[dasmoth]

Not so very long ago, there seemed to be a movement in quite the opposite direction: live somewhere car-friendly and work on out-of-town campuses with ample parking.

While I'm another one who believes that the ideal commute is "step across the hallway" (or perhaps an office at the bottom of the garden...), I'd argue that the old low-density promise of commuting 20 or 30 minutes on open roads isn't so bad (and certainly no more taxing than what the public transport/new-urbanist lobby seem to be proposing). Why is this never on the agenda any more?

[TeMPOraL]

I don't know why there's such "new-urbanist lobby" in the US, but in Europe you can't realize the dream of "open-road commuting" and low-density employment, not without turning the entire continent into one big suburbia. I don't think we have enough land for that.

I'm personally for public transit because of efficiency. Even if you could somehow get that "old low-density promise of commuting 20 or 30 minutes on open road", which would definitely be not a bad situation for commuting, it would still be an energy disaster. Mass transportation and high-density settlements are much more energy-efficient, and energy is one of the biggest problems we're facing as a civilization right now.

[dasmoth]

The UK has 26.7M households in 243,610km^2. That's nearly a hectare per household -- doesn't sound "suburban" to me (although maybe some parts of the US would disagree!).

Of course, the UK population is very unevenly distributed at the moment...

[TeMPOraL]

You still need land for agriculture, industry, forests, animal habitats, etc. Also, not all of the land in that 0.25M km^2 is habitable nor suitable for other uses mentioned above.

I've heard some calculations that in theory you could have all 7 billion people living comfortably on 50% of the land while the other 50% could go to agriculture, industry, forestation, etc. but that would require geoengineering on an unprecedented scale, not to mention being very energy inefficient.