Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe in denser cities or downtown but where I live and work if I wanted to take a bus my easy 9 mile 20 minute drive becomes 60 to 90 minutes with 3 bus changes. That's a lot of ground to make up.
I hope the aspiration for new cities would start with the presumption of density. An experiment like this should be trying to solve a problem, not just add more urban sprawl, and you don't get a city culture off preplanned road infrastructure and zoning laws.
But that needs to be balanced with the desires of some to have fewer connections, but perhaps more yard. And some people honestly desire to have fewer connections and live further away from others.
However, what if the suburban area was more varied in locations: smaller businesses and corner markets mixed in with residential areas? Right now most suburban development consists square miles of nothing but residential cul-de-sacs peppered with massive clusters of big box stores that require huge parking lots and must serve large numbers of people to survive. People want the big box stores because they think they save money, but the same savings are possible with lots of small stores as long as there's a real market and clever people running small businesses. With that type of sparse use of land, greater distances between things on average but with the speed of cars, would that allow more interconnections than density?
I think that over the past few decades, that those that desire the yard, and those that desire fewer interconnections have been able to prevent those that want density from building it. There's a clear undersupply of dense locations and a clear oversupply of sparse locations.
I think the key is to have lots of diversity so that many experiments can be tried. Right now there have been few styles that have been tried with cars, and though I personally consider it a failure in that I don't want to live like that, there are plenty of people that consider density to be a failure and would never want to live like that. Any solution(s) to cities should be able to meet everybody's desires.