You're describing urban environments. A lot of people live in those places already. But a lot of people prefer to live elsewhere. Differences in preference is fine.
What doesn't make sense though is driving in urban environments, especially single-occupant vehicles that make up the vast majority of motor traffic in major cities. Keep the suburbs. But I think it'd be good to make cities painful to drive in for all but the folks who need it (e.g., people with mobility issues, or families with small children). If you're able-bodied in an urban environment, you should be the last person to be driving around regularly.
I find the city to be better for small children and for disabled people than car focused suburbs to be honest. It means stuff is closer to get to and both groups of people are not completely reliant on other people driving them around to get to places. I do not believe the only way a world can be livable for disabled people, small children, and elderly people, is to pave the entire country in tens of millions of miles of roads and drive on them with heavy and dangerous polluting machines.
Cars aren't the terrible thing that many pro urban folk here seem to make them out to be, and I suspect most people prefer driving them to cycling or using public transport.
Similarly, the whole idea of automated driving becoming the default and humans not being able to drive is something I'm 100% against, since it'd be both a privacy nightmare and take away a lot of people's freedom.
The problem is really more that some places are designed to only be usable in a car, and that's what's poorly designed.
Speaking of which, also that suburbs aren't a bad thing. Again, it feels like people take the car focused design common in the US, and assume that's how these have to be. Thousands of identical houses in the middle of nowhere with everything interesting a 30 minute drive away.
But that's not necessarily true, and (as seen in most of the world), suburbs can be quite nice places to live in. A walkable one (like many in Europe) can be just as valid a place to live as a dense city neighborhood or rural area.
Driving in a city with even a basic public transit system is almost always slower than taking the train anyway, so time isn't really a factor. As for comfort, I don't think all the negative externalities of having a car-centric urban area are worth that trade off - what about the comfort of bikers and pedestrians that cars disrupt?
In the US at least, we already massively subsidize road infrastructure and gasoline, I think it's fair to let people who actually live in cities enjoy them, rather than bend over backwards to accommodate suburbanites who only come in for work.
Also, cars aren't a magic ticket to mobility. Elderly people often can't drive and end up stuck in their homes. They have to be purchased or leased, and maintained, etc.
Many/most people living in a lot of cities still own cars so that they can easily travel outside the city. It's a perfectly valid preference to live in the denser part of a city but it is a preference and not an absolute.
Are you suggesting car drivers move to smaller towns where it's actually economically efficient to use them? You wouldn't want car drivers imposing their noise, pollution, financial cost, infrastructure cost, and displacement on the millions of other people trying to live their life. It's very insightful of you to imply that cities should be designed for people, and not cars, so those millions can actually use the density to their advantage.
So your argument is that you need your car because you don't live in a place that is designed for humans, so we shouldn't change cities to be less car dependent?
I think many people /want/ to drive everywhere, but at the same time would prefer to live in the kind of place you get when /not everyone/ constantly drives everywhere (if they had some experience with such places).
With a bit of planning, there is no difference in quality of life for able-bodied people living in communities from "town" up to metropolis:
Center of large city (i. e. new York, Paris):
Above a certain density, public transport becomes the norm across all income levels (cf. bankers in New York).
Suburb of large city down to towns:
For commuters coming in from the suburbs, there are hundreds of cities that show that rail is an option that's affordable and it usually takes 1/2h to the city center.
What motivates people to buy cars seems to be mostly daily life within the suburbs: shopping, getting children to school etc. This is a failure of city planning, because it's perfectly feasible to combine the density of a suburb with local subcenters that provide all daily needs (schools, shopping, medical etc.) within walking distance (let's say 1.5 miles).
Taking the worst as an example, the density of Atlanta's suburbs is about 1000/sq mile (http://www.city-data.com/forum/attachments/city-vs-city/6570...). Meaning there are 7074 people within a mile of any given point. That's plenty to sustain the infrastructure to provide for daily needs, although it may mean a need for more, but somewhat smaller schools/shops etc. (If this isn't convincing, consider that Atlanta is the worst of the worst in terms of waste of space. You can easily fit 10000 people within a mile^2 and still have backyards for everyone).
