Such trips would also be fine candidates for light rail; that is, if it was ubiquitous enough to actually service people near their homes, and to multiple locations where they might be going. It’s not that people won’t ride rail just because; it’s because it is not very convenient to have to drive several miles to a rail station, and find alternate transportation from the stop to wherever you are going, which is the case in most places with rail today.

I don’t think transit can be made profitable. Nor should it be. That’s a certainty.

Globalization and the real estate bubble (the industrial and commercial sectors have problems just as big) have taken a lot of the wind out of suburbanization.

There is a surfeit of both unused housing stock and commercial and industrial land. Prices are going to be low for a long time.

That eases the price pressures on land that make suburbanization necessary. Suburbanization involves the transfer of land from a lower value to a higher one.

Once the post-bubble wreckage has been sorted out, people are going to choose from the variety of housing that has been made available. It’s not either houses or multiunits/rentals. Stronger city regions will have diversified housing and property ownership options.

The industrial cities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were very nasty places indeed. There’s a good reason why people didn’t want to live in them. They looked grim, smelled awful, and the externalities of industrial production (polluted air, water, etc.) was making them physically sick.

Urban wealth allowed us to solve these problems. We’ve figured out how to clean our air, treat our water, and mitigate visual and noise pollution. There’s much less of an impetus to flee.

Imagine our forebears looking at us going into convulsions over … gasp! … parking spaces in front of Starbucks and what colors we’re allowed or forbidden to paint our houses.

Worse, America was a relatively younger country, and hadn’t gone through the urban social transformation process. “Old World” cities went through the process long before American cities even became regional, let alone national or global, spheres of influence. The process, and it is a very frightening one, had long been settled.

Why are cities generally associated with concrete and tall buildings rather than yards and picket fences? Density isn’t a lifestyle choice but an economic necessity. When demand for a dwelling exceeds the supply of land, fitting more people in on that plot of land is economical.

As people have more money, their choices in housing arrangements is broader. They could afford to buy a bigger house, or one that matches their lifestyle.

That, of course, depends on a thriving economy and public policies to allow that choice.

What may be true 100 years ago may not hold for the next 100 years.

A house in the ‘burbs was suitable for a time when people could count on working in the same workplace in the same city region for their adult lives, and that their kids would follow in their path.

Now, workers must be settled into having not only several employers, but a few whole career changes along the way. It may even involve moving into faraway city regions, or probably out of the U.S. altogether.

Then we have the unique challenge posed by the housing bubble. This is going to hang over our heads for at least one generation. There are too many houses on the market, so property as a store of value is going to be a losing proposition. (Commercial real estate is next.) And the house isn’t as important as the land underneath it, and the land’s value is determined by its relation to other important economic activities.

Plus, all economics is global. If Americans insist on a house as a prerequisite for economic participation, then they must also reconcile the fact that lower economic functions can always be given to a part of the world (i.e., the half that subsists on less than $2 a day) that doesn’t have such finicky workers; and the higher ones can be done in cities where well-paid and well-educated workers don’t have self-esteem issues about living in crowded areas with no yards or property deeds.

Suburbanization was underway decades before the Interstate system was built…

…and so were the federal-aid roads and the limited access expressways. The first regions to suburbanize, the Mid-Atlantic and California, had a large system of paved roads for cars by the 1920s and multiple free and tolled expressways by the 1930s. If you look at when areas like New York’s Nassau County and California’s Orange County started booming as bedroom communities, it’s right after the roads got to them.

In areas near interstates, yes…cities became less livable as a direct result of the interstate. No one can deny the effect of a highway on a 3-6 block swath. But in the aggregate, the interstates didn’t affect livability as much as suburbanization did; my parents live less than a quarter-mile from an interstate-grade highway in an upper-middle-class suburb of Philadelphia.

If the highway came first and the suburb came second, it probably wouldn’t affect livability too much. The suburb grew around the highway, and would consider it a primary road instead of an obstacle. This is why the least intrusive highways are those built to follow existing borders. But at any rate, highway construction often involved leveling multiple blocks of neighborhoods, with no concern for the people living in them, and splitting other communities. The idea was that those neighborhoods were all slums and had best be turned into public housing projects.

Moses himself was especially evil, but the other highway builders were not much better. The phrase “negro removal” as an expression for what happened during highway building and slum clearance was used throughout the United States, not just in New York.

To have suburbs, you need cities. (The architectural form is not material to this discussion.)

A city, as an economic unit, can transform the land underneath it to a bountiful source of value. Highly productive cities will have especially valuable land that will gradually become more cost-prohibitive to obtain.

Since no one can make more land, the next alternative is to transform comparatively less productive land around it by absorbing it.

The transformed lands would be what are now known today as suburbs. Improvements in transportation technology help to make these lands less distant.

So suburbs came into being even before motorized power allowed for the transformation of even larger areas.

Alon, most of what you wrote before the above is sensible and fact based. The above quote, however, infers a level of malice that simply wasn’t there (again, with the likely exception of Robert Moses and New York). In areas near interstates, yes…cities became less livable as a direct result of the interstate. No one can deny the effect of a highway on a 3-6 block swath. But in the aggregate, the interstates didn’t affect livability as much as suburbanization did; my parents live less than a quarter-mile from an interstate-grade highway in an upper-middle-class suburb of Philadelphia. The highway is a non-factor in desirability of the neighborhood.

Suburbanization was underway decades before the Interstate system was built…when there were still streetcars. The Interstates weren’t the cause. The desire to be surrounded by yard instead of pavement and commerce was the same 100 years ago as it is now.

More in general, government support for suburbanization independently of highway construction was fueled by racism. Mortgage aid redlined neighborhoods with any racial integration, ensuring white people couldn’t get mortgages if they wanted to live near blacks. That’s one of the reasons why as American cities matured, the racial animosity among Jews, Irish, Italians, and other white ethnic groups subsided, while white/black animosity didn’t. (One of the early impetuses for greenfield suburbanization was that it was the easiest way to ensure that neighborhoods would be white-only, preventing them from being redlined).

Lexington and Fort Wayne are not the best examples of central city decline, because their entire regions are in decline. The reason for the focus on Detroit is that for decades the overall region was doing fine – it was just the central city that was bleeding. The same is true for Oakland, New Orleans, Washington, and the Bronx. It’s ultimately a government policy choice that ensured the rich would live in the suburbs and the poor in the inner city. Other governments chose differently, and got different results.

You’re right that it’s not highway construction in general but the way it was done that killed inner cities. There are ways of building roads without destroying cities. However, all this is irrelevant because more often than not, the highway builders and good roads populists wanted to make central cities less livable instead of more livable. (Nowadays urbanists often fail to distinguish between the Mumfords and Moseses, but they were two separate sets of people; city leaders frequently opposed suburbanization and believe in urban renewal as the way to prevent it.)

The interstate highway system was a huge win for America. An America with only two-lane roads connecting our country is one I’m glad we don’t have anymore. It’s true that too many urban freeways were very destructive, but it is naive to blame the decline of urban cores only on freeways. Just look at cities like Lexington, KY; Ft. Wayne, IN and others that did not get urban freeways and their downtowns fared no better.