I don't like American suburbs for me personally, but the US has tons of space and I don't understand how traffic would be better if we pushed more people into less space (with fewer streets and so on). Indeed, most big cities are famous for their congestion.
With respect to prices, these are self-regulating. If prices go up, things either get denser and/or people move elsewhere.
> Culture takes a dive.
Again, suburbs aren't my thing, but it seems really offensive/chauvinistic to imply that suburban culture is lesser than urban culture. I'm sure I'm misunderstanding, and in the spirit of charity I want to give you the opportunity to set the record straight.
> No more walking or biking when those freeways go up.
Is this intrinsic to suburbs, or is it an artifact of how suburbs were planned at the time that suburbs exploded in popularity? Can suburbs be designed to be more walkable/bikeable (I would actually be surprised if they aren't already)?
I'm not sure if this is really clear to people who don't live here, but I think it's important to note that 'suburbs' doesn't really mean just one thing. Portland is mostly suburbs, for example. I think it's tempting to think suburbia must be endless miles of tract housing with no business, no retail. While that happens, it's not at all universal.
> Can suburbs be designed to be more walkable/bikeable (I would actually be surprised if they aren't already)?
Can't speak for everywhere in the US, but in the places I've lived, this is standard. Part of the cost of building a house is putting sidewalks in. So the problem isn't walkability. The problem, where it exists, is a lack of anything to walk to. But that shouldn't be that hard to address -- knock down some houses and zone for commercial. Build small cities out of suburbs. (I expect that already happens, it certainly happened decades ago in places with long established suburbs).
On the points of culture, there's a video [1] that talks about how common US zoning pressures towns to all build very similarly, to the point where they look almost indistinguishable from one another. There's similar videos done by City Beautiful and Not Just Bikes, but I'm having a harder time searching my history for them on my phone. (I'll try to post them once I'm back at a real computer.)
Here's another video [2] that discusses how city tax revenue is primarily earned in their dense downtown regions, and spent on their more distributed suburban environments.
Others in the comments have discussed this, but the issues with towns being walkable and cyclist friendly tend to intersect directly with anti-goals if car design. Places aren't walkable if there's huge roads and parking lots that people have to traverse in order to get to them. Similarly, cars are quite hazardous to pedestrians and cyclists. If we're optimizing for human-scale environments, we're inherently car-hostile. Similarly, if we're optimizing for efficiency of cars, then we're hostile to human-scale design. The ideas are largely antithetical.
You can get some hybridization--metra trains from city cores to the suburbs, street cars or trams along main suburban drags alongside with automobiles, but one system constrains the other.
Historically, highway systems have segregated neighborhoods whose citizens were poorer, and relied disproportionately on public transit or bikes and walking. If you have to go half a mile out of your way to find an overpass over the highway to get to the nearest grocery, and that overpass has a litter-covered sidewalk barely two feet wide, we definitely aren't building our suburbs to be walkable or bikable.
> Again, suburbs aren't my thing, but it seems really offensive/chauvinistic to imply that suburban culture is lesser than urban culture. I'm sure I'm misunderstanding, and in the spirit of charity I want to give you the opportunity to set the record straight.
No, I meant that culture takes a dive from small-town culture, where you know your neighbors and shop owners.
With respect to prices, these are self-regulating. If prices go up, things either get denser and/or people move elsewhere.
> Culture takes a dive.
Again, suburbs aren't my thing, but it seems really offensive/chauvinistic to imply that suburban culture is lesser than urban culture. I'm sure I'm misunderstanding, and in the spirit of charity I want to give you the opportunity to set the record straight.
> No more walking or biking when those freeways go up.
Is this intrinsic to suburbs, or is it an artifact of how suburbs were planned at the time that suburbs exploded in popularity? Can suburbs be designed to be more walkable/bikeable (I would actually be surprised if they aren't already)?