If you want to live spread out, fine. There’s plenty of space for that.
If you want to go into the city for the amenities it provides, take a reasonable form of transportation that doesn’t require millions of parking spaces and bulldozing neighborhoods for new freeways.
Heterogeneity of options is good. I don’t think most people who advocate for good urban spaces think that everyone should be forced to live that way. They just want it to be an option instead of only building homogenous suburban developments everywhere.
Right now the supply and demand for those kinds of walkable, bikeable cities, towns, and neighborhoods is out of whack. You can tell this because the places that are built like this tend to be very expensive places to buy a home.
In my area a house in a normal suburb costs around $500k. A similarly sized house near a local town center with walkable shops, restaurants, park, grocery store, library, etc cost $1m+.
As a concerted urbanite i totally agree with you. The problem is that people like the author are arguing for a third type of place, the suburb, which is unsupportable and harms us. Its a post-war experiment which has largely failed.
Sure choice of needing space, walking sure these are subjective, but for many many people the choice to where to live in not determinable. America is such a selfish society in regards to this when it comes to local democracy. (ie NIMBY, car focused, no care given to future population densities)
I spent 20 years of my life in Houston and saw first hand how horrible it is for non drivers and poor people to get around, lose their livelihood when losing car access etc -ie the working poor
Any major city must support the needs of its poorest majority as much as possible, and a city the size of Houston must have a better transportation and social spaces -it is absolutely horrible.
now if you want space and move to places that only work with cars sure, but our cities are suffering the lack of support for walkability and public transport. Anyone who has spent time in European cities where these spaces and public transportation options exist by necessity can see the value
Yes, I think a lot of people miss that the issue is that we have forced a reduction in variety, options, and market choices by dictating single-family detached zoning in huge swaths of the country, even in congested metro areas.
The people asking for some amount of consideration to non-car transit options, density, and housing affordability aren’t generally suggesting that this be forced on everyone, but that it at least not be artificially suppressed. That options and variety be allowed and that people have a choice to live in such areas if they want to or if it is what fits their means.
If you set such a low density ceiling in a giant metro area in the face of market forces that want density, you also raise the floor of the cost of living in that area to be being able to afford a single-family detached home and buying, maintaining, and insuring one car per working household member.
That increases the cost of living for people working in restaurants, shops, warehouses, and other service industry jobs, making your goods and services more expensive.
> This would be a big claim for me to make as someone that has no formal education in the topic, I wonder if the massive shift in urban vs. rural living over the past 200 years has happened at the expense of our natural inner urge for open space
This is a big claim for you to make for sure :) . As someone who also lives in Texas, I'll just say that wanting space is not a problem in it self, but the argument of Texas has ~millions of acres of land and therefore wanting a few for yourself is not bad just does not hold when you consider the resourcing required to fulfill your want (tax money, water plumbing, electrical wiring, concrete and the alike).
If we take into consideration 'efficiency', resource-wise, when attempting to build a city that works for most, not just thee, it would end up looking like a high-density urban area that is in-fact walkable and small individual space for those in it.
This of course, does not preclude the existence of outskirts and places outside core density, which is was you want. By all means, you can have it, but degradation of shared infrastructure is to be expected. As in, maybe you have some unpaved roads, no water line or electrical etc.
This way the city saves on aforementioned resources, and yes including the good'old tax payer money. "Don't want my tax payer money subsidizing your choices" is common phrase used in this state. By that logic, "I don't want my tax payer money subsidizing your choice to live outside the would-be dense city" would apply here.
Sadly, this state does rely in ever-more sprawling city design that will bring about its financial demise as the cost of maintenance and upkeep catch up to a slow down in the state/city tax revenue. Checkout urban3's work on city financials https://www.urbanthree.com/case-study/
I appreciate the tact taken by the writer in general, despite deeply disagreeing. However the gross generalizations and myopia of the argument are clear enough from the closing lines:
> I wonder if the massive shift in urban vs. rural living over the past 200 years has happened at the expense of our natural inner urge for open space. Am I bad because I want to live on land that otherwise would have been used for hay farming?
This extrapolation, that humans innately desire to live apart from one another, is a bold claim and directly refuted by the immense populations of voluntary urban dwellers. For certain, pro-density arguments against car-centered development can suffer from the inverse generalizations, and it should be called out in either case.
