Cars provide an illusion of freedom. Yes, you can get in the car and go "anywhere" on a very extensive and well-maintained road network. A good thing? Absolutel

Cars provide an illusion of freedom. Yes, you can get in the car and go "anywhere" on a very extensive and well-maintained road network. A good thing? Absolutely. On the other hand, a saccade in your attention (and those happen to everyone, albeit rarely) can have fatal consequences, you can be ticketed for driving at an objectively safe speed (posted speed limits can be well below design speeds, often by intention) and total costs, amortized, are somewhere near $20-30 per hour of driving. (Gas is only a small part of it.) Then there's parking, which is a fucking nightmare if you go anywhere interesting in a populated area. Having access to a car for a weekend trip is great; the car-dependent lifestyle is the absence of freedom. Suburbia was supposed to kill the urban "slum landlords" but, for the average "middle class" (actually upper-working class; true middle class starts around 85th percentile) American, the car is the new landlord. So many people work hard just to afford the car they need in order to get to work. It's a huge waste of resources. Also, I think that the suburban lifestyle is largely about control, especially when it comes to children. The suburban parent has to set up "play dates" and thus gets to control who the kids' friends are and make sure they're only exposed to the "right" social classes. The downside of this is that depriving children and adolescents of so much independence just makes parenting a monstrous, 18-year, chore. The "Calvin and Hobbes" childhood is impossible when the land is cut to pieces by roads. Since the current crop of kids is so controlled by their parents that they need a chaperone just to take a piss in the woods, the result for "middle class" parents is that having children means they no longer have a life. (The true middle class and upper-middle-class suffer less sacrifice; they can afford nannies and boarding schools and such.) It's not a way to live, IMO. That said, I'm not as much of a booster of the "traditional city" as the OP. You simply can't have a city like New York without a lot of public transit. The wealth generation that comes from large cities (2+ million) is that they allow extreme economic specialization, but you don't get that unless people have rapid access to a large number of people. Also, as ugly as the 20+ story apartment buildings may be, we're going to need them in order to make housing affordable... and that may just be a losing battle at this point. We also need to stop letting corrupt foreign officials buy real estate in New York and San Francisco, but that's another issue for another time.