I think that the fact that the suburban lifestyle has lasted 60 plus years, and shows no signs of dissipating, is proof that you’re wrong.

I also think that your prefered landscape exists in certain pockets of America, and a proper accounting of it shows that it isn’t achievable for the vast majority of Americans, unlike the suburban lifestyle.

Finally, hybrids and their paradigm shift in fuel economy are allowing the suburban lifestyle to survive, and perhaps keep on its outward expansion. Honda’s new Insight hybrid will be another Prius-style blockbuster. Ford’s Fusion Hybrid has recieved reviews showing that it is the best mainstream hybrid yet.

You missed my point. The proper comparison is to take the current paradigm in which driving is supra-ordinated above everything else and to compare it to some other paradigm one might envision in which people choose to live differently. My point is that we can envision a mode of everyday living wherein people live in such a way that they are not bound to diffuse locales, and as such are not obliged to take car trips to those locales, and thus “save time”. They recover that time for themselves, and can use that time being productive in other pursuits. The whole point is that current suburbanites bear an enormous opportunity cost to their travel. Given the spatial configurations they face on a daily basis, they are forced to spend considerable percentages of their time in transit, even if any one trip might be on average shorter than the trip taken by someone riding public transportation. Suburbanites face a hidden cost of car travel – an opportunity cost. I would indeed wager that if that opportunity cost is quantified and factored in, the “personal finance” savings to living in a suburb would dissipate and possibly evaporate.

I think we can test your hypothesis. We’ve got varying landscapes, some that probably meet your criteria of more compact landscapes. What are the personal finance tradeoffs of such a landscape vs. the typical suburban one?

I think Richard has the answer. The compact landscapes have more income inequality because they’re more expensive to live in. Essentially you have the rich (Richard would call them the creative class), and the illegal immigrants who cater to them (and who live in squalor).

That certainly explains Manhattan, which is the core of the only public transportation system in the US that captures the majority of rush hour commuters.

Regarding what one can do in a car vs. what one can do on public transportation, you certainly can’t read in a car. But many hard core commuters do value the decompression time of their commutes. They’ve got their iPod, XM, talk radio, whatever.

Fair points. I’m going appeal to another touchy-feely feeling to counter your hard-as-stone objective argument.

I’m not convinced that this is true: “I don’t care what you do on a bus, if it takes you hours to do what would take a fraction of that in a car, a bus makes absolutely no personal financial sense. Your time is simply far too valuable.”

First off, think of it this way. A lot of people once thought that increased speed of factory production would decrease working hours. This did not happen. Similarly, as Rebecca Solnit points out reliance on car travel binds people to more diffuse locales rather than freeing them from travel time. Many assume that driving saves time, but instead it changes our relationship to the world and space, creates landscapes that are oriented towards driving, and obliges us to take car trips instead of other sorts of trips. Again, if not for driving, we wouldn’t be bound to these diffuse locales, and would have “more time”. If this is too touchy-feely, I’m sure I could find “math” bearing it out.

Secondly, yes you should “care what somebody does on a bus”, because if I remember correctly you were the one arguing that the creative class wouldn’t ride public tranportation because their time mattered too much too them. My argument is that unlike time driving, time spent on public transportation isn’t time lost – it can be spent reading, thinking, coordinating, being creative, etc. Even if travel time _per trip_ is lower in a car, that really is forfeited time to a “creative class” person – it is time that they cannot read, think, etc. Time traveling on public transit is not forfeited time.

Besides that, as someone who has taken freshman-level philosophy, I’ve never encountered accounts of “freedom” or “liberty” that depend on purchase and use of certain consumer goods.

The ONLY city where public transportation captures a majority of rush hour travelers is NYC. This has nothing to do with “systematic underfunding of mass transit”. Hell, the MTA invented underfunding!

More likely, there are geographical factors that have made public transportation work in NYC (and Europe).

I don’t think Americans have “a love affair with the car”, or that freedom explains the dominance of the auto in America. It is simple personal finance. It’s the math.

I don’t care what you do on a bus, if it takes you hours to do what would take a fraction of that in a car, a bus makes absolutely no personal financial sense. Your time is simply far too valuable.

In fact, the reason that the poor rely on public transportation so much more than the rich is exactly proof of my contention. The poor only rely on public transit because they have no other choice. If they were a little richer, and could afford a car, they would be far better off.

As for high speed rail, the latest I’ve seen from Spain, which just finished their own high speed system, is that it cost roughly $1B a mile. And that’s in a country without our insane legal system where you can sue anybody at anytime for any amount of money.

High speed rail might make a lot of sense in certain areas (Chicago could be a high speed hub, with close by Milwaukee, Detroit, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Minneapolis). But again, the finance of the situation probably doesn’t work. Is there enough ridership from Chicago-Indianapolis to fund the capital cost of $200B (let’s say), much less the operating costs?

David, Robert Pirsig proposed the best description of American culture in his book “Lila” that I’ve ever ready, arguing that American culture sprang from a synthesis of the values and customs of the native American Indians roaming free in nature and the western European values and customs of the settlers’ ancestors. The Indians valued freedom and independence within the context of a village orientation and harbored a deep reverence for what lay around them; a very deep but disorganized spirituality that valued present-tense experience. In any event, it’s an interesting hypothesis and “Lila” is one of the most powerful and thought-provoking books I’ve ever read. But, back to the here-and-now, I can appreciate the thrill of driving a high performance car on a racetrack and I’m sure that the early-day highways served as great race-tracks when not overwhelmed with traffic during peak driving hours; but those days are long gone. Suburbia is far too strung-out to provide for any such relief, the highways have become moving parking lots. We will see the transformation of the car from status symbol and ultimate mode of transportation to unfashionable instrument of necessary evil in the very short-term.

I didn’t write that america is better or the only country that loves liberty, I implied that it is different culturally from others with its greater emphasis on individual liberty. (For lit on this thesis check de toqueville, turner, lipset, etc). US policies and consumer behavior on ‘autos vs mass’ transit are an expression of this high ranking for personal liberty.

In keeping with the theme expressed above, check out Cannonball Run starring Burt Reynolds. An exciting story based on the real world exploits of thrill seeking, renegade auto racers making their way from the east coast to the west in an illegal road race. I dare say, the automobile was the source of freedom for all those people, including foreign born racers who came to the US for the Cannonball Run. Hope all had a nice weekend.