[throwaway22032]

Public transport is impossible in most US cities. By impossible, I mean so uneconomical that it cannot happen at scale. The geography is not there.

Even in the UK, a tiny island, public transport works well in large cities like London and Manchester, sort of okay but a faff in the suburbs of those cities and smaller cities, marginally as something for tourists in small towns, and for the rest of the country there's nothing.

Almost everywhere in the US has less density than a small town in the UK. In most suburbs just getting to the end of your road is going to be 10 minutes walk. It would mean half of the country abandoning their homes and rebuilding, which I imagine would end up higher carbon than just using the ICE cars.

[CalRobert]

The geography's fine, it's the zoning that destroyed it. You don't need to have your entire country be oceans of parking with a few buildings sprinkled in the middle.

[throwaway22032]

I agree, I mean the human geography, not the size of the country, sorry if that was unclear.

A bit like how London couldn't turn into LA now without demolishing half of it. We tried to build a couple of freeways in the 60's and failed.

[brenns10]

To be fair, that's exactly how LA turned into LA: they ripped up streetcar lines, demolished parts of the city to make room for interstate highways, and changed the development rules to require low density and lots of parking.

Which is to say, American cities were not born with the car centrism, they were demolished and rebuilt with it. The reason it succeeded here, but not in London, may have a lot to do with the insane corruption due to the auto industry here (but we call it lobbying, not corruption, so it's fine :P), and also due to the hyper racist forces that drove white flight to suburbs. Also the incredible amounts of federal money that went to the interstate highway system.

[whimsicalism]

> It would mean half of the country abandoning their homes and rebuilding, which I imagine would end up higher carbon than just using the ICE cars.

Bet you it actually wouldn't, the impact of urban sprawl is absolutely massive and continuous as compared to a one-time cost.

[throwaway22032]

Fair enough.

I don't think it really matters to be honest, Americans are not moving into even something like my ~1500sqft terraced house en masse. You may as well ask half the country to learn Russian.

[dublinben]

The 60% of Millennials who don’t own a home, and the 60% of gen-Z who live with their parents would probably leap at the opportunity to own their own 1500 Sq ft row house.

We don’t need to convince anyone to move into more sustainable housing, we merely need to allow it.

[bcrosby95]

This is a large part of the problem. When we went house hunting, we wanted to live in a denser area. But we just plain couldn't afford it, so suburbs it was.

[bcrosby95]

I'm actually not so sure, especially if you use buses. The problem is its inconvenient, and if you have a car you take that instead of a bus, so no one takes the bus, which makes it hard to justify the bus and frequent schedules.

Our small suburban city of 15k actually has free bus service up and down our main stroad. Everyone is probably within a 15 minute walk to it. But it's aimed mostly at school kids, so the hours are very sparse during certain times of the day. E.g. when schools tend to get out it's every 10 minutes, but outside of those hours its every hour or so.

A lot of it is cultural too. My wife lived in Santa Monica, and she would drive for 1 hour to go 2 miles rather than walk or bike, and this behavior was common among her friends.

I live a 10 minute walk to school. My neighbors still drive their kids to school. There's no (good) excuse for that.