To be honest, out of the millions of people in the LA area, VERY FEW are making the decision to get stuck in gridlock. The average commute time in Los Angeles remains at about half an hour, and the volume carried by 12 lanes of traffic on the 405 (roughly 20,000 per hour at rush hour congestion, which is less than the 2,200 or so at peak volume conditions – 40-50 mph) is nothing compared to the millions of commuters in Los Angeles. If they want to get stuck on the 405, rather than moving closer or finding a job elsewhere, it really is their choice.

And generally speaking, the suburbanites do pay for their roads, through gas taxes. The businesses they work for pay for parking, and taxes for the city. That indirectly comes out of the paycheck. Landfills are always in the suburbs, not in the city. Nor is there necessarily greater demand for water due to suburban landscaping, especially if appropriate landscaping for the soil and rainfall environment is considered. In addition, there is a large back to nature movement in the suburbs that you don’t see. Whether it’s raising hens for eggs, or gardening, or growing fruit trees, a lot of folks in the suburbs are going back to nature for this. Try raising a hen in the city. In fact, the problem with suburbia is actually the excessive size of houses: the infamous 2500 square foot hours on the 5000 square foot lot. The older “streetcar suburbs” in the San Gabriel Valley were historically 1000-2000 square foot houses on 6000-10000 square foot lots, which were sustainable in the pre-car era.

The fact is that cities need the suburbs to survive, but the suburbs could easily create a world amongst themselves without the city. However, the entire metro area suffers. Look at Detroit, where basically the suburbs (both black and white) told the City of Detroit F-U. Now the entire metro area is in the crapper.

“A car-enhanced life”. I’m sure the commuters on the 405 freeway going 12 miles per hour and the residents lining both sides breathing the air feel very car-enhanced. Suburbs subsiding cities, ha what a silly notion. So all the jobs in the city and all the roads the cities build to bring suburban commuters to their jobs and all the land use for their parked cars, you think the suburbanites pay for all of that? You talk of “How “sustainable” is your city if you don’t provide your own water, sewer, trash, power, building materials, and food?”, but suburbs do not provide all their own resources either and demand far more of them due to their decentralized nature and greater demands on water and power per capita. Not to mention the fact that suburbs tend to lack sufficient jobs for their residents, and much of the freeway crush into the city is from all the suburbs.

I’m sure suburbs will be around in some form for many years to come, but we cannot sustain outward growth indefinitely. Our economy and our environment cannot support a big house for every family with 2 or 3 cars in the garage. We can acknowledge this and prepare for the future or stick our heads in the sand and wait for the consequences.

You are the people who need good mass transit the most, and yet you can’t see the forest from the trees. How sad.

The rest of America does not live either at the density of NYC, nor has the privilege of someone else funding their existence. As much as NYC folks will claim they can get by without a car, the same is not true for the need for massive utility power grid inputs – in their case, Nukes. How “green” is your car-free existence now?

How “sustainable” is your city if you don’t provide your own water, sewer, trash, power, building materials, and food? Sorry, but “sustainability” is a crock – its just a political movement to empower old hippies to become the establishment and find creative ways to tax us more.

The rest of America generally chooses to live a car-enhanced life, because the central-planning folks don’t seem to understand the rest of us want privacy, space, clean air, and our own house. Funny, as the central-planning folks always manage to carve out a nice place for themselves, then tax the rest of us to build their housing projects that they want to force us to live in, so we can ride their buses to get about.

No, thank you.

If we need to segregate highway cost so lower-density communities pay “their share”, that’s fine. Just don’t expect the suburban taxpayer to subsidize anything in the city.