Suburban sprawl is stifling the US economy

Irvine is the business hub of Orange County - more people commute into Irvine than out of Irvine. It has giant, well designed surface streets and very little traffic (compared to the rest of SoCal, especially cities the same size). Irvine is one of the nicest, most well designed cities in America.

The point you miss is that governments spend far more on roads/services/infrastructure to benefit each mcmansion dweller than they do on roads/services/infrastrucutre to benefit each apartment dweller. So its not a 'free market' of choice - apartment dwellers effectively subsidise house dwellers. A real economic zero-sum choice would be the house dweller paying more tax or with worse services and the apartment dweller enjoying better public transport or similar. I agree some people will still prefer their mcmansion, but far fewer than now when the decision making is skewed.

I suspect that most families living in a half million dollar McMansions actually do pay far more in tax than the typical apartment dweller. In my area, the flow of capital is definitely the opposite of what you describe: without question, the individuals living in the suburbs heavily subsidize the lives of those living in the more urban areas and apartments, at least those who live in a tax district that has a combination of the two.

More typically, the tax districts for the areas with McMansions are entirely separate from those with a high concentration of apartments and urban housing. In this situation, the residents in a particular area bear the tax burden for the services that they consume. My particular metropolitan area is divided into several "cities" (I put it in quotes because they really all run together) that serve to ensure that each area's residents bear the cost of their services. Even in this situation, due to taxes levied by the state government, the flow of capital still tends to go from the suburbs to the urban areas.

In fact, I suspect that most house dwellers would be hugely in favor of further segregating the tax system so that funds paid by a group of individuals are used for services desired by that same group. In my area this would, however, result in the defunding of most public transportation (which is largely financed by people who do not use it), urban schools, the community college (which is funded by the whole county, but mostly used by lower income residents), etc. As an example, the public bus system recently appropriated lanes on many busy streets that were paid for by gas taxes. Since those with longer commutes pay more in gas tax, it stands to reason that these lanes were originally paid for by suburban commuters, and are now being used by the apartment dwellers and urban residents who are the primary clientele of the bus system (use fees make up only a small part of the funding for public transit in my area).

I am not stating that the existence of any of these things is bad, but simply that your belief that apartment dwellers are subsidizing the lives of McMansion residents is entirely incorrect.

Once it's built out, a portion of society is forced to dedicate their careers and extract public funding just to maintain the existing status quo of the infrastructure.

Consider what a large city budget could be spent on if a large portion of it didn't go towards maintaining the roads, maintaining the streetlights and accompanying infrastructure, and hiring extra police force to properly cover the expanded driving area.

I've not been to Scotland specifically, but I've been to other parts of the U.K. and Ireland and most of Western Europe and I've observed this difference, in most of Europe, the cities tend to have an ancient core, often surrounded by a pre-car secondary core, surrounded by an post-car/post-war dreary apartment ring on the outskirts.

The two inner cores are pedestrian dreams, for obvious historic reasons, but automotive nightmares. The wealthier parts of town tend to be in these inner cores, and the low-end workers tend to live in the outskirts.

The outskirts areas of European cities are generally pretty abysmal by American standards. Unkempt, graffiti-filled, feel dangerous. This is where all the train yards are. They remind an American of what we call "inner-city" projects, only they surround their home city.

Because of the income levels that live there, and being tightly wrapped around the more prosperous inner cores, they are however, better informed by the pedestrian friendly natures of those inner cores. So they usually have great integrated bus service and passable mass-transit (if the city has it).

The reasons for this outer ring are numerous, but it's usually a mix of rapid construction after the war (people needed houses, FAST), mid-century social experiments (public housing projects), and the inertia created by those two things.

What's outside this ring? Generally farmland, dotted with small towns and villages. I've never seen density drop off in the states as quickly as I do in Europe. You're in a city and then you're immediately in the countryside -- there's very little transition. It's not true everywhere in Europe. But it's fairly consistent.

Cities in Europe are also pretty close, Glasgow to Edinburgh is ~1hr driving. Glasgow to Manchester is ~3.5hrs, to London in 6.5, and Paris in 11. If they weren't so close, inter-city transport would be unbearable. But because they're so close, national rail ends up working like commuter rail and you can hop a train from Glasgow to London in 4 hours.

Heck, Glasgow to Kiev is 31 hours, or about 4 days of driving.

Or here's a trip I did once in Ireland. Dublin to Belfast to Dublin to Galway. It crosses the entire country a couple time and the whole thing takes around 6 hours.

Here's a comparison of Scotland vs. a state in the U.S., Virginia. https://mapfight.appspot.com/scotland-vs-us.va/scotland-virg...

Virginia has 3 major urban areas, the North (near Washington D.C.), the Capital at Richmond, and the South Eastern Coast around Norfolk.

The North of Virginia is a bit like London, a continuous conglomeration of several adjacent areas and small towns and cities. It has about 3 million people in it, but it's worth looking at a piece at a time:

Arlington, VA has about the density of Glasgow, has several interesting neighborhoods, is highly walkable, has subway service, buses, is bikable.

A walk from Celtic Park to Ibrox Stadium in Glasgow will take you about 1.5hrs. While a similar length walk in Arlington from the Potomac Overlook Park to the National Cemetery takes you about 1.5 hrs. Here's what the core looks like from the air (the circles are areas around the subway stations) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/Arlingto...

It only has about 1/3 of the population of Glasgow, but most purposes it's a fair approximation of a place like Glasgow in the U.S. If you figure in Neighboring Alexandria, VA (also part of the North), you get even closer to an American Glasgow. It's every bit as reasonable a place as most European cities.

But Arlington and Alexandria aren't particularly important areas in the U.S. They're just parts of the Washington D.C. metro area, which has around 6 million people, the 7th largest in the U.S.

Now drive 2 hours South to Richmond, which by American standards is old, founded in 1737 (before the U.S. existed!) And even though it's half the density of Arlington and Glasgow, is still highly walkable in most of the city. It doesn't have a subway, but it has extensive bus service, a major university, government buildings, etc. It feels like a small European city in those ways.

Go 2 hours East and you end up in Norfolk, which is basically a conglomeration of military bases and ship builders. With about as much thought put into city planning as that sounds. It's not very walkable, suffers from all of the criticisms ever levied against American cities, requires a car to get around etc.

Now what's in the rest of the state? Farmland, small towns, villages. But Virginia doesn't have to rely on Virginia for farming. There's a million square miles in the middle of the U.S. that do nothing but grow food, and most of that land sits unused, and unfarmed.

So most of Virginia's farmland is nonproductive. It sits there unused and non-productive. So what do you do with a bunch of cheap land that's only costing farmers money? You sell it, chop it up and offer houses to people who want to raise families outside of a city, but don't want to live in the isolation of the wilds. You create suburbs.

So 2 out of 3 ain't bad. I've just described 2 minor American urban areas that are as reasonable as most places in Europe. You can even take a train between them.

Suburbs are not a uniquely American thing. As European agricultural productivity and economic integration has increased, American style suburbs are also becoming popular in Europe.

Here's Glasgow again

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Uddingston,+Glasgow,+Glasg...

and a listing

http://www.s1homes.com/Houses-for-sale/2015031712003303.shtm...

Even the architecture looks like an American suburb!