>You call it barbaric, but I call your "15 min walkable cities" open air prisons...

What about it is a prison? Go on Streetview for Cardiff or any British city, show me what you regard as prison-like. I don't understand what you could possibly be talking about.

(Apart from the literal HMP Cardiff of course, but nobody goes there unless found guilty by a jury of twelve)

There's a reason I refer to Streetview so much: I can point to very specific concrete things (often literally made of concrete), instead of getting lost in abstractions and rhetoric (I notice you didn't even address what I said about the shitty bus stops, probably because you know they're indefensible). So show me the bars of my prison, tell me about the shadows on the cave wall.

>I guess that is a chicken vs egg statement. I dont think they actually would, and I believe the "demand" for sidewalks is a very small minority of the taxpaying base. If it was not there would be more puch for it in Local Politics which is far easier to get things like that through.

>Chances are though to it would require a tax bond initiative on the ballot, which I suspect would have a VERY VERY VERY poor chance of succeeding, thus no funding to do it. People often claim they want sidewalks right up until they have to vote to increase their property, sales, or income taxes to pay for them.

This is just another way of saying your political system is completely broken. What you're describing is not competent governance. Why do sidewalks require a referendum? And moreover, why don't roads? Why don't you need to vote for every little new road that gets built, but you do have to vote for every new sidewalk? There's your answer for why the latter doesn't get built. If you needed a referendum and tax bond initiative to build street lighting, that wouldn't get built much either. Democracy drives in darkness.

And might I remind you, given the talk of taxes: the federal gasoline tax comes nowhere close to paying for roads, the way it's theoretically supposed to. It's been fixed at the same per-gallon rate for 30 years, hasn't risen with inflation (93% since then), presumably because voters like you don't want it to go up. Road building and maintenance comes out of an increasing share of general funds each year. Non-drivers subsidize you.

>Also for the record, I find "Strong Towns" to be propaganda not serious research or journalism or what ever...

You can just look at the photographs in the articles, they speak for themselves. You can't just call something "propaganda" because you don't like its point of view.

>You desire greater population density

Greater than what?

>more closely packed cities

More closely packed than what?

I don't want to live in the Kowloon walled city, if that's what you think. I don't like tower blocks (they're usually a false economy). There's a happy middle ground in these things.

>and everything to be walkable so a person a work, live and shop in a small area.

And yeah, what's wrong with being able to work, live, and shop in a small area? You seem to have this fevered delusion that I'm somehow imprisoned in my neighbourhood, that I'm forced to shop locally, but that simply isn't the case. I can do things nearby, and I also can go further afield if I want (which I in fact do), and I have the choice to walk, bike, take a bus, taxi, train, or indeed drive. There are cars going back and forth on the road next to my house right now, they're not impeded in the slightest. The difficulties in getting around that I do have are -- you guessed it -- caused by excessive car infrastructure more than anything else. In the manner of Archimedes: give me a protected bike lane long enough, and I shall circumnavigate the Earth.

On the other hand you can't do things nearby, and you must go far afield, and you must drive to get there. You have objectively fewer options, which makes you less free.

And you must always carry official travel documents, and produce them on demand to armed officers of the state, with severe penalties for refusal. Whereas I go about as I please, breathing free English air, carrying no identification, and never hearing the snarl of "papers, please"; a continental despotism which here thankfully has never taken root. In a country dependent on the car, driving licenses are tantamount to internal passports. How's that for an open-air prison?

>I, and many other Americans, find population density to be a BAD thing, we do not want to live all stacked on each either. I own a 3/4 acre (about 3000 sq meters) of land where my home sits. That is the absolute minimum I would accept, and I am actively looking for a homestead that is 4+ acres (16000 sq meters)...

That's great! I really don't have a problem with you living out in the middle of nowhere with a big house. There's a lot to be said for that way of living.

But I will say this: there's density, and then there's density. One of the good things about low density, I'm sure you'll agree, is that, per person, you have lots of beautiful nature and open places around you, that you can enjoy. But quality is important too, not just quantity. Look at Peoria: there certainly is a lot of area per person, but it's low quality: it's "space", but it's not "place". Most of it is surface parking, or sad little disconnected patches of grass on which no child will ever play a ball game, with no actual nature or biodiversity, or similar ugly and unpleasant non-places that no human being can enjoy. The actual nice public places seem pretty sparse, and have to be shared by a lot of people, as if it were high density anyway. So it seems to be the worst of both worlds: all the downsides of low density (increased distances, worse walkability), but not much upside.

As for private acreage, again: it's possible to have that, without the miles and miles of surface parking. I really have no problem at all with big houses in outlying districts, my problem is with extravagantly wasteful land-use patterns in productive urban cores. That, and unsafe-by-design roads.

>This is a problem with your conceptualization you believe that I am in the minority of my citizens / neighbors, you can not comprehend that people in the US may not want to live like you live in Cardiff.

I get that not everyone wants to live in an extremely dense city (and Cardiff is not such a city). But I don't think most Americans are quite as explicitly hellbent as you about low-density living. I think most people just want a pleasant and affordable place to live, where "pleasant" might amount to many possible things. People can enjoy low density and high density at the same time, without any contradiction; they will weigh the benefits and drawbacks against one another. And I suspect many literally don't even realize what a good walkable city can be, because they haven't lived in one and don't know what they're missing. For example, I've spoken to someone who literally thought I made an enormous measurement error when I said I could walk to buy groceries because there are so many shops within 10 minute walk. He asked me to double check that it really was 10 minutes and really was half a mile and there really were so many in that radius. The idea was foreign, it had never occurred to him that this might be possible and easy and normal, in a place that isn't like Manhattan or something (and I found Manhattan fairly unpleasant when I visited fwiw, it's not the kind of urbanism I like). Low density suburbia was all he knew.

(That's part of why that "Not Just Bikes" channel got so popular -- what it depicts is so mundane, yet so foreign to so many people's experiences. And East Berliners didn't know they liked bananas, until the Wall fell and they tasted them.)

So maybe this "lack of comprehension" runs both ways.