No one is going across town for the coffee in either case. I’m willing to bet time to coffee is about 5 minutes for the SUV driving say Denver suburbanite as it is for the walking Tokyo urban dweller. Same temporal convenience just different scale based on the predominant mode of transportation.

Also median commute times in car dominant cities are usually less than 30 mins. The narrative of people driving far distances to work represents a few (loud) supercommuters in most american cities. What people forget about with suburban sprawl is that jobs have sprawled as much as housing; oftentimes the old downtown is not even the major job center any longer for the region, a vestigial center whether the city realizes it or not (many a cases of new build american hub and spoke rail networks to long faded downtowns only because that’s how it used to be done not because that is reflective of most people’s travel patterns today. hence poor ridership capture of many of these newer networks).

Commute times in large transit oriented cities are often longer with metros averaging less than 20mph, an hour or more is not unheard of in places like nyc. It is really hard to beat the convenience offered by a car and a say flyover american city barely 25 miles wide with 60mph point to point travel pretty much everywhere at any time. That is why people drive almost exclusively in those places.

As someone who has lived in public transportation heavy cities, and currently lives in a flyover American city where we all drive everywhere, I strongly disagree. I live in a very popular commuter suburb of a larger American city, and the commute is about 30 minutes in the best case scenario. If you are in rush hour, or there is an accident (and there inevitably is), it pushes 45-60.

But the bigger point is that even for a similar amount of time, driving is far less convenient than public transportation. Cars demand your full attention. Public transportation does not. I can sleep on the bus or train. I can read. I can work. In the car my options are limited to music/podcasts/audiobooks. Cars are extremely expensive. They are expensive to buy, expensive to maintain, and expensive to insure. Cars are deadly. Driving is the single riskiest thing people do with regularity, by a large margin. Cars are less efficient and have more externalities. They require more space for roads and parking, they produce more pollution, in terms of both greenhouse gasses and noise. They are also possibly the single biggest factor in the obesity crisis. Part of the reason America is among the fattest countries in the world is because a trip to anywhere requires driving there, where in many other countries people walk or ride their bike to many places the need to go to.

It’s very hard to live in a place with proper, functional urban design and public transportation, and walk away preferring car-centric culture.

> The difference is pedestrian/cyclist-dominant vs. car-dominant. Personally I’m in favor of the one that doesn’t involve carting a big SUV across town for 16oz of coffee.

You did it again. There nowhere in the US where you need to "[cart] a big SUV across town for 16oz of coffee." Big SUVs aren't even very common anymore. They got replaced by sedans styled to look like SUVs (aka "crossovers").

That kind of black-and-white thinking does no one any good. And it's probably a big part of the reason why, like you said above, you "can’t wrap [your] head around it". You're not going to understand things without empathizing (or at least reasonably hypothesizing) about the other group's feelings and experiences.

> Ideally these places wouldn’t even need parking space, because yes, there’s lots of tiny shops dotted throughout the neighborhood and each serves the surrounding residents. The residential areas encircling Tokyo work exactly like this and it’s perfectly economically viable.

So? No American city is going to be bulldozed to build a clone that works like Tokyo, even assuming the Americans want to make the same tradeoffs the people of Tokyo make. If you want to any progress towards walkability, you're going to have to make serious compromises away from that ideal.

If you open up zoning to mixed density with light commercial, get rid of parking minimums, and design infrastructure that's walkable and bikeable, you don't need to intentionally bulldoze and rebuild any city from scratch. Instead people and companies will do it piecemeal because it makes sense to. New coffee shop opens and it's so busy that people who can't walk there can't find parking either? Sounds like demand for more coffee shops closer to those who can't walk to the first one. Someone is going to take that business opportunity.

> Because the neighbor's formerly quite street turns into a parking lot before people "can't find parking." The people who have quiet streets will also see that and fight to keep a shop from opening near them.

This doesn't feel like a realistic scenario at all. A "suddenly very popular coffee shop" or "several shops opening close to each other" over here wouldn't significantly affect parking/traffic for several reasons. 1. a coffee shop's capacity (as in: seating, queue times) is already much smaller than parking space nearby; 2. of people in the queue, most will be locals already; 3. "it's hard to park nearby" by itself acts as a filter that naturally pulls people either to shops closer to their location, or to public transport.

There's just no such thing as "people from outside my neighborhood going out of their way to drive to the local XYZ". And places that _do_ want wider audience like fancier restaurants or wholesale won't pick a middle of the neighborhood to set up even if they were allowed to.

Also, we may be having different definitions of a quiet street. If anything, traffic in a mostly-residential area should decrease since locals could do things like small groceries without using a car?

It's ridiculous to need to drive at all, and just about anything called an SUV or crossover is a good deal larger than it needs to be and certainly big relative to the cars of the 80s, 90s, and even 00s.

I say this living in a suburb and driving a crossover myself. The charms of this lifestyle are not lost on me, but I would kill to have consistent coverage of proper sidewalks, bike paths, and corner shops. I'd love to not need the car at all.

And no bulldozing is necessary. Just tweak zoning to allow small businesses and people will organically start live-in corner shops.

Good thing there are microcenters on every corner.

If thats not your thing, Walmarts, or Stop and Shops, you know for people who don’t want to spend their whole pay check on a single meal worth of food (we exist)

> Big SUVs aren't even very common anymore. They got replaced by sedans styled to look like SUVs (aka "crossovers").

A 1990s Ford Explorer weighs around 4000 lbs. That was considered big at the time. A current one is a couple hundred pounds heavier, a Ford Edge around the same, Toyota RAV4 or Honda CR-V a little less but still almost 4000 lbs. By contrast a 1990s sedan was generally under 3000 lbs with ~2400 lbs being pretty common.

The main difference isn't that SUVs got smaller, it's that sedans got bigger. A 1989 Honda Accord was ~2500 lbs, the 1990s ones were ~2800 lbs, the current ones are well over 3000 lbs.

A lot more people cone out of accidents in modern Accords without a scratch than their 1989 counterparts.

That's more because of things like airbags and crumple zones than bigger cars. Weight doesn't help you when you hit an overpass or a utility pole, and is only a relative advantage when you hit another car, so the average going up doesn't help anybody.

Modern cars are heavier primarily because they're bigger, not because they have modern safety features. How much do you expect airbags actually weigh?

> Big SUVs aren't even very common anymore

dunno what america you're in. unless your point is they're big pickup trucks now?

True body-on-frame SUVs are definitely much less common then they were at their peak around the turn of the millennium as buyers moved to either unibody crossover SUVs or quad-cab pickups. That said, I have no idea what the point making that distinction was as it really doesn't matter in this context.

> Big SUVs aren't even very common anymore.

I know this isn't your main point but I was sadly laughing at that sentence. Pretty much anywhere I go in the U.S. there are giant SUVs. Plus crossovers and even sedans are just getting bigger, with smaller cars like subcompacts being phased out and compact cars growing in size.