Issue for me with cars isn't space vs no space, it's the amount of stress, time and money that is wasted in car-centered societies. 20 minutes to work. 20 minutes home. Add another 20 minutes if you do anything else but home to work. That's an hour a day. You've also wasted an hour doing nothing that might have otherwise been spent walking. Now you need to borrow another hour for the gym or some kind of physical activity… and that assumes you don't drive to a gym (one of the the most bizarre things people do). But that's two hours a day that just feels "wasted," and that's a best case scenario. Then there is the cost of the car, insurance, gas, maintenance. The hours that all translates into. Add it all up over the year and you spend like 15-20% of your waking hours dealing with the reality of the car. For some, it's more.
I also feel like a peculiar externality of car-centric society is anger. I get why. You are wasting all your time in the car. You aren't walking. No exercise. Fast food. Parking. I can see why people who are pro-car want space—they are angry all the time. They need space to cool off. There is even a face that I call "car face" which is that kinda pissed off for no reason always in a rush face. People who "love cars" and don't find it "stressful at all" seem to have this face to the max.
> it's the amount of stress, time and money that is wasted in car-centered societies
Commuting by train also involves a lot of stress: unexplained and indeterminate delays, filth, crime, dependence on multiple stages (walking, bus, train, walking, etc.)
I like my city a lot, but "urbanists" really need to update their priors and examine what they're advocating for. Ride share, electric micromobility, and (soon) self-driving cars totally change the equation for transportation.
Chicago is about to spend $440 million(!) to update a single train stop for a system that is carrying 25% less riders than before the pandemic.
Self-driving cars don’t really do much to increase density of moving people or decrease infrastructure costs per-passenger-mile.
Some parking needs may be reduced, but you still need somewhere for the cars to hang out while waiting for each morning and afternoon directional commuter rush.
You still need the same number of freeways with ever expanding lanes.
They mostly decrease the monetary, time, and mental cost of taking a car to work as an individual choice, which will increase the load on roads and freeways.
How many passengers per hour does that train line move, versus the costs to build and maintain an equivalent capacity freeway with one person in each car?
It’s worth asking why the estimates for the station have doubled over the course of the last two years (I can’t find a source explaining why, right now).
But it’s still perhaps an unfair point to make. State/Lake is one of the busiest stations in the system, in the heart of the downtown corridor. It is not a simple “update” - it’s a full, in-place rebuild. And, that rebuild includes adding elevator connections from the elevated platforms down to the subway below. The elevated infrastructure in question is about 130 years old, and they have to keep running the trains over those tracks the whole time.
It’s a massive engineering problem, even before you add in the additional costs of paying crews to work overnights so that the whole CTA doesn’t come to a grinding halt while they do it.
If you search around a bit, you can find the construction costs for other overhauls the CTA has done recently, which far more agreeable price tags. If this one is huge, there’s probably a very good reason why.
Ridership keeps increasing as the system rebuilds from the mass staffing shortages of the pandemic. Every time they increase the frequency of a bus line, ridership increases. The trains will be the same as operators continue to be hired.
State/Lake has been sorely lacking an in-system transfer for damn near a century, and the feds are funding the rebuild. It's one of the busiest stations in the whole city, and evening rush demand still exceeds capacity on two of the six lines it services.
As someone who actually uses the station to get home from work it's ridiculous to hear you talk about this project like it's a bad thing.
It is frustrating how so much in life can feel car centered, I think. That said, so many of the counter arguments cannot contend with the fact that having a car is convenient. To an absurd degree.
There is a reason why everyone in the dormitories knew who had a vehicle. And though you could get to some of the off campus areas by foot, it was far more likely that you would hitch a ride.
If your campus had a subway stop in the middle of it, I highly doubt students were more likely to leave by car than via some other form of transport.
That being said, my 2nd cousin who lives in Copenhagen owns a car. It is convenient. She doesn't use it a lot since usually a bicycle or mass transit is also convenient but having the option is nice for certain trips or conditions. Copenhagen is a pretty nice city to drive in. Hundreds of bicycles at every intersection slows you down a lot less than hundreds of cars at every intersection.
That's the secret -- make your city convenient to use without a car, which significantly reduces the number of cars, which makes it much better for those using a car.
To what extent is having a car convenient because we've built our cities under the assumption that people own cars? Where I lived for a year in SF (near Church station) I found that for day-to-day life I never once wished I had a car. Groceries, restaurants, bars, and parks were all within (short) walking distance, and my job downtown was easily accessible by transit.
As much as I love college campuses, I think they often miss out on having interesting amenities within the walkability of the campus itself. Still, going to school in Cambridge I never wanted a car and the few times I rented one for a longer trip or a move I wished that I didn't have to.
