Point of note: the average dwelling in the UK is 75 years old. That's a mean; a substantial proportion are over a century old, and many are under preservation o

Point of note: the average dwelling in the UK is 75 years old. That's a mean; a substantial proportion are over a century old, and many are under preservation orders ... and they were designed at a time when automobiles either did not exist, or were owned by fewer than 2% of the population. (Car ownership hit one vehicle per 25 people only some time after 1945.) We just don't have the land area to go throwing up new construction (including buildings or roads) willy-nilly -- if the US land area was populated to the same average density as the UK there would be around 6 billion people living there, not 300 million. This goes for most of the living urban cores of European cities, similarly. Urban sprawl is cheap and lets you build around the automobile -- although it's intrinsically hostile to public transport by reducing population density. But if land is astronomically expensive to re-purpose, urban sprawl simply isn't a viable solution to the transport problem. TL;DR: we need teleport booths, stat.