On the contrary, our biggest cities started as little groups of houses. Letting places increase their density is a natural solution to a lot of this. The core problem is that we need to take away the power of local government to limit development.
The roads and houses are constructed with such separation and space that it is literally impossible without eminent domain of basically every lot. It’s simply not a possibility to turn the suburbs with huge stroads and subdivisions into mixed use high density living.
The separation and space tends to resolve itself slowly and naturally as density increases. You get the pressure from the new people who live there to make crossings shorter and safer. It's slow, but it is effective.
When someone says incentive in this context, they usually mean the individual incentives of each of the workers to make money for themselves, get promoted to get a share of profit, not the overall fuzzy public pressure.
In general, this is why semi-private or private transport works so much better. If the end user is getting a bunch more value out of working on the train, they will pay more for the train than the road (if they have to pay the full price of the road vs train each time they use each).
That's a minuscule amount of the value it creates. And that's a problem, and a problem we can only fix by privatizing it. But most of the value it creates is for the landowners around it. And that's why successful transit companies are also real estate developers. Even in our own history, that's how private transit worked before we killed it.
That's the value, but not what capture means. If you have to pay $50/week extra rent to get that benefit, then the true value was 'captured' by your landlord. If you owned your house before the trainline was built, you probably captured more of that value yourself.
Of course, this is what happens when there's no profit motive. If we weren't making the marginal cost of using a road zero, and they had to compete with each other, and the people running transit wanted to make money rather than satisfy the requirements of a law, transit would be cheaper. That's how it is in all the places in the world where transit is really good.
NYC's subway system is an amalgamation of three systems, two of them built privately (but both of whom subsequently went bankrupt) and the third built by the city.
I'd argue that it's not even corporations anymore of which we should try to hold accountable. It's very clear who is making these calls as the players involved (Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman, Amodei, Thiel, Karp, Luckey, Langley, Nadella, Bezos, Pichai, Tann, etc) want nothing more than to be in the limelight and "preach" to the masses that they know best. They're more brazen year over year as they gain confidence in their unchecked power and continued accrual of wealth. The more money the more disconnected from reality and the stronger assumptions they build. And they have zero compassion. All of these people are dangerous to humanity individually, but when you start to realize how many have emerged and have no filter or checked powers publicly that becomes a truly terrifying thing.
I've recently started reading "End Times Fascism" [0] and it truly encompasses where we are at, how we got here and the bleak future we may be in for if we don't get in front of this now. But this book definitely highlights a lot of what some of the tech community has been seeing and hand waving about for years. The worn out trope that we should hold corporations accountable doesn't work. We should hold the people at the top accountable like other nations do because if they want the limelight then they should bear the responsibility that comes with abuses. The US is becoming a caste system by design. National surveillance, erosion of access to resources for personal compute, bought and paid for politicians and laws that don't apply to the wealthy.
It's actually nothing like that, and is surely not how it's marketed or sold. I guess you're OK paying a monthly fee for Internet and having the access be unavailable for random parts of your working day because you want to anthropomorphize it? The defense with which people will go to bat for these shitty companies is wild.
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