Urbanists are extremely critical of the type of zoning that plonks suburbs in the middle of nowhere away from cities too. "R1 Zone" is practically a swear word.

Mixed-use zoning is much more effective. We do this in Europe, it's pretty nice being able to cycle to work and walk to the shops (not that I cycle to work personally, but almost all my jobs have been within cycling range).

But those suburbs already exist. What should we do for all of the people who already live in them? (And keep in mind that there's usually a good reason that people chose to not just live in an inner city in the first place.)

Strong Town's argument is that some of these suburbs will be successful in encouraging mixed-use development and in doing so will expand their tax bases. But most of the others will fail and decline.

ST are quite explicit that they mostly don't think that retrofitting suburbs should be a focus, because they believe that most of these will go bankrupt anyway, given a sufficient amount of time (because of too much infrastructure liability compared to the tax base), and indeed this is starting to happen all across the US. Hence their focus on areas with a solid core already, that should then be strengthened and encouraged to expand organically from there.

But that's just it. If someone likes suburban living, and your family home is in a suburb, how do you think they'd feel about something like "suburbs are probably all going to fail anyway, so let's do a bunch of things that will definitely and quickly make them fail, and then await the glorious day when your house gets torn down and replaced by apartments, and your neighborhood becomes a replica of the inner city"?

I don't understand your reasoning.

The only thing ST says here is "let existing suburbs be what they are", which sounds like what you want as well.

Even if they're not directly changing the suburbs with this proposal, the changes they want made to the city will make life worse for people who go there from the suburbs.

That's what commuter light rail is for, is Strong Towns against that?

Sure, I'll acknowledge that that could fix this problem. My complaint then becomes that they want to make everywhere hostile to drivers before commuter light rail gets built, when there's a chance that it never will.

I mean, if you're in a growing city and you do nothing, things will eventually get shitty for suburban commuters. At that point, you might have a choice between expanding the road system or building the rail.

Okay, but let's not reduce the capacity of the road system in the meantime.

Bus systems can work well to move commuters to rail-based mass-transit that bring them into the city. If the suburbs sprawl too far out, you can also plop down park-and-rides at the terminal stations of the mass transit system.

Why do you specifically need to drive and park at the exact location you're going to, especially when the land cost of the storage place of your empty car is prohibitively expensive (as they tend to be in urban CBDs)?

I have no need to park my car at any particular place. I do have a need to have the commuting experience be safe, reasonably convenient/predictable, and time-efficient.

I live in Cambridge on the Boston subway system. It’s probably (barely) in the top 5 in the US and it sucks compared to European cities I’ve visited or lived in.

In places that have good mass transit for their suburbs, sure. But what about all of the places that don't?

Because sometimes I have to go to work in weather conditions like hailstorms, thunderstorms, or freezing rain.

I recommend watching through the "Not Just Bikes" back catalog.

He has a bunch of videos that address common complaints that people who've only known car-dependent lifestyles bring up.

Here's a good example of how to design functional bicycle infrastructure for a seemingly hostile climate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU

Build mass transit. It's one of the best ways to increase economic activity.

I'm fine with this, but I don't like the plan of making it harder to drive first, and then maybe later adding an alternative.