I don't know where you live but everything is too far apart in American suburbs. How you would fix that without tearing it all down? And it's totally impractical for transporting a family around.
Road tripping. Visiting far away family. Day at the lake or beach. Going camping. How do you convince people to give all of that up and just be content with whatever is 15min away.
Residents of American suburbs should have to pay for their full costs (infrastructure and maintenance, environmental, healthcare, services, ...), and if many people can't afford it, we should do a universal cash subsidy to every resident at the federal level to make up the difference so the transition is not so damaging, then let people decide if they really want to spend that whole amount on paying the actual costs of their lifestyle or if they would prefer to move to a more efficient living arrangement and keep the cash to do something more productive with it.
The USA subsidizes the suburbs to an absurd degree, pushing most of the costs into the future and making city dwellers pay more than their share for the rest.
Living in a relatively large house in the suburbs should in principle cost several times more than living in a flat in the city, because it requires vastly more infrastructure and the amortized cost of services is much higher. But our broken economic system has flipped this around and made suburbs extremely artificially cheap, while making most of the building practices that make denser walkable neighborhoods possible illegal under building codes and local ordinances.
I don't think it's broken. I think it's working as intended, but what it's optimizing for (people raising families) is perhaps not what you'd like for it to optimize for. Whether it's the right or wrong thing to optimize for is another conversation, but you may be surprised about what the collective political will of the US expresses. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a voting majority support for the idea that "American suburbs should have to pay for themselves."
American style suburbs are worse for raising a family than living in a city. Long commutes practically remove one or more parents from the equation 5 days a week. Long bus rides compromise sleep and exercise etc.
All for a back yard that’s rarely used and worse in just about every way than a nice park.
What they are is a cheap imitation of the wealthy enclaves near cities that only work because so few people can afford to live in them. You can imitate such buildings cheaply, what you can’t do is build or maintain the support structures which made such places so appealing.
From the perspective of the child, it's much worse. You are basically arrested until you are 16-18. No independence whatsoever. Want to meet a friend? Ask your parents to drive. They're busy? Too bad.
My children love it. There are so many friends within walking & biking distance of my house. The roads are slow, traffic sparse, with wide open spaces to play and ride bikes, etc. None of the kids seemed bored, there's so much to do. And little of the unpleasant stuff that makes living in the city more exciting.
Parents and society can be unreasonably restrictive in any environment. People call social services on parents for letting kids walk around alone in suburbs. The freedom you can get as a young teen without a car is however vastly higher in cities due to public transportation.
Social norms also vary widely, first graders in Tokyo take public transportation to school alone. This isn’t inherently unsafe or unreasonable.
Why can't they just walk or bike to their friends? 2-3 km walking distance is perfectly fine, bike extends that range significantly (10 km at least). This was the case for me.
Sorry if the question is naive, I don't live in USA.
Don’t confuse socioeconomics for inherent advantages. Adjusted for income people live longer in cities, they are thus objectively safer.
Wealthy parts of cities have vastly better schools and less crime than the average suburbs, but the American middle class abandoned cities. Air pollution again can go either way, suburbs often have surprisingly terrible air quality made worse by long commutes.
Per mile, small urban roads were millions of usd a mile (see department of transports annual report and it varies by region). Maintenance is even worse. It’s the 5th highest expense for most cities (US census survey of local and state governments 2020).
Of course the suburbs don’t make sense, you have a half mile of road out to a neighborhood and another half mile of street in the neighborhood itself. The percentage of property taxes going to the road is probably just a few percent points. With only a few hundred houses, it would take decades to raise the 1-3 million to replace the road.
Already have this problem with our subdivision lol. Private road, and replacing the road is going to be $20k a house even over 20 years or something even with a bond lol, and that’s a normal, reasonable-density subdivision. People don’t realize how much rural and suburban roads are getting subsidized.
Initial infrastructure is often paid for with up-front cash transfers from the federal/state government and long-term loans, then the long-term maintenance is supposed to be funded by local taxes but in many cases is set up to be more expensive than the long-term available tax base, so infrastructure just starts falling apart and then either taxes go up or maintenance is put off and people left holding the bag are screwed, or external cash bailouts make up the difference.
In either case, the suburbanites (especially near the beginning of the construction cycle) and initial construction companies are getting a huge subsidy from everyone else (and from future generations) to promote an inherently unsustainable and destructive living arrangement.
It's a kind of Ponzi scheme, and like any other Ponzi scheme, at some point the music stops and then the whole system is in an extremely precarious place.
It is already a huge change if people who drive to thir offices didn't. People going camping or driving across the country aren't the problem. The Dutch do that as well, what they don't need to do is having to drive to go fetch milk or get to work. I have my dentist, grocery shop, restaurants, coffee shops, gym, bike shop, bank, park, hardware storeband bus stops within 15 minutes from my home, and all of those are in a residential neighborhood of an American city that to my Latin American sensibilities is too residential and spread around. The level of density needed to support "15 minute cities" is much lower than people think, but it means allowing there to be a bakery in the corner of your block within a residential neighborhood, and wrestling some space in the commons from inefficient forms of transportation in favour of more efficient ones.
You don’t have to tear it all down. Just tear some of it down. For example, you could tear down a single house and replace it with a shop, and suddenly a whole neighbourhood would have a shop within walking distance.
I wonder where people live that this isn't already true. My suburban neighborhood has several small & medium sized markets. I have a suspicion that many HN participants idea of suburbia is the endless tract housing variety. That's just one version, and comparatively rare in my region. Our suburban neighborhoods are mixed.
Suburbia probably doesn't have enough density that the number of people who choose to walk to the shop over driving twenty minutes to the huge shop could keep the small shop alive.
You start by not making the problem worse. Stop building stroads[0]. Liberalize the zoning code and allow mixed-use development. Get rid of parking minimums.
The upside of how sparse American suburbs are is that we can repurpose all the junk/wasted land with normal market incentives. Roads can be thinned and the land handed back to the owners of that land, along with the setbacks that are used to force people to maintain water-intensive lawns[1]. Upzoned buildings can be redeveloped to higher density or turned into small commercial stores as market forces dictate. Anyone who wants to hold out can still do so.
None of this requires absolutely banning cars[2]. People will stop driving as cars become less necessary for daily suburban life. Road trips can still happen. So instead of families with three or four cars, maybe they only have one or two. As car infrastructure is used less, it can be repurposed for transit networks that don't suck - i.e. BRT, light rail, or tram systems with dedicated rights of way.
"15 minute city" doesn't mean "you should only ever travel 15 minutes on foot and anything further will be stopped by the pollution police". It means "building a city so that everything you need is closer and more convenient".
[0] Surface street / highway combos, i.e. roads with 3 lanes on each side, highway speed traffic, no pedestrian infrastructure, and business access. They try to do everything and fail at everything.
[1] Incidentally this was sold as a way to stop communism, somehow
[2] OK, but can we still at least ban the giant Escalade mega-SUVs that let you run down like ten kids without even seeing them
Cars are great for all that, and an electric cargo bike like an urban arrow is great for all the things nearby, IF you have safe infrastructure. Plenty of people have cars in my Dutch city but it's still safe to do local things by biking and walking
Road tripping. Visiting far away family. Day at the lake or beach. Going camping. How do you convince people to give all of that up and just be content with whatever is 15min away.