Over here there’s tons of small paths that allow you to take much shorter routes on foot or bike. Sometimes official, sometimes the path belongs to a multiple-entries apartment block connected to two streets, or a street and a park, or whatever, in any way you don’t know your surroundings without having explored them.

That’s ludicrous - I don’t know which hedgerow maze you’re navigating to get to the grocery store. 2500ft is half a mile. You cannot make 0.5 miles into 4-5 miles in any reasonable amount of neighborhood streets, and I have never lived somewhere like that in 6 completely different suburbs in different regions/cities.

In my suburban neighborhood, the straight line, as-the-crow-flies distance is 0.52 miles. The driven distance is 0.7 miles. Everywhere I’ve ever lived it’s proportionally similar, though not always as close. Anyplace with public transit - even good public transit - would require more distance than walking and WAY more time than driving.

Are there just a bunch of people out there living in insaneland (where?!?)? Everywhere I’ve lived is dense city or completely sane suburbia. Are suburbs just an evil caricature of reality in your mind? Is fuckcars just full of people living in some crazy fictional strawman of a suburban hell?

Where are you getting this absurd, fictitious distance? I’ve lived in MANY different suburbs and cities. The driven distance is only ever slightly more than the straight line distance. The only consistently true fact is that public transit takes 3-4x as long to go the same places as driving (and I mean in dense urban areas with real transit). It really seems like there’s a strawman that fuckcars participants have in their head for just how bad it is to drive places in less dense areas - I promise it’s not. Or you just need to find one that isn’t shitty AZ/TX/FL new build HOA hell that exists only to enrich a scummy RE developer.

Sure, and so will slowing, stopping, and reversing anthropogenic climate change. Should we give up?

Yes. The likely turning point, according to the UN, is around 11bn in 2100, then declining. Plus or minus a billion or two and a couple of decades.

Which is btw nowhere close to the earth’ carrying capacity though that’s highly variable in the first place. It’s probably not a good idea to pine for a population increase past that point and leave some room for other species. And no matter how many we are it’s a good idea to minimise ecological impact. Why do people want fresh strawberries in winter anyway those transportation-stable strains taste like water. If you want strawberries in winter eat jam.

Also note that this overshoot is happening precisely because developing countries are, well, developing: Their fertility rates still stick to the old child mortality rates but the actual rates are lower so you get a population spike. Keep that up a generation or two and they plateau, then fall as people don’t require kids to provide for them in old age and also are barely affording rent with dual income from three jobs each so they definitely can’t afford a kid. Oh wait that was the US in particular. But yes that’s exactly what you want to avoid to halt contraction.