I think cars are and probably should be convenient for certain things (mainly moving, buying furniture or other big stuff, and to a lesser extent getting into nature). But for day-to-day life, it is a sign of failure (and wasted potential!) when cars are convenient.
See where i live my car is drastically less convenient than walking, biking, or taking the bus for basically any trip under ~5 miles. The effort to get out of my garage and out of the neighborhood and sitting in traffic and finding parking on the other end means biking is basically always faster, and for anything within a half mile (which covers most things i need day to day) walking is just easier.
I enjoy having a car for when i want to go on road trips or move something big or go to some specialty shop of the clear other side of town, but it is not at all convenient for ~90% of the places I go.
Asking most Americans to go car free isn’t realistic.
But I think asking for the kinds of development that reduce the need for and length of car trips, as a choice of place to live, is reasonable.
There’s also a vast gulf between a car-free household and the current situation where many suburban households have 3+ cars due to two working adults plus children in high school or college, each of which needs their own car every day.
This person misses the point. They seem to be arguing for their right to own a car and to own a large plot of land. Which isn't what NotJustBikes, StrongTowns, etc. are arguing.
The actual argument is that when developing infrastructure we should be developing it so that people can also safely and comfortably walk and bike, etc. Notably that was historically possible in rural farming communities for thousands of years before the car.
Is it okay if in this imagined town you can safely and comfortably walk and bike everywhere but there is no public transportation at all, the town is sprawling and
so very little is within walking distance to any given person, little to no mixed use zoning, and everyone owns a car? I think that distills the argument down to its essence. Totally car dependent town but the sidewalks and bike lanes are top notch.
In defense of big oil, single occupancy vehicles, abandoning public transportation, climate inaction, and walkable cities because anything else is "communism".
This is a superficial, selfish, ignorant take. Instead, smaller and walkable villages exist that have enough of everything close by without having to be Houston, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, or tiny town texas where groceries and hospital are 30-45 minutes away. The closest I've seen to this is Davis CA. There are probably others but not many. 90% of Americans will rationalize meat-eating, owning guns, and ICE vehicles until the end of time because "me, me, me" entitlement.
PS: I live in hill country in close proximity to SATX not entirely by choice. I wished there were public transportation, bike highways like the Netherlands, and more essential services nearby.
I think many things in this article are wrong (the claim that EVs are silent is plainly false). But I'll just say that even though you might want open space, does that necessarily mean that you are entitled to it (at a reasonable cost)? Strong Towns made a pretty compelling point that urban downtown areas overwhelmingly subsidize suburban areas due to their much higher tax density, and I have to think that rural areas where it's truly possible to own "open space" are even more subsidized than suburbs.
Yes and one that is aesthetically characteristic of the places the author has spent time in. The idea that community development and the project of raising the social "floor" is somehow being "forced" on the middle class is infuriating and i encounter it often.
Damn right. Cars are freedom. The Foucault biopolitics crowd will never understand this. I’m glad that the lefts so called “anti authoritarian” accolades are being massively called into question on things like the demand to get us out of our cars.
No! I want my damn air conditioning, my music, and to be away from the smelly masses. Trying to force me to be around others is authoritarian bio power. Car centric society is amazing. Everyone who doesn’t have it desperately wishes they did have it. Singapore people pay 100K+ for a shit car in a place with the best mass transit in the world and virtually zero crime for a reason!
The day I bought my first car, my personal freedom skyrocketed.
Same when I later moved to a transit-heavy big city (Toronto). I tried to tough it out for years, but buying a car completely transformed my experience of living there.
most/many people want car, but the question if humanity can afford to give car to everyone: climate and ecology change, fossils which we take from our children and which could be used with more impact.
stetrain|6 months ago
If you want to live spread out, fine. There’s plenty of space for that.
If you want to go into the city for the amenities it provides, take a reasonable form of transportation that doesn’t require millions of parking spaces and bulldozing neighborhoods for new freeways.
Heterogeneity of options is good. I don’t think most people who advocate for good urban spaces think that everyone should be forced to live that way. They just want it to be an option instead of only building homogenous suburban developments everywhere.
Right now the supply and demand for those kinds of walkable, bikeable cities, towns, and neighborhoods is out of whack. You can tell this because the places that are built like this tend to be very expensive places to buy a home.
