&gt;City planners need to take public transportation into account when they issue new building permits, etc. They need to encourage business to build closer so people can use public transport.<p>The problem we have today is too much planning, from the smallest rural town to the biggest metropolis. Planning has gone from the simple but noble goals of ensuring public safety and efficient flow of goods and services to dictating lifestyle and trying to preserve things exactly as they are.<p>The typical suburb or sprawling city, for instance, doesn&#x27;t merely not take into account public transit in zoning and approval processes, it actively allows <i>only</i> sprawling designs. Minimum setbacks, floor area ratio limits, side, front, and back yard requirements, minimum parking requirements, and height limits all act to make it so nothing but sprawl is even <i>legally possible</i>.<p>I can point to numerous examples of these sorts of regulation from all over the United States in cities big and small, from New York to Nome. Yes, this includes places like Houston where it is claimed that there is no zoning but land use control is still Stalnist.<p>This is all based on a 1950s utopian vision where all people everywhere would have cars, cars would just be extensions of people, and we&#x27;d all be able to live in a comfortable middle class suburb the next state over because modern planning would ensure no traffic could ever happen.<p>It would also ensure those pesky apartments full of those &#x27;others&#x27; would have limited density, so they&#x27;d be packed away in some ungodly corner of the world where everyone else wouldn&#x27;t have to see them.<p>This power is still used today as a de facto tool of modern segregationists who are concerned not merely with race, but also class and even taste and lifestyle.<p>Reducing the power of these local regulators so that urban planning once again becomes a boring profession concerned with public safety and the movement of people, goods, and services and not a way to enforce a very specific 1950s utopian lifestyle would go a huge way to fixing sprawl in America.<p>&gt;You can&#x27;t have people out waiting on public transport in that mess.<p>Until about the 1950s, people in the South did wait on public transportation. Look up the timetables and maps of the old railroads, interurbans, and streetcars. You&#x27;d be amazed how far reaching public transportation in the US was. Many of the cities of consequence in the South sprung up around the railroads.<p>Atlanta, for instance, used to be known as &#x27;Terminus&#x27; as it was the end of the line for a railroad with nothing else nearby. The city was built around it, grew rapidly, and eventually the state capital was moved there. Streetcars further fueled growth. This is a story repeated all throughout the South and the rest of the US.