I completely understand your reaction, and it's a very typical one when I talk about this subject. I hope you're willing to engage in a productive conversation and maybe you'll come away with at least a little new perspective.
I am not at all advocating for stifling urban density. I never suggested that nor ever talked about building subways or skyscrapers.
The organization I linked to is called "Strong Towns" not "Strong Cities" and that is on purpose.
> Also a feature: if you can't afford this, perhaps that isn't the community for you?
Let's reframe this: If I'm a business owner, I can pay an American breadwinner $100,000 and they'll spend $10,000 on transportation per year for their family. Or, I can hire someone who lives in a place where they don't have to spend that much and I can pay them $95,000 a year. Maybe that other family only owns one car per family instead of two, I'm not even saying that they never drive. They just don't have to use a car to reach 100% of the destinations they want to reach in their life (grocery store, school, work, playground, etc).
This is what I'm really getting at here: Americans collectively blowing all this money on longer roads and sewer lines and a bunch of half-empty parking lots that don't generate tax income and economic activity makes America less competitive on the global stage. It’s a silent drag on the economy.
This is before we even dive into the rabbit hole of the statement you just made: that you implicitly believe that this self-reliant car-dependent transportation system makes it more difficult to be poor. What happens if my car breaks down before my first day at work at an entry level hourly job? I'm going to be fired, and then I will have no job to pay for fixing my car.
You don't even have to be pro-urbanism or prefer to walk to places to understand that argument.
> This is a fairly typical agenda: "I want to spend your money turning your city into something you don't want it to be so some theoretical utopia can be actualized."
1. What do you want your city to be? Can you describe it? What environments in your city/town do you enjoy spending time in? Which ones do you find uncomfortable to be in? What's it like to stand in those places, outside of your vehicle?
2. Is the utopia theoretical? Try visiting the downtown of any small railroad town in the US and observe the scale of it. How many millions of Americans per year travel internationally to experience walkable environments? Small towns that are comfortable to traverse without driving do exist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg
> No matter how much crying
I do not recall crying
> nothing is going to make me ride the bus
> I ride the subway everywhere in NYC
Now you're sending mixed signals, I guess. My hypothesis is that you don't actually know what it's like to ride the bus, and the idea scares you. I hear you. You've probably never been on one that is frequent or pleasant, probably just your typical infrequent broken-down slow bus that is underfunded in America, the kind of bus where you have to be extremely desperate to resort to using it. So you get on the bus and that's the demographic, and it makes you uncomfortable.
Have you ever been to Disney World? Did you ride the bus there? Why didn't you just drive up to the gate?
Have you ever ridden a bus from the airport parking to the airport? Why did you do that? Why not just drive up to the airport?
> no matter how many lanes you kill by dedicating them to buses
Even if you prefer to drive, you should actually want what I want, because it alleviates traffic. If your goal is to get more people to drive, you will have more traffic.
> I'll just take my tax dollars (which far exceed that of typical bus ridership) elsewhere.
The place you are taking your tax dollar is into sewer line reconstruction. it really isn't even all that much about transportation itself, it's about property tax efficiency.