In my area a house in a normal suburb costs around $500k. A similarly sized house near a local town center with walkable shops, restaurants, park, grocery store, library, etc cost $1m+.
ixtli|6 months ago
AIorNot|6 months ago
I spent 20 years of my life in Houston and saw first hand how horrible it is for non drivers and poor people to get around, lose their livelihood when losing car access etc -ie the working poor
Any major city must support the needs of its poorest majority as much as possible, and a city the size of Houston must have a better transportation and social spaces -it is absolutely horrible.
now if you want space and move to places that only work with cars sure, but our cities are suffering the lack of support for walkability and public transport. Anyone who has spent time in European cities where these spaces and public transportation options exist by necessity can see the value
stetrain|6 months ago
The people asking for some amount of consideration to non-car transit options, density, and housing affordability aren’t generally suggesting that this be forced on everyone, but that it at least not be artificially suppressed. That options and variety be allowed and that people have a choice to live in such areas if they want to or if it is what fits their means.
If you set such a low density ceiling in a giant metro area in the face of market forces that want density, you also raise the floor of the cost of living in that area to be being able to afford a single-family detached home and buying, maintaining, and insuring one car per working household member.
That increases the cost of living for people working in restaurants, shops, warehouses, and other service industry jobs, making your goods and services more expensive.
1xer|6 months ago
This is a big claim for you to make for sure :) . As someone who also lives in Texas, I'll just say that wanting space is not a problem in it self, but the argument of Texas has ~millions of acres of land and therefore wanting a few for yourself is not bad just does not hold when you consider the resourcing required to fulfill your want (tax money, water plumbing, electrical wiring, concrete and the alike).
If we take into consideration 'efficiency', resource-wise, when attempting to build a city that works for most, not just thee, it would end up looking like a high-density urban area that is in-fact walkable and small individual space for those in it.
This of course, does not preclude the existence of outskirts and places outside core density, which is was you want. By all means, you can have it, but degradation of shared infrastructure is to be expected. As in, maybe you have some unpaved roads, no water line or electrical etc.
This way the city saves on aforementioned resources, and yes including the good'old tax payer money. "Don't want my tax payer money subsidizing your choices" is common phrase used in this state. By that logic, "I don't want my tax payer money subsidizing your choice to live outside the would-be dense city" would apply here.
Sadly, this state does rely in ever-more sprawling city design that will bring about its financial demise as the cost of maintenance and upkeep catch up to a slow down in the state/city tax revenue. Checkout urban3's work on city financials https://www.urbanthree.com/case-study/
anmiller3|6 months ago
> I wonder if the massive shift in urban vs. rural living over the past 200 years has happened at the expense of our natural inner urge for open space. Am I bad because I want to live on land that otherwise would have been used for hay farming?
This extrapolation, that humans innately desire to live apart from one another, is a bold claim and directly refuted by the immense populations of voluntary urban dwellers. For certain, pro-density arguments against car-centered development can suffer from the inverse generalizations, and it should be called out in either case.
themagician|6 months ago
I also feel like a peculiar externality of car-centric society is anger. I get why. You are wasting all your time in the car. You aren't walking. No exercise. Fast food. Parking. I can see why people who are pro-car want space—they are angry all the time. They need space to cool off. There is even a face that I call "car face" which is that kinda pissed off for no reason always in a rush face. People who "love cars" and don't find it "stressful at all" seem to have this face to the max.
stetrain|6 months ago
Over 100 people a day in the US die in traffic incidents. And that’s not counting survivable but traumatic injuries.
bryanlarsen|6 months ago
xnx|6 months ago
Commuting by train also involves a lot of stress: unexplained and indeterminate delays, filth, crime, dependence on multiple stages (walking, bus, train, walking, etc.)
timeon|6 months ago
- EU 7.7t
- USA 16.5t
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
xnx|6 months ago
Chicago is about to spend $440 million(!) to update a single train stop for a system that is carrying 25% less riders than before the pandemic.
https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/08/20/state-and-lake-cta-s...
stetrain|6 months ago
Some parking needs may be reduced, but you still need somewhere for the cars to hang out while waiting for each morning and afternoon directional commuter rush.
You still need the same number of freeways with ever expanding lanes.
They mostly decrease the monetary, time, and mental cost of taking a car to work as an individual choice, which will increase the load on roads and freeways.
How many passengers per hour does that train line move, versus the costs to build and maintain an equivalent capacity freeway with one person in each car?
drewbug01|6 months ago
But it’s still perhaps an unfair point to make. State/Lake is one of the busiest stations in the system, in the heart of the downtown corridor. It is not a simple “update” - it’s a full, in-place rebuild. And, that rebuild includes adding elevator connections from the elevated platforms down to the subway below. The elevated infrastructure in question is about 130 years old, and they have to keep running the trains over those tracks the whole time.
