> At some point, there’s going to be a large number of cities where a majority of homeowners are too old to drive.

If you're too old to drive you're probably also not in the best position to walk far or walk while carrying shopping/groceries. Combined with the obesity epidemic many people simply aren't healthy enough to walk 1km.

Probably why so many are moving to 'retirement communities' so they can downgrade to golf carts. You can take the car away from the person but the soul of the boomer is the automobile.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7leRLIxw7oc

Tesla FSD is already very good. Maybe a good thing the Boomer generation can do is to help make automatic cars legal.

China has a high-speed rail network whose size spans about half of the United States'. Some old US cities had better transit systems in the 1950s than they do now. No one expects every US city to be on the level of Tokyo, but there is no excuse for being so far behind.

What are these "challenging geographic features"?

Total strawman argument.

The size of the country has almost no bearing on the way we develop our towns and cities, subsidize car production, assume/require car ownership in public policy, etc.

It's also quite the stretch to claim the UK as the best country in the EU and even more to claim that it doesn't also have a car culture. And it's not just "America's worst state", the vast majority of US town and cities are car dependent.

... I'm not sure many would agree that the UK, of all places, has good public transport. _London_ does, but it more or less ends there.

(Possibly you mean by some other metric, but I'm struggling to think of _any_ metric by which the UK could be said to be the best country in Europe. Sitcoms, possibly. It does a good sitcom. Even outside London!)

I don't think we need to give up cars entirely, but I also don't think we'll be able to address the negative aspects without some amount of change.

An example: I live roughly 200m from the Costco in the center of town, but there's a major 4 lane road between us. Walking would be so convenient, but it's so much safer to drive. A footbridge would address this without impacting drivers. I have no intentions of giving up my car, but this particular activity would be so much nicer without it!

The simple geometry problem of how much space cars take up is arguably the worst now (given tailpipe emissions are on their way out), and there is no solution to that outside of fewer and much smaller cars.

I really like the Barcelona Superblocks model [1] for existing urban environments, but subsidizing families to relocate closer to schools is also an option imho. You have to find the intersection of what is politically palatable and the resources available; the next 100 years is going to see structural demographic decline, declining working cohort participation, less growth and productivity, continuing rapid fertility rate decline, declining household sizes, etc so creativity and flexibility will be required (imho). I am also a fan of what Culdesac [2] is doing, and is a pattern to be scaled.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” got us cars, and I think the new question is "How do we deliver locality and mobility for quality lives without cars, when possible?" Cars are not going away, but we should not build for them specifically as if they were the default option, as this cost burdens the future with potentially unnecessary and expensive personal mobility and infrastructure obligations. Even today, they are unaffordable for a substantial population of people, based on the evidence in my comment above.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=barcelona+superblocks

[2] https://culdesac.com/

I don’t think many US parents would accept their child independently walking or bicycling to school, even over short distances. The Stranger Danger mainstream media has them absolutely terrified that their kid is going to be kidnapped as soon as they leave their front doors.

Just to consider this on a small scale where, it would actually need to be implemented, one neighborhood at a time, I live in a medium-sized town where the school district has chosen to reject free land that developers attempted to donate to the district for the construction of schools, in favor of just assigning the families who move into these new-build homes to the schools in the other part of town where schools have ample capacity due to the large 4+ bedroom single-family homes mostly being owned and occupied by empty-nest Boomers.

We live somewhere in between the "new builds" part of town and the area that has a bunch of schools, so the walk from our neighborhood to our assigned (and closest) middle school is only 2.5 miles, a 55 minute walk with 155 ft elevation change. This walk takes you across a road with a 60MPH speed limit, basically an expressway. The elementary school is a bit closer, only a 40 minutes, 2 mile walk, but same expressway.

Oh, and they don't even offer a school bus of any kind. I suppose the gen-x parents killed that idea off 25 years ago because they were so worried their kids would be out of direct supervision even walking to a bus stop, so each child is chaufferred door to door, rain or shine, until 16 when they receive their own cars.

I agree with you that all this is absurd. Kids are capable of walking to school and shouldn't have to leave a medium-sized neighborhood to do so. But significant demolition of neighborhoods and construction of schools, local grocery markets, etc. is the only prescription for our ills that would provide anything resembling an alternative to cars for the residents of the tract homes that make up a significant part of our car-dependent suburbs.

This is why I think whoever upthread is arguing that people aren't exactly being reasonable expecting the America we inherited from the 20th century to stop stalling and transform itself into 1,000 Amsterdams. Even though the places that share that awesome non-car infra are highly sought-after.

In my comment, I am using it as signal wrt infra cost affordability. I agree it is not a bad solution as population declines continue where it occurs, versus having no road. Look at infrastructure cost projections to understand if it is within the light cone of economic affordability. If it can't be paid for with a combination of taxes and debt, it isn't possible.

I am open to other sources of these metrics, please feel free to provide them.