It's only rural living that requires a car. The quality of live in large cities will dramatically increase in the next few years, if only because self-driving cars and car sharing require far fewer parking spots. These make up about half of the space required for cars right now, meaning their abolition could double the space available for pedestrians.
My preferences and your preferences are irrelevant in terms of how our cities are constructed. Many areas on this side of the Atlantic were built after cars become common, and many people who bought new homes in those neighborhoods during post WWII expansion preferred driving their new cars.
I don’t get to change that now, unless we tear my entire neighborhood down.
I suspect the area you live in was settled prior to the ubiquity of cars, and thus, was designed for people without them.
What fails this is many people don't want to live in cities. Living in apartments with others, taking public transportation with others and walking down the street with other is more unpleasant than cars.
I suspect this will also suffer from the “grass is greener” problem. Those who live in cities will romanticise suburban living, and vice versa in suburbs.
Culture also matters; in the west the city is often seen as a place for single professionals, rather than somewhere to build your life long term. This will affect perceptions, for good or ill.
Also, although you can get by without a car in many locations, I think there’s probably a relatively stark difference in how livable that is depending on how it’s implemented. If your city is filled with two lane roads through the core that’s clearly much worse than the Netherlands equivalent.
Well said. I do something similar -- I live someplace with a bit more breathing room that's bike friendly and walk friendly for some basic things, and I never take my car into any city center.
> Make city centers less car friendly and denser to discourage car use, improve walking infrastructure in the suburbs (more sidewalks/bike trails).
To put it a bit more concretely: Remove street parking in cities. Expand sidewalks. Build more public transit and bike infrastructure. Create light rail with parking lots outside of cities so you can get in without a car. Let people use cars as before in rural middle-of-nowhere america, and mostly the same in the suburbs (lower speed limits and build more sidewalks and connecting paths, so you can walk between neighborhoods).
> This lifestyle can't work for people outside of cities, though.
Exactly. Which means that, if cities are designed sanely, they will be more attractive to people who don't want cars (when I lived in a city during college, I never had a car and never missed having one), and suburbs and rural areas will be more attractive to people who do (as I do now since I like having a detached house and an actual yard).
In dense urban cores, I think people (to the extent that they are able) can and will self select for what they prefer. IMO urban cores should be fairly hostile to cars, in order to maintain space efficiency and work well for the largest quantity of people. If you optimize an urban core for cars, nobody has a good time. If you optimize it for throughput, at least people walking, biking, and taking trains/subways can have a good time. It's just a utility argument, but that's where policy needs to step in to nudge us away from a local minimum of every individual city dweller wanting their own SUV.
There is endless suburban sprawl in the US that does accommodate cars, and people that feel the need to drive a massive vehicle are welcome there.
And this is coming from someone owning 7 cars living out in the sticks. But when I did live in Seattle the train and bike infrastructure made the city so much more livable when working downtown.
In large parts of the US, this isn't necessarily true. Our cities and suburbs are designed around individual auto use. Re-designing these areas to be more pedestrian and mass-transit oriented would likely be a quality-of-life increase for most people.
I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing (that I survived my teen driving years is entirely out of luck) but when we've built up a culture (suburbia) entirely dependent on being able to drive from point to point, we can't be surprised that making it more difficult to drive turns teens and 20 somethings off from staying in that culture.
If you can't drive or your driving is restricted as a matter of law, would you rather be stuck in suburbia or in a more urban area where mass–transit or cycling is possible?
What doesn't make sense though is driving in urban environments, especially single-occupant vehicles that make up the vast majority of motor traffic in major cities. Keep the suburbs. But I think it'd be good to make cities painful to drive in for all but the folks who need it (e.g., people with mobility issues, or families with small children). If you're able-bodied in an urban environment, you should be the last person to be driving around regularly.
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