Old Urbanist is a blog on urban planning and housing history, covering zoning, street area, parking, and car ownership.
HN commenters cite it for data on how much city land goes to streets and parking, on zoning, and on the history of car ownership.
In 1930, fewer than 10% of farms in the US had access to electricity; that kind of land is still cheap.
Mocking responses like yours seem to keep missing how bad 1930 living conditions were: such a lifestyle is with one where the average person had no electricity and no indoor plumbing, no phone service, no internet, no TV: sure 5 hours per week is sufficient for that lifestyle.
(Also, according to this graph, just under half of USA households in 1930 owned land, likewise just under half owned a car: https://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2013/02/was-rise-of-car-ownership-responsible.html)
You want land commensurate with that lifestyle? Sure, OK. $20/h (IIRC, the average American is about $43/h) * 5h/week * 52 weeks in a year = $5200, here's three options in the US where you could buy that in a year, which is much faster than what you need to pay off a house today:
1. 0.17 Acres, IN: https://www.land.com/property/Michigan-City-Indiana-46360/12589667/
2. 0.66 Acres, AR: https://www.land.com/property/1001-Ash-Flat-Dr-Horseshoe-Bend-Arkansas-72512/19628673/
3. 1.13 Acres, NV: https://www.land.com/property/Spring-Creek-Nevada-89815/20311909/
What do you live in on this land? Again, I want to emphasise that the average person in 1930 lived in conditions that Westerners would no longer accept including no indoor plumbing, no electricity, no TV, no internet, no phone (mobile or landline).
We won't accept them today, but glorified garden sheds like this are what a lot of people…
Thus speaks someone unfamiliar with it, it would appear.
The reverse is in fact true, as @lispm points out.
It's complex, it's diverse, it's tailored to each individual town and city. Big cities have urban rail or light rail or both, smaller ones have trams or trolleybuses, smaller ones may have just buses. To get to and from the stops, some cities have footpaths, some private bicycles, some public cycle sharing schemes.
And any combinations of the above, of course.
Every system bespoke to that city. Every city's system totally unique.
Outlier cities, such as very mountainous ones, integrate cable car systems into the mix, such as La Paz:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mi_Telef%C3%A9rico
And Medellín:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrocable_(Medell%C3%ADn)
Chongqing has a remarkable system because the city spans a set of mountain ranges and valleys:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chongqing_Rail_Transit
The exact reverse of your statement is the case.
The simplistic one-size-fits-all answer is: "get everyone to drive, give them loads of big roads and pave half the city for parking."
https://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2011/12/we-are-25-looking-at-street-area.html
> By your argument, they have no right to tell people living their what they can do with their property.
That's a false equivalence. People moving in aren't telling people in San Francisco what to do with their property. There is a mutual transaction (between a developer in San Francisco that wants to build say a high-rise apartment and people who want to rent it), that is being blocked by NIMBYs who have no property interest in the land on which the apartment would sit.
> By voting and electing people who want to change the status quo, they can tell people what to do with their property.
Only because Euclid was wrongly decided: http://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2011/11/ever-since-euclid.html.
>The Le Corbusier spirit of zoning
It's not Le Corbusier. Zoning in the USA started in the late 1800s, an effort to regulate light and air in cities, and turned by the early 1900s into an effort to keep certain industries and ethnicities out of "good" neighborhoods.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/28/a-history-of-zoning-in-three-acts-part-i
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-06-19/the-birth-of-zoning-codes-a-history
https://fee.org/articles/the-racist-history-of-zoning-laws/
https://www.kqed.org/news/11840548/the-racist-history-of-single-family-home-zoning
https://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2016/02/american-zoning-as-expression-of.html
The automobile simply did not do it.
Until the late 50s, most households in the US did not have a car : https://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2013/02/was-rise-of-car-ownership-responsible.html?m=1
Without a car, the only solution is public transport. And public transport in early 20th century America was the dominant source of the use of animals in personal transport.
The confounding factor here is transport, hence why I mentioned trucks. Go to for example Tiznit in Morocco and observe how animals are used. They're not used for personal transport - they're not efficient for that in city environment - their use is moving merchandise.
Tried to be careful with "up to". LA's city center has been measured at 59%. I'll try to find the source again.
But just consider:
- roads
- highways / major ingress/egress
- sidewalks (yup. Don't really need them without cars)
- parking lots & garages
A nice source with color-coded maps
- http://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2011/12/we-are-25-looking-at-street-area.html
A nice survey/writeup from Vox: https://www.vox.com/a/new-economy-future/cars-cities-technologies