You all do realize that suburbs existed before the invention of the car right? American infrastructure is bad but it’s not irredeemable, the assumption that we can’t provide public transportation to these places because of a lack of resources is malthusian. And sure some places like the American Southwest and Florida are legitimately over human population carrying capacity due to climate change but in general the earth as a whole isn’t, and cities like Amsterdam are just as unsustainable as Miami since even though has one of those le epic reddit notjustbikes cityskylines approved infrastructure, both are below the sea level.
I think in general our message should be abolish the need to own the automobile, any measures meant to limit car use should target the rich before the poor. And that trains are good, and that a high speed train across the United States would be a rather popular project in the eyes of even the chuds. And by god stop calling for the suburbs to be razed, stop trying to be zoomer Robert Moses.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding here about what a suburb is. The traditional suburb is simply a less dense extension of a city outside of the city center. Paris has suburbs which are connected by regional rail - this is perfectly good. When people hate on suburbs, they are usually Americans talking about something qualitatively different - inefficient urban sprawl that requires a car to get anywhere. Sometimes people talk about suburbs when they mean exurbs, which are like if you took a town and spread it out so much everyone needed a car.
Cities and suburbs need to be rebuilt for the human (they were razed for the car already). Exurbs however need to be returned to nature and/or transformed into proper cities or rural towns.
South Florida and Phoenix immediately come to mind when I think of really terrible suburban design. Not a whole lot of high density zoning, just a massive sprawl of developments with only one or two exits to main roads so it takes like 45 minutes to walk a few hundred feet as the crow flies. Limited or no sidewalks, no effective mass transit, mixed-use zoning nonexistent. Population density is a great indicator as to how poorly designed a big city is.
Phoenix: 1.64M pop, 518 square miles Philadelphia: 1.57M pop, 134 square miles
Pretty easy to guess which one of these is easier to survive in without a car.
Agreed.
Long Island is the most easily fixable suburbs for this very reason, they have the Long Island Rail Road so some infrastructure is still in place already. I hope the suburbs there get more densified for not just farmer’s sake, but for the underrated beautiful countryside there to be more abundant to enjoy.