Item — HN Reader

Unfortunately “new cities” develop in places where everyone is used to driving, so it takes a lot to overcome a car centric culture.

I live in a college town in a rural area. The transition to public transportation happens when parking becomes expensive or impractical (such as at the university) so people park and ride on a bus.

But that still requires cars. Frankly cars have value that’s hard to replace when there’s a disperse population. Which maybe is the real problem in the US: there’s a culture around “I want my own land”. It pervades even in progressive circles...

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How many such "new cities" are there really? Car culture wasn't a thing until the 1950s and I can't think of a single metropolitan city that was founded after that.

There are lots of new cities, or at least cities that were founded or built substantially after the invention of the car. Irvine, CA, for example began construction in the 60s and incorporated in the 70s (and now has more than 250K people making it a top 100 city by population). The town I grew up in only incorporated in 1982 (and most every house was built in the 70s to 90s).

Also the city of Mountain House is a planned community for 20,000 that started construction in 2001.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_House,_San_Joaquin_...

There’s not really “new cities” in the sense of someone establishing a new town. There’s just smaller towns growing into small cities, small cities growing to mid-sized, etc...

The problem is those places start car dependent and the US is such that we have a lot of land and there’s not a lot of incentive to urbanize. We want our 40 acres and a mule, with a big fence around our land, and a big sign that says “no trespassing” then we want to drive our cars to get to common areas

I think one of the problems in discussing cities is the hazy meaning of "city" that different people have in mind. Many (most?) people who live in cities aren't in the biggest ones, and the dynamics are different eg when bikeable-distance suburban housing is affordable, and distances inside the urban area are walkable.