Wow this is so incredibly wrong that its almost hurts.

As a Swiss person I find it so fucking funny when people in the US who drive over their totally broken streets, constantly stuck in this huge traffic jams, build ridicules 20-lane highways and add a single line to a highway for like 5 billion $ want to talk about how public transit is expensive and unpractical.

Partly this believes comes from the fact that the US is one of the few countries that has made highway building into directly government funded activity (not even a real gas tax) while transit project have no such luxury.

Roads and highways are supposed to be free, and government just pays for it. But somehow public transit has to pay for itself.

But here is the thing, true individualism and choice comes from great public transit. In Switerland, you can pay nothing (except some of your taxes) for the public transport and then just decide at any random morning decide, I'm going to go to the other side of the country, cross a lake, go up a mountain and then back home in the evening. You pike up your phones, walk out of your place of living and most likely within 5-10min walk you have some kind of public transit that will reliably bring you to the place you want to be and back.

Check out the network here: https://www.jokteur.com/integrated_timetable/switzerland_sto...

This is for 8 million people, that is less then in some US metro areas and it has to contend with mountains. The US mostly has much better geography.

So it turns out what almost all individuals want in terms of transit is about 5-10min walk away from a public transit station. Building such a system is far more cost effective then building a car network that achieves the same thing. And it also frees up the existing car network not to be totally overflowing and in constant need of expansion.

It also is about 100x better for the environment because almost all of that network runs on green electricity, its saves a huge amount of money because people don't breath tail pipe emissions, and it saves the population a huge amount of money because a car is 100% optional for a huge part of the population.

Not to mention its incredibly for the independence of kids and young adults. Kids in the mountains have reliable way to get to school and its very often the case that young people take the train to school as early as 14. I did international travel without parents when I was 16. This allows that the schools don't have to pay for inconvenient separate bus systems like they have to do in the US.

In cities this is even more important. Transit in cities is cheap and effective if you consider the per person cost, and it results in a comfortable quite likeable city if done correctly. You don't need 'smart cities', all you have to do is ban idiots in their dumb polluting load cars, and design the city for walking, cycling and transit.

And if you do that, the property values and property taxes will pay for the transit with much left over. In the US the few places that exists that are like that fetch absurdly high prices and make the cities huge amounts of money.

The idea that you advocate 'distributed society' is nonsense. Its incredibly harmful in terms of emissions, energy use, infrastructure cost. Its literally the opposite of how all human advancement has worked over the last 500 years.

And again, this is not theory, this can be backed up with data. Suburban sprawl car dependency is literally the worst and most costly way to live and that's why all the US cities are broke. I strongly suggest you go check out 'urban3' they collect real data from real cities and the universal patterns is that dense city centers with transit are supporting the urban sprawl these cities have built around. And even worse that even with the economically profitable core, they will never be able to maintain all the sprawl they have build. And that's why in so much of the US they can't fix the roads. That's why so many cities in the US have horrible problems with their water systems.

You are literally 100% wrong. And its not even up for debate. Data of real existing cities shows this in an incredibly clear way if you just look at it. Rather then come up with your own ideas like 'distributed society'. As if such a world didn't require huge road networks, huge water networks, huge amounts of cars, huge amount of truck driven logistic centers and so on and so on.