[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.