We need to spend more money creating better metropolitan areas that people want to live in, rather than using tax payer money to support fewer and fewer people.
There's definitely stuff more far flung and less dense within the city limits of Boston and/or on the Orange and Red lines.
The suburbs kind of start somewhere in Watertown/Newton.
The closest bedroom community to Boston, moving west, is probably Worcester.
Here is here video about The Growth Ponzi Scheme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0
However, that's not the only factor at play here. Part of thing that makes spreading out the population look like a reasonable strategy is the mess involved in building in existing cities. A lot here is "soft" corruption - local government treats public grants as candy to give out to their friends and particular processes described in the article are just ways to do this.
A lot of this is prop 13 bs - cities can't tax so they finance themselves with new home assessments. But prop 13 itself is all about protecting those who built yesterday from the costs of maintenance today.
The thing is, those costs are real. The "a normal person can afford to build a house" isn't coming back. The single family home system has diseconomies of scale (roads and electricity get harder as the scale of suburbia increases, think about it). A modern society can't afford to do things that way and it's continuing by because those doing it are pushing the costs onto other people.
The latter does not imply the former. If the increased infrastructure means that more people can live and work in an area, then even if the traffic for each person in that area is exactly as bad as it was before, it still helped those people who took the option to move there.
We do not build infrastructure that it might stay idle. Compare "we upgraded our internet to gigabit but we're seeing a similar utilization ratio, therefor the upgrade didn't improve the lives of anyone in the home".
That is a clear improvement.
Doubling your commute length had nothing to do with my argument.
I suspect the current trend is in the opposite direction. If self-driving cars ever become a real thing, it's all over for team urbanization.
If there was unlimited money, how would you even start to fix cities? A big part of the attraction to living in the 'burbs or beyond is cheap space and very little noise pollution.
Urbanization is more than just hatred of vehicles - Europe has managed to development walkable cities where cars are significantly less convenient than other modes of transport - even if the cars are automated they're going to continue to be suboptimal compared to well planned and zoned cities. At the heart of the issue is whether a city is oriented toward foot traffic or optimized for car storage - America leans the latter way and it's pretty darn weird since, outside of the central south (Arizona, Texas and such) - most people would prefer a ten minute walk to five minute drive.
That's an odd take. Most of the northern states (excepting the temperate coastline) get cold enough during the winter that a 5 minute drive is far better than a 10 minute walk. When the polar vortex comes through and it is a windy night, a 10 minute walk is short enough to get frostbite on exposed skin.
Then, 90-100 degree summer days aren't uncommon, except the humidity makes them more dangerous because you can sweat all you want, but it wont evaporate to cool you down.
Some cities- Minneapolis and St. Paul- have indoor walkways and climate controlled sky bridges for pedestrians, but they're pretty primarily used for business people's lunchtime, since they're fairly limited in where you can actually get to.
That’s kind of irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what you can convince taxpayers to fund. If self-driving cars become a thing, people will move further and further out of the city. Who cares if they have a 90 minute commute to work if they can eat or sleep or work or play games during that time. Taxpayers will continue to fund big road projects and car storage is going to be more important in the future.
Or maybe remote work spreads more to even more jobs and being in a city matters less. People may drive less often and live in a place where they can have (and afford) more space to build exactly the home they want to live in. Lots of us enjoy having room for hobbies like gardening, woodworking, outdoor cooking, etc…
You can do all that on public transport yet people still prefer shorter commutes.
Self-driving vehicles could change a lot of that. Every bus system could morph into something closer to a shared fleet model.
Part of the problem can be frequency. You have to factor in the time spent waiting at the station and changing between trains. If you can just walk to the station and not have to consult a timetable because you know there'll be one coming by within 5-10 minutes, that's a much more attractive proposition than having your whole day ruined because you arrived too late and the next one isn't for 2 hours. It could be the most comfortable train in the world and it wouldn't make up for that inconvenience.
Where you live, maybe. Where I live, it is pleasant, practical, and affordable.
Yes, private vehicles have the advantages you list. But the disadvantages: expense (borne both by the owner and by the taxpayer through subsidies), immense space requirements, parking, congestion, noise, pollution, pedestrian fatalities, encouragement of sprawl development patterns, and so on. EVs and autonomous vehicles only solve a few of these. As for COVID -- hate to break it to you, but you're going to catch it no matter what, if you haven't already.
Why is it that people dismiss the idea of making public transit (and other transportation modes) better, and hang their hopes on fantastically complicated and unproven engineering and software efforts like self-driving vehicles? There are plenty of examples of cities and whole countries achieving the former, while the latter is a -- well, I don't want to say a pipe dream, but there's no concrete proof it would work as advertised at scale.
The part about replacing buses with a shared autonomous fleet seems crazy to me. You have 20 people in a single bus, replaced with 20 people in 20 individual autonomous cars. That's at least an order of magnitude more space taken up on the roads. AI or not, they're gonna make more traffic!
It'll be pretty hard to have a city without most of that, and anyone who likes blaring bass from their car will just go old school and carry it with them.
Oh, and neighbors throwing their monthly party, complete with bouncy castle and loud music, loud arguments, and dogs barking, and construction crews, and all sorts.
Sharing walls is torture if you are sensitive to noise pollution.
IME traffic was pretty far down the list of city noise pollution that actually bothered me.