[ghaff]

And, really, that understates it. I'm technically urban per the Census--ex-urban per ESRI. But the idea that anyone near me could reasonably get by with just public transit is laughable. And I actually live quite close to a commuter rail station and there is a small regional bus system.

[ttfkam]

Sounds like you and your fellow community members should vote for folks who will prioritize public transit rather than widening stroads. Poor transit options are a policy choice, not an inevitability. The best time to start advocating for livable cities was a decade ago. Second best time is now, so that ten years from now, you and yours will have more options than they have today.

Folks need to be transported at higher and higher densities as a city's population grows. Cars are the lowest density carrier available. Think of how many cars fit on a four-lane road on a mile stretch. How many people are in those cars? How many trains or busses would be needed to move that many people? Now visualize the space taken up by those cars versus the space taken up by busses.

That's how you solve traffic problems with a growing population, even for the folks who still need their cars because their destinations are sufficiently irregular. Mass transit helps those who need their cars too!

As a byproduct, you don't need so many and so large parking lots. Think of all the parking lots around you, which I'm sure there are many. Imagine 80% of them were replaced with housing, retail, office space, parks, meeting places, etc. Then convert the remaining 20% to multi-story parking.

Urban sprawl is a choice. Choose different.

[ghaff]

I am 50 miles outside the nearest major city. I'm on a busy but 2-lane total country road where my two nearest neighbors are on 10s of acres. There are no nearby businesses (much less stroads) until you get to a nearby small (20K) person city. I don't know how you solve that with mass transit. And it's considered urban as the US Census defines it.

You may not approve that such places exist but they do. And folks like to live in them.

[ttfkam]

Okay, so where you live is classified incorrectly. That's fine. Mass transit doesn't work without the "mass" part, which you clearly don't have. I have no problem at all with your vehicle ownership or your choice of place to live.

[ghaff]

Well, the census has a binary definition and, for different purposes, it makes various degrees of sense although I can fairly easily go into one one of the largest US cities for a day or evening. I'm not in the boonies but I'm also clearly not in a location where car-less public transit can remotely work. And I'm not sure there is a reasonable mid-definition because at that point you're judging what degree of inconvenience is acceptable--which is pretty much the case with the regional transit system around where I live.

[frumper]

Houston and Phoenix are 2/5 top 10 cities in America and both have a lower population density than the small farming city I live in of 50k people. America is just huge.

[ttfkam]

Yes, car-centric land use is horribly inefficient and the core of the problem. You can either throw good money after bad as a matter of public policy, or you can start strategically increasing density.

But it's a choice. There are a lot of folks out there in the "good money after bad" camp who focus too much on what is and what was rather than what could be.