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Summary: there is no "one size fits all".

> No one is going to ban cars, but it turns out that spending 80 minutes per day in one really sucks,

You're assuming that everyone in suburbia spends 80 minutes commuting. Some do, some don't.

You're also assuming that commute times are uniform and that minimizing them is the only goal.

In my household, commute time is 10 minutes by one person and 60 by the other. Moving closer to the 60 would move us farther from other things that are important to us.

> and if we can build a society where people live closer together and can ride a train to work, that's progress.

You're assuming that people value living closer together. Some don't. They'll gladly pay extra commute time to avoid it.

I write "extra" because that time on the train/bus is also commute time, and it isn't necessarily better time than car time. Yes, some people do prefer train time to driving, but not everyone thinks that 30 minutes on a train (or bus) is better than 80 minutes in a car. (If you need to run errands or do something, the car wins.) And even fewer like the train/bus if it's the same or more time.

I think that people who don't like suburbia's tradeoffs shouldn't live there. The same is true of cities....

Not everyone is a DINK couple. Some people even drive because that makes it possible for them to quickly get to their kids in an emergency. (Parents value such things.)

I don't have a problem with driving. I like driving, but I wouldn't enjoy having to do it for an hour every day. It's car dependence that sucks about suburbia. When everyone drives because everyone has to do so, you get a mess: traffic, sprawl, loss of community, ugly places not worth caring about.

In which case the solution is just better suburb design. Make sure there's an area zoned commercial within twenty minutes' walk of nearly every house. Big enough to support at least a small supermarket plus a few cafes and restaurants, and ideally an elementary school as well. It's bad if you have to drive just to get milk and eggs or to take your kids to school.

I grew up in suburban Sydney and was always confused by why Americans derided suburbs so much; but then I saw American suburbs. All they need is better planning. Throw in some more commercial districts, and prevent the building of zillions of identical houses by discouraging a single builder from building hundreds of houses; instead sell individual lots to individuals who can then contract with their own builders.

The discussion of urbanism in this country has been falsely polarized. The anti-burbs imagine suburbs as necessarily this sprawling mess of wide boulevards and rows of gigantic, identical houses, while the anti-urban imagine city living as necessarily a soulless forest of skyscrapers. There is a happy middle here that isn't talked about very much, even though it is by far the most cost effective and pleasant solution.

Slightly OT, but if anyone here ever wants to witness a textbook example of suburbia run amok, creating a wasteland of little value to humanity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississauga

> The anti-burbs imagine suburbs as necessarily this sprawling mess of wide boulevards and rows of gigantic, identical houses while the anti-urban imagine city living as necessarily a soulless forest of skyscrapers.

You're forgetting that many of the suburbians see cities every day because that's where they work....

What fraction of the urban crowd have a comparable experience? ("I grew up in a suburb and hated it" doesn't count.)

There are an awful lot of city people too who have to see the suburbs every day for work and are relieved when they get to go home to the city. I am thinking in particular of all the San Franciscans who work in the South Bay.

I know many a Microsoftie here in Seattle that suffer a pretty torturous commute to the burbs while living in urban areas.

You really think that driving down 101 (or riding a WiFi bus) and to Castro Street for lunch shows you what living in the South Bay is like? Wowsers.

FWIW, almost all of suburban South Bay housing has a grocery store within 20 walking minutes. (There may be a spot in the middle of Atherton that doesn't. The rural areas of Woodside and Portola Valley don't.) I mention that because of the claim above about how to "fix" American suburbs.

I think that it gives as accurate an idea of what suburban life does as driving into the city to work gives of what city life is like, which is what I was responding to ("You're forgetting that many of the suburbians see cities every day because that's where they work.... What fraction of the urban crowd have a comparable experience?").

I don't think either group of commuters is getting the real experience of the place they are commuting to (the skyscraper forest is not the real city, and the office park is not the real suburb), but I think most members of both groups are legitimately glad when they go home and get away from a place that they don't like to be.

