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If we're looking at transportation, we ask: "Can society afford for everyone to walk everywhere by building simple sidewalks? How about bike riding on simple, narrow streets? How about driving short distances using a simple road and highway network? What about everyone driving long distances using a large/complex road and highway network? How about everyone being able to fly short distances by helicopter? What about everyone commuting across the country by airplane? Still sustainable? You figure out where the limit is and draw the line, fund the best we can actually afford in terms of cost, practicality and the avoidance of negative externalities (pollution, danger, noise, congestion, etc.), fund it, and if others want to choose something more costly, let them pay for it.
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I agree with this. Though where you draw that line depends on your political leanings. A left leaning person would set the threshold high because they'd also be in favor of higher public spending, a conservative leaning person would set it low because they'd be opposed to "redistribution".
There is not a strong or objective consensus on where the line should go, except for a historic(ancient) norm that streets are the commons.
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In the case of transportation, it's become abundantly clear over the last few decades that everyone driving everywhere by car including commuting long distances is too costly in several ways for society to sustain, so if individuals want this they can pay for it themselves.
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It's a contrarian opinion but this is what I question. Keep in mind I am in favor of transit and walkability and think cities should build up not out. If I was a Saudi prince planning a blank slate new city in the desert, Simcity style, cities wouldn't be dependent on the car so much.
The vast majority of North American towns and cities are irreversibly autocentric and decentralized. It also is the lower income working class who must drive the most. This is unlikely to change. As autonomous vehicles come out and make smaller, cheaper, electric vehicles a viable choice and let you pay for rides without having to own the vehicle and pay for its insurance, I imagine a lot of people will do that because its simply more practical.
In the modern economy, most jobs are service jobs. Their jobs are located all over the city or region. Think suburban shopping centers, distribution warehouses, offices that get cleaned, homes of people who hire maids and lawn crews. These jobs are less likely to have consistent, weekday hours. Many work shift work or on weekends. At the same time, affordable and middle class housing is also spread out and often pushed to the edges of metro areas these days. Housing filters, or trickles down, in existing urban centers it is rarely built affordable at market rate from the start without government subsidies.
We all know that mass transit works best in more densely populated areas, with centralized clusters of employment. It doesn't work well in suburban environments. It is very difficult for most people to rely on suburban transit. Its not uncommon for the working poor to spend hours commuting by suburban transit every day. It limits their employability when their work schedule has to conform to bus schedules, and it takes away their ability to be with their family or do things with their kids.
The inconvenient truth is that attempting to reshape cities by raising the cost of driving by removing public funding for highways and implementing tolls, or even street level fees, is not going to work as well as people hope. Even if it did, it would take several decades and it would cause a lot of pain to the people who shouldn't be burdened with it. The working poor will just be nickled and dimed and have less disposable income because they'll have no choice but to still drive. The upper middle class and affluent will just pay the cost of tolls because they can afford it.
This thread is about McMansions, and the willingness of many people to choose that lifestyle and even pay the 'full cost' of it. Those McMansion dwellers will prefer to eat out in whatever cute town center has nice restaurants nearby. They'll go to the doctor and send their kids to schools and call plumbers and pool cleaners and buy toilet paper and cat food nearby. Hence service jobs will be local to these suburban areas too. And middle class jobs in support of those service jobs.
When you work at a warehouse along a highway 20 miles from the city from 5 am to 1 pm and your wife works at a clinic in the outer suburbs from 3 pm to 12 pm and you live in an apartment complex in the inner suburbs, guess what, you need a car. No transit will ever be able to serve these areas at those times efficiently unless you want to suffer a 2 hour, 3 transfer bus ride from hell.
That warehouse will never move in the city, because it would be even more costly. It will not pay the workers more to compensate for their commuting costs, because the marginal value of their labor won't also magically increase. Increases in wages for those workers will be driven by macroeconomic factors and how well they compete with foreign labor, you don't get COL adjustments in near minimum wage jobs(shocker).
The clinic will be in the outer suburbs because it wants to be closer to the McMansion dwellers who are its customers, it does not care about where its workers live.
So what's to be done then? Well, maybe we could reign in sprawl by strategically focusing road and transportation spending. Local governments would extend the grid of streets and utility lines to stimulate somewhat denser suburban growth with urban nodes and clusters of jobs near affordable housing.
But guess what, this implies government is spending on roads. Its not quite the market urbanism that some espouse. That would mean little government spending on transportation(short of some piddly streetcars in certain areas so it can pretend to be progressive), and hence no strategy and no growth management and no density and no compactness.
Just rich people making the choice to still pay for sprawl, sprawl existing because their preference reigns supreme, and the 99% living in the sprawl not out of choice and being under house arrest because they have to pay congestion charges to leave their trailer parks. Sounds like hell to me.
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