https://maxmautner.com/2026/10/11/how-fast-is-a-car.html
The median American worker earns $23.80/hour, or ~$19 after taxes. A used car driven the US average of ~10,900 miles a year costs ~$8,200, counting $1,700 a year for a parking space at home. That is ~430 hours of work before the car moves. A new car takes ~700 hours. A $999 e-bike ridden 3,000 miles a year takes ~25 hours.
Your point is that we need to avoid ecological collapse right? One of the worst possible things we could do for the environment would be to come in and try to rebuild all the infrastucture in the world to make it more green. We need to learn how to use what already exists in a more green way. I’m not saying none of what your talking about could work. But it would be a slow and transitionary process. We can’t just come in and rebuild everything because it would be better another way. That would be horrible for the environment. So we’d be implementing some of these things but we would still have these huge road networks made for ICE vehicles. So we have to find a way to make use of them in a way that is less unsustainable. For example smaller trucks that are more energy efficient and building things to be easily repairable so theres less waste, and looking into hydrogen fuel cell technology (something China has been advancing a lot recently).
You don’t need to tear up the ground everywhere, but there are steps you can start taking to get things moving towards the goal.
If you removed the offset from lot lines in the “International” building code, you would allow for infill that basically would double the density of the neighborhood.
If you were to designate every third street on the grid as an arterial, you could limit automobile traffic to those streets, then make all the others pedestrian and bike (and emergency vehicles) only. Along with this, you could take empty lots or dilapidated buildings along arterials, and turn those into aggregated parking lots. This would eliminate the need for everyone to have a driveway and/or a garage. There’s never enough street parking for all the guests you might want to have over, but with the lot that averages everyone out, there’s always extra room. Having these around town means you never need to worry about finding where to park, and you have fewer places where cars enter and exit the roadways, making them smoother and safer for everyone. Sure, you have to walk 2 blocks, but 2 minutes of walking is already assumed in larger parking lots and places where you need to hunt for a parking spot.
If you got enough empty lots in a row, you could make a little gathering point for the neighborhood, with a field and a rain shelter and a bus stop and maybe a couple storefronts like a laundromat, a coffee shop, a gym, a corner store.
Put these together and all of a sudden you have 3x3 block areas inside which it’s quieter, it’s nicer-looking, the air quality is better, you don’t need to worry about kids or pets getting hit by cars, there’s never a shortage of parking, and you see a lot more of your neighbors. Additionally, your aggregated parking lot (or garage) serves as a park-and-ride: the bus stop connects to other neighborhood hubs and transit stations. Now you can easily reach hubs all over town on a bus, and cycling/walking is nicer and safer, so you don’t have as much need for a car, thus it becomes a virtuous cycle. You end up with a neighborhood that’s nice to be in, that fits together, that feels a bit more like the places people want to go on vacations to.
There’s no reason why smaller towns couldn’t do something similar. After all, the model for many centuries prior to fossil fuels was to have all the buildings packed together in the village, with the farms within a walking distance. We can talk about how “mega-farms feed everyone”, but honestly this is bad for the soil and the biome and human nutrition and other externalities. They’re not particularly more productive per unit of area, they’re just good at churning out grain for cheaper animal products.
Highways (including state routes) aren’t going anywhere, but it would be relatively easy to phase out most car traffic in favor of bus and bicycle traffic. Making each tract have a direct pay-in for their public works (water, sewer, asphalt resurfacing, etc.) instead of putting everything under the municipality’s or county’s budget would do away with much of the incentive for sprawl.
The example of fertilizer is really interesting because we use way more of it than we need. We could decrease the fertilizer requirement by promoting nitrogen fixers and mycorrhizal fungi amidst row crops, and the remainder could be made up by regular composting and humanure toilets.
You can do a piecemeal collectivization as long as you have something usable and practical to show after each step. Every time you replace an individualized use with a collectivized/aggregated use, you economize space and resources.