This is something the OP doesn't discuss well. The "traditional city" provides a sense of beauty and "place" for the tourist, but it's an annoyance for people who live there. Housing gets expensive, quality goes down over time, and building up becomes impossible. Living without a dishwasher, as one might have to do in old housing that can't be economically upgraded, gets old really quick. That's not to say that "traditional city" equals "no dishwasher"; I'm only pointing out that there are some serious hassles (noise, expense) to that way of living.
The driver-centric planning of the US is pretty terrible, because cutting your urban land with ribbons that are dangerous to cross, unpleasant to look at and hear, and utter non-places turns out to have catastrophic effects on urban life, even in objectively great cities like Chicago and New York. I will agree with that. I don't think that four-story buildings and narrow streets are a workable solution. That will just make everywhere decent unaffordable, so you'll need transit or large towers nearby anyway to keep the local economy from falling to shit in bad times.
What we've learned about the car is that it scales horribly. Robert Moses re-designed cities for the car because he was an elitist asshole. At that time, most working class people didn't have cars. "Parkways" were thus named because he intended them as actual motoring parks (for rich people). In the 1940s, cars became affordable to average people and promised to "disrupt" urban landlords-- a hard thing to oppose, as anyone who's lived in New York or London will agree-- by making previously useless land livable. However, we found out that when everyone drives, the result is congestion, misery, pollution, and actually surprisingly expensive. Between insurance and gas and maintenance and parking-- and the suburbs actually failing to be affordable except far away from urban centers and jobs-- the car became the new landlord in suburbia.
I agree fully with OP that suburbia is ill-planned (who doesn't?) and that car-centric cities are a mistake. But the 21st century is going to call for something new and transit will have to be a big part of it. Personally, I think we should tax the tits off of landlords and real estate owners (beyond one house, owner-inhabited) and use the money to build a first-rate rapid transit system. Since their wealth comes directly from inefficiency of geography, we should tax them to pay to fix that inefficiency. It's only fair that those who benefit from a bad situation be called upon to pay to fix it.
The driver-centric planning of the US is pretty terrible, because cutting your urban land with ribbons that are dangerous to cross, unpleasant to look at and hear, and utter non-places turns out to have catastrophic effects on urban life, even in objectively great cities like Chicago and New York. I will agree with that. I don't think that four-story buildings and narrow streets are a workable solution. That will just make everywhere decent unaffordable, so you'll need transit or large towers nearby anyway to keep the local economy from falling to shit in bad times.
What we've learned about the car is that it scales horribly. Robert Moses re-designed cities for the car because he was an elitist asshole. At that time, most working class people didn't have cars. "Parkways" were thus named because he intended them as actual motoring parks (for rich people). In the 1940s, cars became affordable to average people and promised to "disrupt" urban landlords-- a hard thing to oppose, as anyone who's lived in New York or London will agree-- by making previously useless land livable. However, we found out that when everyone drives, the result is congestion, misery, pollution, and actually surprisingly expensive. Between insurance and gas and maintenance and parking-- and the suburbs actually failing to be affordable except far away from urban centers and jobs-- the car became the new landlord in suburbia.
I agree fully with OP that suburbia is ill-planned (who doesn't?) and that car-centric cities are a mistake. But the 21st century is going to call for something new and transit will have to be a big part of it. Personally, I think we should tax the tits off of landlords and real estate owners (beyond one house, owner-inhabited) and use the money to build a first-rate rapid transit system. Since their wealth comes directly from inefficiency of geography, we should tax them to pay to fix that inefficiency. It's only fair that those who benefit from a bad situation be called upon to pay to fix it.