I'd highly recommend reading Confessions of a Recovering Engineer before debating my communication of it. There's a lot more depth to the arguments than the one-sentence summary a novice (me) can give :)
Namely, Strong Towns isn't anti-car! In fact, they explicitly arguing _against_ removing cars from city centers in most cases, for reasons related to those that you mention. If I remember correctly, many towns tried to do this in the 70's or something, and most of them failed; cars are still required in most cases.
That being said, _requiring_ cars and _allowing_ them are very different things. Being anti-bulldozing city blocks to put in 6-lane highways isn't anti-car, it's pro people!
Again, highly recommend engaging with the source material rather than taking my word for it. I've been consuming and parroting (sometimes badly) their content for months - they have been thinking about these questions for literally decades!
> That being said, _requiring_ cars and _allowing_ them are very different things. Being anti-bulldozing city blocks to put in 6-lane highways isn't anti-car, it's pro people!
That's a semantic argument that doesn't address the real problems that skimping on commuter infrastructure can cause. San Francisco and Seattle have both achieved some of the highest housing prices in the nation thanks to chronic underinvestment in highway infrastructure.
No thank you: I don't care for content that's searching for evidence to support a preconcieved position. There is too much dogma and not enough pragmatism in this space.
I already get enough of their content on HN to recognize dogma when I see it. Quite frankly, it's a circlejerk where everyone else is wrong unless they follow the ST-scene's ideologically-founded prescriptions, and if you post evidence to the contrary you'll often get shouted down.
Namely, Strong Towns isn't anti-car! In fact, they explicitly arguing _against_ removing cars from city centers in most cases, for reasons related to those that you mention. If I remember correctly, many towns tried to do this in the 70's or something, and most of them failed; cars are still required in most cases.
That being said, _requiring_ cars and _allowing_ them are very different things. Being anti-bulldozing city blocks to put in 6-lane highways isn't anti-car, it's pro people!
Again, highly recommend engaging with the source material rather than taking my word for it. I've been consuming and parroting (sometimes badly) their content for months - they have been thinking about these questions for literally decades!