>You point would be much stronger if we didn't very strictly regulate what you can build where in cities and cities still grew organically. Take a look at the

>You point would be much stronger if we didn't very strictly regulate what you can build where in cities and cities still grew organically. Take a look at the developing world. There are plenty of places where zoning is minimal and can be ignored if the right palms are greased (the US was like that too at one time). They still build highways and buy cars in droves (despite the latter being a much larger fraction of people's income) though they do build more public transit as well (developing countries build a lot of everything). >Why can't I build higher buildings in my neighborhood even though demand is really strong? Because people with exactly the same hubris as yourself who just so happened to have been born 75yr earlier also thought they knew best. >Laws create demand for cars because they shape the city to be more car friendly than it might be if left to anarchy. The positive feedback loop of car friendly laws leading to more cars leading to more demand for car friendly laws is very obvious and hard to break. Yes, American sprawling suburbs are over the top but in their time they were actually what people wanted and worked quite well. Now we're reaping what we sow. >They are just obscenely overused today because of the way we chose to shape the incentives. I thing regulating what one can build on their own property (vs what one can emit off of their property) is a violation of property rights but that's about as far as our agreement goes here. Attempting to incentive our way out of the problem is doomed to the same failure without some fundamental change in human nature