Yes! Speeding things up just causes distances to increase and facilities to centralize. Game-theoretically, each individual does save time, but soon everyone h

Yes! Speeding things up just causes distances to increase and facilities to centralize. Game-theoretically, each individual does save time, but soon everyone has a car and the equilibrium shifts. It's like two income households, college degrees, or access to machine guns: Great when only you have it, bad when everyone does. Or like commute times: It doesn't matter where you are or what the distances are; people are willing to commute about 40 minutes. Increase speeds and they just move further out. The centralization brought by high speeds then destroys Main Street and shifts power to big box stores. Yes, the overall economy does get "more efficient", but in a way that the gains are captured by the Walton family. If infrastructure were changed to make higher speeds more difficult -- if we could blow up the damned highways -- then the equilibrium would shift again, and, within a few years, people would be spending no more time going back and forth to the grocery store, because smaller local stores, bodegas, would have popped up. If you go to "developing" countries you see more of this. There are villages and little shops. The roads are dirt, and you travel by moped/scooter at low speed. Sometimes cows wander on the road. The whole economy and transportation network fits together. And it's totally fine. This is closer to how we should live in America. Yes, outright poverty is bad -- you need food to eat. But once you reach the "middle income" bracket? Once you have a moped, a (not "smart") cellphone, two molded plastic chairs, a pair of flip flops, and a t-shirt? At that point, so long as the weather is warm, you're basically fine. You can't live like that in America. But if we all did, then (in many of our climates) you could. Now, you don't need to turn the US into Cuba to accomplish this. There are ritzy high end places that have made this trade too. There are a few suburbs built with networks of low speed paths, where everyone just drives golf carts (except to go outside the community). There are retirement communities in Florida that are basically Disney World. There are resort-town beach islands where cars are banned. People love these places. Something like 60% (remembered stat) of Americans now live in places administered by an HoA or condo association. We're turning into a weird feudal sprawl of gated communities. Which sucks. But it may also offer an opportunity: Those communities, being more self-contained, might be able to experiment more. And the experiment they should do is to look to the pre-industrial past, and the lower-income present. Money, cars, highways, McMansions, Whole Foods, corporations, "leaning in" -- they are a curse. They rob you of your happiness and of your grandchildren. Build villages. Grow food. Keep shops. Have families. Find better gods to worship. A civilization, a culture, a built environment -- they all fit together. They need to be conducive to life.