[onlyrealcuzzo]

It's expensive to live in a city that's 40% asphalt to move cars around and park cars in. You basically need to pay 40% more for the same living space, since you don't really pay for the moving space. Great way for car companies to force externalities onto everyone else. Don't like cars? "Oh well, you're paying for the road and parking anyway. You can't beat the problem, so you may as well join it."

[badpun]

> You basically need to pay 40% more for the same living space, since you don't really pay for the moving space.

That would be the case if constructing and maintaining roads would be as expensive as constructing and maintaining housing, which I don't think is true.

[big_chungus]

If induced demand is a problem for cars, might it not be a problem for cities? A higher potential density will lead to a higher density.

[mntmoss]

In Portland, OR, there is substantial transit infrastructure, but the results are a bit mixed. Everyone agrees that it is easy to get around most of the city, but its suburban areas tend to experience the same low-density/high-prices phenomenon that is seen in other coastal cities.

Why? Last I read on the topic, it's because the market is factoring in the potential value of each parcel when built out according to what infrastructure dictates, but without actually building it. So small garages built 50 years ago are getting priced like 8-story apartments.

Actually building to meet the demand is the thing that lowers the rent, and that comes down to raising the inflow of building permits each year. That's the part that has to be solved.

One of the things that Japan does besides having a lot of trains is a standardized national zoning code that makes planning and permitting much more straightforward. Building in Japan is much more of a commodity, and the prices reflect that. And an example of relaxed building rules in the USA is Houston, which has long had a cool yet expanding housing market, but a car-centric one.

The effect of the combination of the trains and low regulation in Japan is that you get dense/cheap cities - and with fast trains, all of Japan acts as a "suburb of Tokyo". Trains and regulation gives you PDX. Cars and low regulation and you get Houston. Cars and regulation and you get regional SF.

By comparing these different outcomes something like a coherent theory occurs: population in the industrial era always tends to urbanize. If we restrict the flow in some way, we get high priced urban areas; the specifics of infrastructure choices are just one factor, and not necessarily the biggest. But population growth itself is a national issue and comes from other demographic factors(immigration, childbearing rates, death rates). And although Tokyo still gets bigger, which is indicative that urbanization isn't "done", Japan as a whole is on the decline.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

People appear not be a space filling curve anymore. It looked that way prior to the Industrial Revolution and the advent of Birth Control. But it doesn't look like people will infinitely fill all space available to them anymore. Perhaps it's because we're running out of space (artificially, by not building) in places where there's till opportunity. But I'm not sure we have convincing evidence of that. We do have evidence that people aren't wildly reproducing in almost every advanced economy, though.