Transportation allows people to live far from where they work, but that's everything from horses to bullet trains.
Free roads allow for dispersed uses but doesn't affect how dense of segregated they are. Beyond the cost and space requirements to park everyone's cars. Zoning is doing almost all the work you're describing - even with the presence of cars and subsidized highways, the built environment would look very different without zoning and with more market forces.
Jacksonville (and most of Florida) is extremely low lying with a high water table, so sub-surface construction (basements) and subways are basically impossible.
Structurally, it's a low density, car-based city so light rail (as opposed to busses) requires a lot of up front investment without the land use to justify it. At this point, like many US cities, adding effective transit is a chicken and egg problem with land use.
Transit access is what concentrates jobs and creates urban vitality. Highway access has a similar effect but creates corridors and edge city clusters which also drive up land values and cost but are impossible to effectively serve by transit, requiring every single person to drive.
I think you might be surprised at what percentage of the residential land in basically every metro area, and even percentage of all land in the metro area, is zoned for SFH only[1]. In the USA, he last century of development was zoned for SFH, and there's not a budget or state capacity to build sufficient transit out to the exurban areas where there is land for new neighborhoods.
[1]
Here are some for reference:
City / Metro Area Residential Land Zoned Single-Family Only (%)
- San Jose, CA 94%
- Arlington, TX 89%
- Charlotte, NC 84%
- Seattle, WA 81%
- Chicago, IL 79%
- Portland, OR 77%
- Los Angeles, CA 75%
- Minneapolis, MN 70%
- Washington, D.C. 36%
- New York City, NY 15%
Seattle, Chicago, and Los Angeles are surprisingly high, but hundreds of square miles of SFH offsets a lot of lakefront high-rises.
But this is the whole reason people complain about NIMBYs - there are no other backyards left!
He's a professional writer. As the article says, even if you write your own words, this is still a problem with proofreading, copy-pasting references or quotes, and "AI checkers".
I still don't get why a professional writer would ever accept an AI proofreader over a real one, or a "quote" returned from an LLM over one sourced from a reputable reference.
Is the concern that the AI will rephrase the text during proofreading, thus falsifying a copy-pasted quote? I'm not sure how such a change could go unnoticed, unless you blindly publish the AI output without looking at it, which doesn't sound like something someone would do who wants to “write their own words”.
The ability of citizens to restrict or prohibit building in their jurisdiction is extremely strong, basically everywhere in the developed world[1]. There's not much they can do to affirmatively cause things to be built - that still takes capital and expertise - but local controls have stifled many, many, many parts of economic development and greatly skewed the economy.
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