Suburban living is essentially what I'm describing here as being the 'bad' middle state that causes the issues.
You have congestion because there are just houses dotted everywhere clustered around the city, making the 'last few miles' hellish. Later, those suburbs become 'urbs'.
I'm saying have urban and rural with a sharp divide. Inside the 'event horizon' of where you'd normally have suburbs, have car parks and dump people on to urban transport that uses space more effectively like trains/buses/etc.
> I'm saying have urban and rural with a sharp divide. Inside the 'event horizon' of where you'd normally have suburbs, have car parks and dump people on to urban transport that uses space more effectively like trains/buses/etc.
The problem with this design is that cities commonly grow over time. If you have a core which is full of 30 story buildings, it makes much more sense to allow the radius of the core to expand from 10 miles to 20 by bulldozing some car parks and replacing them with more 20 and 30 story buildings than to have to bulldoze the existing 30 story buildings and replace them all with 95 story ones.
The sharp divide is what we already have and is one half of the causes of the existing problem. You have a core which is zoned for higher density surrounded by suburbs that aren't, which prevents the dense core from expanding outward as necessary. The other half is that even the core doesn't allow very high densities, so you generally don't get 50+ story buildings even there, you just get outrageously high rents instead because it can neither expand upwards nor outwards.
You're essentially suggesting that it expand only upwards, but that's still a lot more expensive than expanding in both directions, and there comes a point that it becomes impractical. We don't really have a lot of experience constructing large numbers of 200 story buildings and even if we could figure it out it probably wouldn't be cost effective and result in affordable rents.
Meanwhile there is a threshold density above which you can have things like effective mass transit, at which point expanding outward at the same density allows you to maintain those advantages over a larger area without paying the high cost of constructing buildings at the limits of our engineering talents (and also paying to destroy existing tall buildings in order to do it).
Which is basically what naturally happens without zoning density restrictions. In theory someone could then build a 30 story building in the middle of the suburbs, but that doesn't make a lot of sense when it's more profitable to put that building closer to the core, until the core is already full of those, and then the most profitable place for that building is right next to the core. Which is how the core expands as needed. You don't really need to prohibit people from building at inappropriate densities when appropriateness is already closely aligned with profitability.
You have congestion because there are just houses dotted everywhere clustered around the city, making the 'last few miles' hellish. Later, those suburbs become 'urbs'.
I'm saying have urban and rural with a sharp divide. Inside the 'event horizon' of where you'd normally have suburbs, have car parks and dump people on to urban transport that uses space more effectively like trains/buses/etc.