[hipster duck]

I love urbanism, and it's my preferred environment to live in. I don't need to extol the virtues of walkable cities. We've all heard it a million times before.

That said, I admire car-centric metropolitan areas in some respects. For one, they're so goddamn efficient when it comes to goods movement. If you want creature comforts, that stuff has to get to you somehow, and a 50' semi traveling directly from the warehouse to a Costco at 60 mph and delivering skids of diapers sure cuts out a lot more middlemen than having to break that cargo down into successively smaller vehicles until the final step is a van, illegally parking in the bike lane with the hazards on, and you, the consumer, buying a dusty 12-pack of diapers off the bodega shelf for an insane markup.

I also admire the freedom that architects have to design homes without spatial constraints that car-centric places afford, especially homes on a single level. Philip Johnson's Glass House, or Richard Neutra's Desert homes in Palm Springs or almost anything by Frank Lloyd Wright. These guys wouldn't have had such a canvas to paint on if they were stuck with a tight lot between two brownstones.