>>28507617>>28507638You can say all of this, but the reality is that the majority of people choose the car-centric suburban lifestyle whenever they have the choice, all over the world. There's no grand plan to force people into cars, they simply prefer that over living in some high-rise apartment building surrounded by nothing but concrete, other buildings, and hordes of people. Young people disagree because they're young, they're still in a phase of life where they want easy access to bars, trendy restaurants, etc. and are willing to make a lot of sacrifices for that, but once you've got a long-term partner or have just aged out of that lifestyle and especially once you've got a family the calculus completely changes.
I grew up in a very car-centric place, and as much as the commute sucked it's also what ALLOWED me to have a real childhood, where my family could have a big yard, where I could go play and MTB in big undeveloped parkland areas, where having a car meant being able to access true wilderness areas, all without my parents having to live in constant fear that I was going to get snatched or killed. Friends in denser parts of the city didn't get any of that and spent their entire childhoods inside playing video games and watching TV.
I've ended up living or spending extensive time in big, dense, transit heavy cities all over the world in my lifetime - London, Paris, Tokyo, Osaka, NYC, San Francisco - and I can't see how a kid could have a decent childhood comparable to what I had in any of them. What the fuck is a kid supposed to do when you live on the 10th floor of a high-rise and everything around you is just concrete and hordes of strangers?
As for people like NJB, what they never acknowledge is the massive difference in scale between American big cities and the European ones they idolize, either. The entire Netherlands has about the same population as the LA area. The entire Amsterdam metro area would barely be in the top 30 US cities.