[epistasis]

One of the biggest environmental impacts is driving, so the real key is to have mixed uses near by.

If you have a family and still need to drive your kids to school everyday, because schools are too far away to walk and there's no bus (typical in California), if you need to drive to go to the grocery store, if you need to drive to do everything in your life, then working from home in a less dense area might still involve a very similar amount of driving.

Once vehicle miles travelled is subtracted out, the biggest impact from living in less dense areas is deforestation, reduction of large fauna in ecosystems, etc. A classic example of that is the Santa Cruz Mountains, highly populated by low-density living, but getting in and out is so arduous that most people do not commute much, or even leave their houses for much. A good life for hermits, but it's not for everyone.

[SoftTalker]

I think it would still involve less driving. You don't get groceries every day if you drive to get them. You buy a few days or a week's worth of supplies at a time.

School may be hard to avoid driving if there's no bus or good walking/biking routes, but maybe you can carpool with neighbors who have kids in the same school.

But I think fundamentally a lot of people are just not accustomed to sitting at home. They feel cooped up, and bored. That's not me -- I'd rarely leave the house if I could get away with it. But I know a lot of people feel that way, if they didn't have to go to work they'd go drive somewhere just to be somewhere different for a while.

[epistasis]

I totally understand that, and we need to account for people with different desires and needs. I would go crazy in no time in an isolated setting, I really really crave having a lot of density and people around me. But despise driving to do anything unless it's purely recreational driving, which would be fun maybe once or twice a month.

I would love nothing more than to live in a walkable neighborhood, with very few cars, that lets kids roam free without fear of them getting killed by drivers. But that's really hard to come by anywhere in the US.