The suburbs grew because of some legitimate reasons. In the mid-20th century cities were very crowded. It's one thing to live alone in a 1000 sq ft condo in a city now. 70 years ago that equivalent space was housing a family of five. More space for less money was enabled by automobiles, and it was a great improvement for many.
That said many suburbs botched their expansions with tract housing and poor urban design, because that made the most money for developers and appealed to a now diminishing taste for dispersed living.
However there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a sprawling urban area enabled by cars. You just need to take care to design it well enough.
>However there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a sprawling urban area enabled by cars. You just need to take care to design it well enough.
Optimizing for individual transport in cars and public transport are not compatible goals. The first reason being that if individual transport is made available to most people, they will opt out of public transport and therefore all political will for maintaining and increasing quality of public transport will disappear.
And optimizing for cars means you can't optimizing for walking or other forms of transit.
That said many suburbs botched their expansions with tract housing and poor urban design, because that made the most money for developers and appealed to a now diminishing taste for dispersed living.
However there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a sprawling urban area enabled by cars. You just need to take care to design it well enough.