Comment Re: And the other half? (Score 2) 243
What you describe is consistent (except the trains weren't electric...but some were) with how development was done in large swathes of America up until the mid-20th century. My hometown, and the whole region of my home state, is dotted with small walkable towns like you describe, usually surrounded by farmland or forest (until the strip malls were built along the freeways).
That basically goes back full circle to motorcars, because that ended with the proliferation of cars (and government policies that encouraged or eventually pseudo-mandated cars).
If you have that type of development, you don't need cars. But that type of development is also incompatible with car-prominant transport. So the question is, can we ever go back to that, and can we do it without banning cars or at least de-subsidizing cars, and would that ever be politically possible to do considering the tremendous altars we have built to car culture. It's a question of how to recover from a tragedy of the commons, and it's called a tragedy for a reason.
That basically goes back full circle to motorcars, because that ended with the proliferation of cars (and government policies that encouraged or eventually pseudo-mandated cars).
If you have that type of development, you don't need cars. But that type of development is also incompatible with car-prominant transport. So the question is, can we ever go back to that, and can we do it without banning cars or at least de-subsidizing cars, and would that ever be politically possible to do considering the tremendous altars we have built to car culture. It's a question of how to recover from a tragedy of the commons, and it's called a tragedy for a reason.