Air quality declines, because you increase the number of cars capable of being on the road at the same time. Same with lowering gasoline prices. Make car riding easy, gas-burning increases.

As for a "better" lfe - first, dump the car. It makes you fat, makes your country go to war repeatedly to protect the oil, pollutes us into a super-hot future, and kills and maims more civilians in total than our wars killed soldiers. You just grew up with the carnage, so it's normal and acceptable to you. And it costs us trillions and trillions of dollars (add it up, adjust for inflation since we started building) of tax dollars that could have build a kick-ass mass transit system that connects everywhere in the country. And the costs are snowballing every year becaue we have to maintain all the old as we build the new - but we don't, of course. That's what the "infrastructure" talked about since 1979 mostly is - roads and bridges for cars. We aren't fixing those because we don't want to be taxed enough to do so - so we fall into hell. Except for the wealthy new places, the system is falling apart.

Too many people trying to use too little land in a very stupid fashion.

Mathematically, if you keep increasing the numbers of people, you have gridlock and war over territory (that's what this is). Happens with deer, wolves, oak trees, bacteria, and hydrogen floating in interstellar space trying to form stars.

You control your numbers, or nature steps in and does it the only other way - the four horsemen, singly or in combinations. This will be solved with War - by another name. Laws, road blockages, software mandates, gates, lasers, STD spikes, moats, drawbridges, car-GPS tracking... they'll go to war, save their patches of land, and make the problem worse somewhere else, which will in turn push back.

In this case, the problem is racism, conservatism (cars uber alles), and a terrible transportation system that insists on moving people around in the own private houses on wheels because reasons. There is a numerical limit on the number of boxes moving around on ribbons at the same time and LA exceeded that limit long ago.

PS You don't own your neighborhood streets. That what "street" means. Not that it will stop them from "owning" them anyway.

"Zoning laws are just one way to codify those agreements."

And keep out the poors and negroes. You all're not fooling anyone.

Thing that happens in Europe (Paris, for instance) is that the rich move into the cities, passive-aggressively remove the poor, then make a nice pedestrian friendly enclave for people like them, and no one else. They call it a donut city - rich middle, surrounded by the now-poverty-striken suburbs. Nothing changes except where the rich people get to live - better locations, choice views, nice rapid trans.

Sorry, not 920. More like 100-200 sq ft. (ever *look* at a jam, and count the actual number of people involved? Doesn't fill up a doctor's waiting room).

OR, we could build rapid transit down the centers of the expressway and siphon off all the people trying to occupy 960 square feet at x mph all by their lonesome. And like the roadways themselves, free rides. Open, non-restricted boarding stations that don't look like a prison intake chute - no choke points, no railings, and walls to prevent people from falling on the the tracks (Elevators shaft opeinings have doors. Why don't trains tracks?)
The problem with roadways is cars. Too many cars. The system barely works, and will never be "fixed".
But that would involve rich/richer white middle/upper class people riding with the Morlocks. Enter the Musk's Hyertube for them, I suppose. Train-cars on their own tracks flitting above the poors. Solving nothing for no one except the non-poors.
Sorry, this subject cranks me off. The solutions are simple, but classism and racism and bull headed stupidity and conservatism crush every solution but build-a-bigger-road.

They absolutely can't. That defines racial discrimination. Can't redline either, or stop all black-driven cars to "find" marijuana enough times until Austin dwellers (that's the neighborhood Oak Park walled off) stops entering. But it happens anyway. Because this is America, and we had slaves, and we'll not break the habits that gave us.

Of course, this created the very poverty and hellishness that pervads Austin in the first place. Walling the very poorest in, where they, being poor, tend to have lots and lots of kids, which of course creates a crowded, overpopulated violent mess. But that's where the prison industry comes in...

I spent my teenaged years in North Austin. I watched the mess be created. Apparently the racist moats have been duplicated all over the country in the civil-rights-repudiating last thirty-four years. Gee, I wonder what will happen next.

I watched it happen, at least at the endgame. The process also creates a ferocious overclass of white racists, who beget new generations of even more vicious white bigots, only using fancier language and more circumspect actions. Hence the pro-police suburbs who love cops and won't let them be convicted of killing black people, because they OWN those cops, and the city dwellers (excluding the in-city versions of the suburbs) who are regarded by the overclass as worthless and, let's put it bluntly, shootable at will because blacks-are-criminals. It is the story of America post the civil rights movement. This dichotomy fuels the non-Confederate Republican base, though no one will ever, ever talk about that on the news. The newspeople live in those enclaves.... those are their people.

It's to keep poor people out. The city grid is crippled -- at taxpayer's direct expense, and the indirect expense of maintaining a ghetto of rich white people who don't participate in their part of the city -- to keep white people safe-in-mind in their fake suburbs. Should never have been permitted; it guarantees that poverty will be walled away from the overclass. It CREATES the poverty, in part, by passive-agressive apartheid.

Because they bought a law to say so. Rich people can do that.

Mopeds aren't allowed on the freeways. I believe you need to have 110 (some measure) cylinder size before you're allowed on the freeway. You need a motorcycle (though not a large one). And at 2 mph it should be pretty safe, even in bad weather.

Ashby is no freeway. A proper comparison would be 880, but that goes through business districts. Which might be the correct answer, though even businesses don't seem to like to be next to freeway ramps. Still, the Berkeley 4th street businesses seem to be doing well.

No. Public transportation needs a high population density to be cheap. It can be quite effective even at reasonably low population densities, but it becomes considerably more expensive, especially if you want it to be frequent enough to be convenient. In the US being dependent on public transit is often inconvenient because it's never there when you want it, especially at night or in foul weather.

OTOH, a dedicated bus lane on the freeway (or bus and car with 3 or more people) can considerably speed traffic IF there are enough buses. And that means the buses need to collect and distribute the passengers. Which means wide coverage handled fairly efficiently. This is never done because of severe cost cutting, which causes the transit to be so inconvenient that nobody chooses to use it if they can choose something else. Which raises the cost. Whoops!

Another problem is that efficiency designers have designed buses that are hideously uncomfortable. This is done in the name of cost reduction, getting more people onto each bus, and ease in cleaning. The result is that anyone who has any choice rides something else. Curiously, as people have gotten taller, the leg space/seat has been reduced. Any guesses as to why people dislike public transit? A few years ago when my legs were stronger I would often prefer to stand rather than to sit.

Actually, the BIG problem with Silicon Valley is that prime farm land has been occupied by housing and factories. They could just as well have been built on lousy land, as they don't use it anyway.

"Silicon Valley" used to the the primary producer of cherries, apricots, etc. in all of California. Now there if there's an orchard left, I don't know about it. That was NOT the highest use of the land, just the one that returned most taxes.

Toll lanes are not a good solution. Traiins have limited value as person traffic relief. Unless you have a really good transit system, which I've never seen. (I don't have wide experience, so I admit the possibility.)

The real problem is the commute distance. That needs to be drastically reduced, which is quite difficult when both jobs and families are mobile.

For businesses that are small my favorite answer it to redo the zoning code, and give a good tax break to owners who live in the same building as their place of business. Also give a distance related tax break to people who live near their job. Unfortunately, most zoning systems actively work against this answer. And most taxation isn't locally controlled (but property taxes could be adjusted).