It’s a massive engineering problem, even before you add in the additional costs of paying crews to work overnights so that the whole CTA doesn’t come to a grinding halt while they do it.
If you search around a bit, you can find the construction costs for other overhauls the CTA has done recently, which far more agreeable price tags. If this one is huge, there’s probably a very good reason why.
queenkjuul|6 months ago
State/Lake has been sorely lacking an in-system transfer for damn near a century, and the feds are funding the rebuild. It's one of the busiest stations in the whole city, and evening rush demand still exceeds capacity on two of the six lines it services.
As someone who actually uses the station to get home from work it's ridiculous to hear you talk about this project like it's a bad thing.
taeric|6 months ago
There is a reason why everyone in the dormitories knew who had a vehicle. And though you could get to some of the off campus areas by foot, it was far more likely that you would hitch a ride.
bryanlarsen|6 months ago
That being said, my 2nd cousin who lives in Copenhagen owns a car. It is convenient. She doesn't use it a lot since usually a bicycle or mass transit is also convenient but having the option is nice for certain trips or conditions. Copenhagen is a pretty nice city to drive in. Hundreds of bicycles at every intersection slows you down a lot less than hundreds of cars at every intersection.
That's the secret -- make your city convenient to use without a car, which significantly reduces the number of cars, which makes it much better for those using a car.
bkettle|6 months ago
As much as I love college campuses, I think they often miss out on having interesting amenities within the walkability of the campus itself. Still, going to school in Cambridge I never wanted a car and the few times I rented one for a longer trip or a move I wished that I didn't have to.
I think cars are and probably should be convenient for certain things (mainly moving, buying furniture or other big stuff, and to a lesser extent getting into nature). But for day-to-day life, it is a sign of failure (and wasted potential!) when cars are convenient.
queenkjuul|6 months ago
I enjoy having a car for when i want to go on road trips or move something big or go to some specialty shop of the clear other side of town, but it is not at all convenient for ~90% of the places I go.
stetrain|6 months ago
But I think asking for the kinds of development that reduce the need for and length of car trips, as a choice of place to live, is reasonable.
There’s also a vast gulf between a car-free household and the current situation where many suburban households have 3+ cars due to two working adults plus children in high school or college, each of which needs their own car every day.
svpk|6 months ago
The actual argument is that when developing infrastructure we should be developing it so that people can also safely and comfortably walk and bike, etc. Notably that was historically possible in rural farming communities for thousands of years before the car.
Spivak|6 months ago
burnt-resistor|6 months ago
This is a superficial, selfish, ignorant take. Instead, smaller and walkable villages exist that have enough of everything close by without having to be Houston, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, or tiny town texas where groceries and hospital are 30-45 minutes away. The closest I've seen to this is Davis CA. There are probably others but not many. 90% of Americans will rationalize meat-eating, owning guns, and ICE vehicles until the end of time because "me, me, me" entitlement.
PS: I live in hill country in close proximity to SATX not entirely by choice. I wished there were public transportation, bike highways like the Netherlands, and more essential services nearby.
stumpedonalog|6 months ago
That Not Just Bikes video felt like a personal attack... lol
bkettle|6 months ago
unknown|6 months ago
[deleted]
anigbrowl|6 months ago
ixtli|6 months ago
troupo|6 months ago
The author took the idea of 15- minute walkable cities and presented it as if someone pushes for everyone to live in them, and give up cars entirely.
Bloating|6 months ago
Der_Einzige|6 months ago
No! I want my damn air conditioning, my music, and to be away from the smelly masses. Trying to force me to be around others is authoritarian bio power. Car centric society is amazing. Everyone who doesn’t have it desperately wishes they did have it. Singapore people pay 100K+ for a shit car in a place with the best mass transit in the world and virtually zero crime for a reason!
FredPret|6 months ago
Same when I later moved to a transit-heavy big city (Toronto). I tried to tough it out for years, but buying a car completely transformed my experience of living there.
elliottkember|6 months ago
So much of the argument for cars, housing, indedpendence, "freedom", boils down to this simple sentence, "I want my".
riku_iki|6 months ago
stetrain|6 months ago
Yes, this is why a small apartment in Manhattan is so cheap and a large house in the middle of Iowa is so expensive.
idontwantthis|6 months ago