> I think that it gives as accurate an idea of what suburban life does as driving into the city to work gives of what city life is like

Driving into SF and taking Muni takes you through and over residential neighborhoods.

Neither 101 nor 280 are elevated enough to see beyond the biz that line them.

It doesn't sound like either of us is going to convince the other of anything. I think what you can see from a moving car, especially from an elevated freeway, is irrelevant to understanding what life is like in the city, because the essence of city life is the pedestrian experience.

That said, there are plenty of important streets that people take to work in the South Bay that are also residential -- University Avenue, Embarcadero Road, Alma Street, Charleston Road, and so on. What makes the experience of these streets from a car less informative about the South Bay than the experience of Mission Street from a car is about San Francisco?

> That said, there are plenty of important streets that people take to work in the South Bay that are also residential -- University Avenue, Embarcadero Road, Alma Street, Charleston Road, and so on. What makes the experience of these streets from a car less informative about the South Bay than the experience of Mission Street from a car is about San Francisco?

That's an interesting collection of suburb streets because they're counter-examples to the claims made by urbanites about suburbs. (With the exception of University, they have restaurants, grocery stores, and so on within walking distance. Since University goes through downtown PA, one might guess that there's a grocery store within a block or two - which there is.)

I assumed that the urbanites making those claims were making them out of ignorance. If those are streets that they experience, my assumption is wrong.

> What makes the experience of these streets from a car less informative about the South Bay than the experience of Mission Street from a car is about San Francisco?

I can see that the houses are packed close together, where there are houses. I can see the apartments. I can see the street life.

Note that most workers experience some aspects of the pedestrian life at lunch. They walk by the restaurants, the neighborhood grocery stores, and nightclubs.

Not everyone thinks that having a couple of nightclubs within walking distance is a good thing. If you do, great - you should live near them.

My point is that there's nothing wrong with someone else having different priorities.

OK, it sounds like we may be in violent agreement then. University Avenue is a good place and the only trouble is that places like it are too few and too far apart.

> University Avenue is a good place and the only trouble is that places like it are too few and too far apart.

What's your basis for "too few and too far apart"?

All of "suburb" SF Bay Peninsula has grocery stores and neighborhood restaurants within 20 minutes walking from residences. (The rural areas, Woodside, Portola Valley, the Santa Cruz mountains, Ladera, etc. don't.)

The same is true of the Sacramento valley towns that I know, Davis, Sacramento, Woodland, Roseville.

That's why I asked where these "grocery stores are miles away" suburbs are.

Downtown PA is arguably the worst (on the Peninsula) when it comes to grocery access by foot because its store is Whole Foods. (Atherton may be as bad. I don't know about Monte Sereno.)

The conventional wisdom is that people are generally willing to walk about 5 minutes. I think that is probably a little too low, but I don't believe people will generally walk 20 minutes (1 mile) except in the most interesting of places.

In the case of Palo Alto, Santa Cruz Avenue in Menlo Park is 1.3 miles away. I have walked there once but am unlikely to ever do it again. In the other direction, California Avenue is 1.5 miles away, and then after that it's another 4 miles to Castro Street. People are certainly capable of walking these distances but I don't believe that they actually do.

> I think that is probably a little too low, but I don't believe people will generally walk 20 minutes (1 mile)

That may be, but you get to argue that detail with the folks above. (We can then get out a map and see how much of the Peninsula qualifies.)

> In the case of Palo Alto, Santa Cruz Avenue in Menlo Park is 1.3 miles away.

So what? There are closer restaurants and grocery stores. (It's not possible to have everything within 1 mile, or even 10 miles.)

The requirement was that "a grocery store and restaurants within walking distance". Peninsula cities satisfy that requirement, even though, like everywhere else, there are restaurants and grocery stores that aren't within that distance.

For example, no one would argue that SF doesn't have restaurants within walking distance of most residences even though most SF residences are not within walking distance of Zuma.

> In which case the solution is just better suburb design. Make sure there's an area zoned commercial within twenty minutes' walk of nearly every house. Big enough to support at least a small supermarket plus a few cafes and restaurants, and ideally an elementary school as well. It's bad if you have to drive just to get milk and eggs or to take your kids to school.

