Yes and no. The problem is too much of the world is unnecessarily built that way. This is one of the fundamental reasons why it will take so long to implement: we need to change where people prefer to live.
Note I said “prefer” before y’all get up in arms about forcing people to move. We’ve spent way too many years giving rural people a lot of the same infrastructure as urban people and it’s just not sustainable. The thing is that even relatively small towns can have denser walkable areas and useful transit. Without forcing anyone to uproot, we ought to be able to get a good 80% or more of the population to not require a car.
Someone from the US will always chime in about how we’re different, bigger, more spread out, but that’s BS.
We also have 80% of our population in urban or suburban areas that could be designed for effective transit use.
Most of our travel is between near-ish cities that could be effectively served by intercity rail.
Many of our worst traffic jams are beyond the possibility of fixing by adding more lanes.
Most of our air congestion is thousands of regional flights that could be served by rail
We have a fantastic interstate highway system, amazing air travel facilities, but we’ve not spent enough time or money on other possibilities. We emphasized people’s privacy on their own lot at the expense of being unable to walk anywhere
Yes and no. The problem is too much of the world is unnecessarily built that way. This is one of the fundamental reasons why it will take so long to implement: we need to change where people prefer to live.
Note I said “prefer” before y’all get up in arms about forcing people to move. We’ve spent way too many years giving rural people a lot of the same infrastructure as urban people and it’s just not sustainable. The thing is that even relatively small towns can have denser walkable areas and useful transit. Without forcing anyone to uproot, we ought to be able to get a good 80% or more of the population to not require a car.
here in sweden more than 80% of the population already lives in an urban area, and contrary to what some people want to believe it’s perfectly fine.
Someone from the US will always chime in about how we’re different, bigger, more spread out, but that’s BS.
We have a fantastic interstate highway system, amazing air travel facilities, but we’ve not spent enough time or money on other possibilities. We emphasized people’s privacy on their own lot at the expense of being unable to walk anywhere