There's another solution that's more politically palatable: better transportation. Physical distance is only marginally relevant to the health of a city. Travel time is what actually matters. How do you get 100 million people or more within a 30-minute diameter? Improve transportation.
Human transportation in the United States is a fucking joke. We stalled out in the 1950s and haven't improved. Our trains are expensive and slow, air travel is expensive and inconvenient with terrible service, and automotive travel has the obvious problems of scaling abysmally and belching greenhouse gases. We need fast and affordable trains: 75 mph and $0.10/passenger-mile from suburbs to cities, 300 mph and $0.03/passenger-mile cross-country. Going from New York to Chicago should be a $25 train ride that takes 2 hours. That's what it would be if we were an actual first world country. New York to San Francisco should be doable overnight for under $100 each way.
Don't get me wrong. I'd love to see the assholes in Greenwich Village who keep their neighborhood sky-high expensive by blocking new development get their shit scrambled by a government that actually had the masculine force to stand up to them. I think the whiny bastards deserve to have their windows painted black every night for what they are doing to this city (making it hard to build, thus expensive, because they're emotional 4-year-olds who can't handle change in their pweshus widdle views). All that said, I think improving transportation is more of a winning battle than busting NIMBY monsters (but we should be doing both).
For the most part I agree. Transportation investment is key and much wiser than trying to deal with NIMBYs.
But: $0.03 per passenger mile?! Even subsidized HSR systems come out closer to $0.40. How are we supposed to come to an order of magnitude improvement?
Here's why $0.03 per passenger mile is not unreasonable. The automobile is one of the most energy-inefficient modes of transportation out there and it costs about $0.40 per mile, per vehicle. That's $0.10 per passenger mile for a family of four. On the most expensive, dangerous, environmentally costly common mode of transportation out there.
There's no good reason why trains should be less efficient than the car. None at all. That gives us a starting point, which should be easy to beat, of $0.10 per passenger per mile for a 75 mph train.
Now, most costs in transportation are labor costs, so it stands to reason (below the sound barrier) that what things "should" cost (excluding fuel) can be measured on a per-hour basis. Travel at 300 mph should be cheaper, for this reason-- perhaps not 4 times cheaper because energy costs increase, but definitely 3.
That's what's counter-intuitive here: slow travel is more expensive, in terms of what it actually costs the provider, than fast travel because it sucks up more employee time.
Realistically, $0.05 per passenger mile would be a substantial accomplishment. I would be happy to see that. The Category 5 embarrassment is that we're not even trying.
Human transportation in the United States is a fucking joke. We stalled out in the 1950s and haven't improved. Our trains are expensive and slow, air travel is expensive and inconvenient with terrible service, and automotive travel has the obvious problems of scaling abysmally and belching greenhouse gases. We need fast and affordable trains: 75 mph and $0.10/passenger-mile from suburbs to cities, 300 mph and $0.03/passenger-mile cross-country. Going from New York to Chicago should be a $25 train ride that takes 2 hours. That's what it would be if we were an actual first world country. New York to San Francisco should be doable overnight for under $100 each way.
Don't get me wrong. I'd love to see the assholes in Greenwich Village who keep their neighborhood sky-high expensive by blocking new development get their shit scrambled by a government that actually had the masculine force to stand up to them. I think the whiny bastards deserve to have their windows painted black every night for what they are doing to this city (making it hard to build, thus expensive, because they're emotional 4-year-olds who can't handle change in their pweshus widdle views). All that said, I think improving transportation is more of a winning battle than busting NIMBY monsters (but we should be doing both).