The Big Dig is part of a transportation system designed to help people who live in the suburbs commute by car into the city to work. If everyone who worked in the city could also live there, there would be much less need for massive highways. As local transportation, the subway and buses are much more scalable and efficient. (Not to mention just walking.)
Residential sprawl in the suburbs is not producing food, etc. Nobody is advocating turning all cropland into city, that wouldn’t make any sense.
The advocacy is for changing tax/zoning/planning policy to encourage residential density and mixed residential-commercial use neighborhoods. Even in towns of, say, 30k people, having a denser town center full of low-rise apartment buildings and walkable neighborhoods is a big advantage for economic efficiency, for human health, and for the environment.
Having people commute one-person-per-car for 1–2 hours per day, drive cars to school, to shops, to restaurants, to the post office and the library, ... is ridiculously destructive at a societal scale. All the public infrastructure and public services cost several times as much per capita as life at higher density, not even to mention the economic/environmental cost of the cars themselves, or the massive time opportunity cost of the commuting.
> you can't just assume everyone into urban living.
Nope. But people who want to live somewhere very economically wasteful should be prepared to pay for it.
Residential sprawl in the suburbs is not producing food, etc. Nobody is advocating turning all cropland into city, that wouldn’t make any sense.
The advocacy is for changing tax/zoning/planning policy to encourage residential density and mixed residential-commercial use neighborhoods. Even in towns of, say, 30k people, having a denser town center full of low-rise apartment buildings and walkable neighborhoods is a big advantage for economic efficiency, for human health, and for the environment.
Having people commute one-person-per-car for 1–2 hours per day, drive cars to school, to shops, to restaurants, to the post office and the library, ... is ridiculously destructive at a societal scale. All the public infrastructure and public services cost several times as much per capita as life at higher density, not even to mention the economic/environmental cost of the cars themselves, or the massive time opportunity cost of the commuting.
> you can't just assume everyone into urban living.
Nope. But people who want to live somewhere very economically wasteful should be prepared to pay for it.