I'm familiar with a fair number of US suburbs (mostly in California) and that's true of all of them.

How about some actual examples of American suburbs for which this isn't true?

You also get a gigantic financial burden, particularly on the segment of society that can least afford a gigantic steel-and-rubber money pit.

Gentrification has turned affordable housing in dense city centres into a thing of the past - now "downtown living" is purely a luxury, wealthy thing in most cities. This has dealt a great blow to the poor of this country, as they are forced to relocate to suburbs inaccessible via reasonable public transit. To even get to work on time involves buying, insuring, and maintaining a car, which no matter which way you cut it is considerably more expensive than any bus/subway pass I've ever seen.

It is often difficult for the middle and upper classes to see just how financially debilitating the car culture has been on the poor. A lot of this is the cultural ingrained notion that driving around is the "right" way to travel, and some bias against transit (smelly, unseemly people, personal safety concerns, etc) - I know some people who live in suburbia, who have come from transit-heavy countries/cities, who would jump at the chance to get rid of at least one car from the garage if they could.

> and some bias against transit (smelly, unseemly people, personal safety concerns, etc)

Are you arguing that their concerns are not based in fact or that they shouldn't care about such things?

> I like driving, but I wouldn't enjoy having to do it for an hour every day.

Good for you. My point is that other people are, wait for it, different. More to the point, they're getting something out of their drive that they value. It's okay that you don't agree with them, but it's not okay to insist that they're wrong or that they don't exist.

> When everyone drives because everyone has to do so, you get a mess: traffic, sprawl, loss of community, ugly places not worth caring about.

That's your opinion. Their opinion is different. Why doesn't their opinion deserve as much respect as yours?

it turns out that spending 80 minutes per day in one really sucks, and if we can build a society where people live closer together and can ride a train to work, that's progress

That's fine as long as you realize that it's your definition of progress. I spend between 70-90 minutes commuting by car each day and I have no problem with it: it's normally quite relaxing. There's essentially no traffic for me to deal with since I live out in the country and commute to a suburban job. And one of the reasons we moved out here is because we don't want to live next to everyone else.

I really wish people would quit with the assumption that everyone else wants what they want!

> It was a great idea between 1930 and 2000, as American corporations managed to become increasingly dominant in modern life, but as that trend reverses, I expect the share of our economy held by the top 500 corporations (that's essentially what the S&P is) to contract.

It's quite possible for the dominance of corporations to remain the same or even increase even as the share of the economy held by the S&P 500 goes down.

I'm betting that corps will continue to be as dominant, if not more so.

but as that trend reverses, I expect the share of our economy held by the top 500 corporations (that's essentially what the S&P is) to contract.

I agree with this statement, but not with the conclusion you seem to be drawing from it. It is quite likely that the share of the world economy held by the top 500 US based corporations (S&P 500 only includes companies that are actively traded in the US...) will decline.

The world economy is becoming more diverse as other nations rise to prominence, wealth and technology slowly and finally start to spread and more and more startups are created even within the US. So, yes the S&P 500 is likely to represent an ever smaller percentage of the total market.

However, you seem to be assuming that means the S&P 500 itself will contract. You must remember that the world economy is not a zero sum game. It is quite plausible (I will not speculate on probabily here, but very plausible) that the S&P 500 in particular and the US share of the world economy shrinks in relation to the total, while still growing in an absolute sense.

Even if you really believe the actual value of the S&P 500 in particular and the US economy in general will decrease in absolute value (not just relative share), then the answer is not to refuse to invest, but to diversify and include more foreign stocks.

My bet is we are transitioning from a society of cheep energy to a society of cheap information: we'll be consuming less and interacting more.

Unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily imply less powerful corporations: they're already fighting for the control of what we are allowed to create, how we can interact (privacy), what we can do with our stuff, which crops we will eat, etc. I'm an optimist though: I hope they won't eventually succeed.