[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.