok for them to lose it due to the massive amount of housing you plan to build

There's a lot of hyperbole in that sentence, and it's missing the key point that car travel is so inefficient that this pressure is always there even without overt public policy. Urban living is expensive because people like to live in places with fun things to do (i.e. which improves as a function of density) and they don't spend long periods of time stuck in traffic. Removing the public subsidies for suburban commuters will only make it more pronounced.

Baloney. We'd have to rebuild all our cities. Stop for a minute and think seriously about the cost (even just the energy cost) of doing that.

> especially given the fact that we already did something at that scale in the 20th century when we reorganized our society to support a car-based commute

No. We didn't rebuild the cities to do that, for the most part. We built the new growth in a different way than the existing cities. But fixing the existing setup to be less car dependent would require a whole lot of rebuilding. (You mention Salt Lake City. Trax and Frontrunner are fine, but they haven't emptied I-15. You want to change Salt Lake so that I-15 is empty? You're going to have to do a lot more than extend Trax.)

Other people's preferences don't bend to this kind of declaration. If they were preferable, people would choose them.

I'm all for building out better transit infrastructure, but there is simply no contest in the midcentury suburban sprawl that dominates American life. Maybe park-n-ride. We're going to have to figure out how to build attractive, livable, and politically credible compact urban environments at scale to really address car dependence.

So you'll pay to bulldoze people homes and build massively dense downtown housing that offers a better quality of life than the suburbs?

This problem and its solutions are not new. The solutions weren't implemented because there wasn't enough desire to implement them, and I doubt that has changed today.

American culture pushes the idea of personal vehicle ownership equaling success, and if you have a car you're going to drive it instead of taking the subway.

Assuming you live in a bikeable or walkable area, sure. Bus service exists, but it can be patchy and/or underfunded. Some people simply have none of these options.

I live in Detroit (yes, Motor City), and this area is crying out for good mass transit. In fact, two out of four necessary counties voted down a regional transit mileage (which amounted to peanuts every year on property tax bills), which would have provided billions to develop rapid transit for southeast Michigan, because of pretty much racial hangups and “screw you, got mine”-ism from the suburbs.

These are complex issues. I agree that building out transit infrastructure is complicated, but I think making them politically attractive are equally difficult.

Actually you just said the solution. Let them buy all the exurb crap the want, but make driving hell in all the main destinations. Do that, and your transit investments will actually work.

Only spinless politicians that want to appease both sides make transit fail and let the car win.

"If we tax the poor, they'll decide to be less poor"

It won't work. The suburbs are predominantly filled with people who could not afford to live places with functional transit in the first place.

If you make driving more expensive, the few people who are wealthy enough to choose the city, will do so (driving sky-high prices even higher). And for the 99% of suburban people who already can't afford cities, these people will have even less money for housing, so they'll be forced to buy cheaper housing, which will be even further away from the city, and you'll exacerbate even more sprawl than already exists.

No it won't hit poor people at all if you fund it with progressive taxes and ticket sales. Car ownership on the other hand is not only expensive and unreliable (if you can't afford to buy decent cars), its ridiculously dangerous, increases stress and decreases well being. A well designed public transport assists the poor by making it much safer, cheaper and faster to come into the denser areas (typically with better/higher paying jobs) for work while living in lower COL suburbs.

I sincerely believe that impediments to more public transportation in the US is not chiefly financial; I believe its mostly due to what was before racism, and now is just NIMBYism. People don't want a bus stop or train station in their neighborhood, which will attract the homeless/poor/lower classes etc.

As much as I'd like to agree with this, the fundamental problem is that most people in the US do not work at a single point in the city anymore.

That's the real problem. You don't get to connect existing enclaves. You have to build your mass transit, fund it at a loss for decades, make sure it doesn't get overrun with crime, and maybe after 10-20 years there will be enough housing and office space along the line in order to make it viable. Maybe.

Or you can throw down a couple more roads and let people figure out where to live, themselves.

This is my point. There is no amount you can add to the cost of driving that will get people to take a bus to a place the bus doesn't go.

And once you build high density office space next to a train station, people will take the train all on their own without any need to waste resources collecting regressive and privacy-invasive road tolls.

You also have the inefficiency of destroying demand outright. Some people will just stay home.

It also seems like the presence of congestion would already be diverting traffic to less busy times, because nobody wants to sit in traffic. So there is not a lot of low-hanging fruit there.

And if you want to shift demand to mass transit through pricing, instead of making the roads more expensive, make mass transit less expensive. Then you don't need a toll collection infrastructure for roads and may even be able to eliminate the fare collection infrastructure for mass transit.

> In a lot of jurisdictions it's essentially impossible to build enough road so there is zero traffic, because buildings can grow upwards but roads cannot.

Sure they can: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_Bridge

But high density cities are the obvious case for mass transit improvements.

> Your point about the rich getting infrastructure seems like a non sequitur here. It's voters' job to get their representatives to build enough infrastructure, not just the rich.

The point is that congestion pricing benefits the rich over the poor, as compared with alternatives like funding another bus or subway line via taxes, or reducing/eliminating fares. Which voters care about when deciding what to get their representatives to do.

> I agree that congestion tolls are somewhat regressive, but the solution is to have a progressive tax system, not to avoid efficiency taxes.

It's politically a lot easier to not impose regressive fees than to impose them and then try to balance it by transferring more money to low/middle income people who are already paying negative effective tax rates.

Public transportation only works to connect high density areas. It's critical to take that into account or systems will fail.