One thing that's tough for people to recognize is that driving everywhere is extremely high cost, for everything.

We see it as the "default" so when we drive along a swooping interchange with lofty support beams all perfectly engineered it's just "whatever" but that is actually an absurdly sophisticated and expensive feat of engineering. In the US our "cathedrals", our great public works, are interchanges and bridges and they're everywhere.

And they're far too expensive. Without spending dramatically more in the US our infrastructure is going to start crumbling, and even with today's spending we're neglecting all sorts of other infrastructure to pay for roads instead. Rural towns will literally be "blessed" with replacement interchanges that are the town's entire annual budget for a decade plus, all while their parks, schools, sidewalks, and everything else crumbles. Our built environment is poor in large part because we try to do one thing very well and now even that is unsustainable.

Driving also acts as a toll on everything. Driving costs about $0.70 a mile, which is a "hidden" expense for every single profession. When you're building a house every person on the job site pays that cost in their commute, which ultimately gets passed onto the final price of the home. In metros without density the added commute distance drives up costs of every profession, and in metros with density the added time drives up costs of every profession.

We're an extremely high-cost high-income society, which means our margins are vulnerable. If our economy dips or our income falters our fixed high costs are harder to manage. We're seeing that struggle begin now as the "fixed" cost of participating in the job market is exploding as car payments, insurance, and gas all rise. We've been lucky enough to have such a powerful economy that has rarely caught up to us, but it is a dangerous situation long-term for the US.