Roads are a convenience to those who use them, but they are also noisy, dirty, and barriers to non-motorized traffic.
You make some interesting points, however history shows a few different things. Cities CANNOT exist without roads, the roads are absolutely necessary to the transport of food and raw materials from the regions outside of the city boundaries for the consumption of the city dwellers. In return the cities provide creative arts and new technologies among many other things. And those things benefit us all.
Also another point, those smelly noisy automobiles and trucks you appear to dislike? they were hailed and praised as a solution to horse “pollution”. So unless you and your fellow city dwellers are prepared to bring in those needed commodities on your own two feet; trucks, autos, trains and ships are here for the time being.
Roads, cars, and trucks aren’t going away, nor should they. That’s not my point.
Most of us live in cities. That includes those out on the exurban fringe who wear cowboy boots and drive a big SUV on their two hour commutes. American society can’t be healthy if the cities are chronically sick. We’ve done a lot of harm through bad policy, and we need to rebalance in a number of areas.
Rational transportation planning is not the most important thing, although it’s probably in the top five. FWIW, I would put school choice at the top of the list. Not everyone will pick the city as their first residential choice, but many do, and for young adults who make that initial choice, it is apt to be lousy schools that eventually push them out to the ‘burbs. Voucher the schools, and watch the next generation of young middle class parents stay in place. The cities would be transformed.
Low income housing is a second big issue. We need to break up the big toxic concentrations of government subsidized poverty. That is now generally understood by people in the field, but the remedy requires that suburbs accept a share. That doesn’t necessarily mean scattered site, low density projects or Section 8 (although it might); it may mean zoning to accommodate affordable housing, or relaxing occupancy rules so that renters can double up. We have to stop using cities as dumping grounds, which creates the toxic no-go areas that become the great generators of the underclass. And we should create mixed use neighborhoods so that low and moderate income folks can live in reasonable proximity to jobs.
What we do now is warehouse the very poor in areas where an employer would be insane to tread, and then we wonder why intergenerational poverty becomes the norm.
Housing policy quickly morphs into transportation policy. Again, mixed neighborhoods are a key. We want to maximize the percentage of people who live in close proximity to work. I live in such a neighborhood; this can and should be much more common than it is.
Fix the schools, rationalize housing and transportation, and the cities can be turned around. Not overnight, to be sure, but it’s a worthy goal. And so we need to proceed by small steps. For transportation, this means making sure that we provide sidewalks and bike lanes in urban and high density suburban locales, making sure that arterial roads don’t become barriers to neighborhood cross traffic, and respecting existing neighborhoods, as opposed to seeing them as impediments to the rapid transit of the imperial commuter class.
We’ve all laughed at the classic New Yorker cover of America as seen from Manhattan. A lot of suburbanites have a similar view of their cities, with their exurban leafy acres in the foreground, their job looming in the distance, and not much identifiable in between: drive through country rather than flyover country, but the principle is the same. That’s what needs to change.
Your commuter road would destroy my neighborhood if you ever managed to push it through. The road lobby has tried many times in the past and will surely try again. That’s the issue.