As others have said, driving really isn't a choice in much of the US, but rather an artifact of finding a residence with desirable attributes (price, size, form

As others have said, driving really isn't a choice in much of the US, but rather an artifact of finding a residence with desirable attributes (price, size, form-factor, noise level, green space, school zone) in the same metro as one's workplace. Just as the article notes that framing driving with moralistic terms is a recipe for ruin, so is framing it as a conscious choice on parts of perfectly average people who "decide" to drive to work that day. So quit focusing on driving -- driving isn't the problem, despite the pollution deaths, despite car crashes, despite whatever evil cars and trucks bring upon the world -- they're tools, like just like fossil fuel power plants and oil refineries and other terribly unpleasant things that enable a modern, globalized, distributed, and hyper-specialized society. As this and other articles find, driving is a symptom of land use, but car-centric suburbia was not build because of cars, but merely enabled by them. Greenfield land has many perks, not the least the lack of pre-existing baggage like badly configured buildings, under-sized streets, and aging underground infrastructure. In the US, this wave was helped by white flight and the increased demand after WWII, but demographically homogeneous countries in Central and Eastern Europe are going through a wave of suburbanization right now, driven solely by income inequality. I've said it before [1], as car suburbs are aging themselves, they're becoming worse places to live, which makes it harder to pay for their upkeep, and those who can afford to move move either further out to brand new exurbs that have a better balance of commercial vs. residential, or back to revitalizing urban cores, leaving only those who can't afford to leave. Capitalism works within the same metro too; local governments compete against each other for businesses and residents. The low-populated outskirts are often at risk for annexation by a nearby town, so they can instead incorporate themselves to capture local tax base and keep it from paying for "somebody else". There is no free lunch and income is redistributed either way: either the city annexes a far-flung reach of greenfield land to build some high-profit industrial park to help pay for the city's aging infrastructure or its attempts to gentrify, or the local residents organize into smaller and smaller independent municipalities that focus on fostering the character of the particular neighborhood while keeping the tax income closer to the site, but fragmenting the metro into entities that compete for the same dollars. This is fundamentally an economic problem, one that's not driven by regulation and NIMBY, but mostly by average people looking to maximize their self-interest for 5-to-15-years at a time, but much longer if they're unlucky. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11880084#11880937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11880084#11880937