It's not just density, though that's part of it. A big part is walkability (and otherwise making the city not just car accessible). That can be done without increasing density, by for example, adding wide sidewalks and bike lanes, eliminating maze-like cul-de-sac-heavy street layouts, and decreasing speeds in commercial areas (i.e. enforcing a stronger divide between low speed streets meant for people and high speed roads meant for cars). Another part is mixed-use zoning, where small businesses are intermixed with homes instead of people relying on driving to megastores in shopping centers far from where they live. By decreasing the necessity of the car you decrease the cost of road maintenance and by making places more walkable you make businesses more accessible and therefore more successful.
I would suspect that many neighborhoods could be kept at the same density and be significantly rethought in line with the Strong Towns ethos to be more comfortable places to live.
Density increases might be necessary in high COL areas because those places are in high demand, but there's plenty of bad city design in places outside uber-expensive metropolitan areas. And there might be strong demand for missing middle[1] housing if only it were legal and frictionless to build it.
> eliminating maze-like cul-de-sac-heavy street layouts
You can actually do the opposite. You make suburbs heavily maze like to slow traffic down. Instead, you build plenty of shortcuts for bikes and pedestrians: the direct routes. That is: the incentives to bike or walk (short direct route to nearby locations) should outweigh the incentive to drive (twisted path that might be kilometers winding around a crow's flight of 100m).
Actually building separate paths for pedestrians and cyclists is a required ingredient in that recipe though.
I have seen it argued that heavily-curved suburban streets are safer because drivers have to slow down to see around the bends, etc. Highly-curved suburban streets also tend to avoid 4-way intersections and prefer T intersections. In theory both of these should make the streets safer, but in practice the streets tend to be built to highway-like standards, making many people drive over 30 miles an hour anyway. I encounter that on a daily basis. I would instead prefer for designers to make the streets narrower and to provide prominent sidewalks and bike paths, since that sends a much clearer signal that drivers should slow down.
Moreover, there is a second problem with these suburban street layouts. They tend to follow a hierarchical design. Each area is a separate "pod" that is disconnected from adjacent areas. To get to another area, you have to go through a limited number of "choke points" that feed you into a larger road or an even larger road or highway (traverse up the tree and then back down). This design choice inevitably leads to traffic at the choke points, since many drivers cannot possibly avoid these paths. A street grid avoids that since it operates in parallel; there are many equivalent routes. This is literally the same as running a program in serial versus parallel. So even drivers have good reasons to dislike typical suburban streets, since they do inevitably lead to traffic by design.
Ah, so I was more getting at a style seen in the Netherlands. The residential neighbourhoods have short sections of roads with frequent choke points (sometimes featuring speed bumps, but sometimes just narrowing of the road to a single lane), together with frequent one way sections and blocked routes for cars but continuations for lighter vehicles.
From the perspective of a vehicle, the neighbourhood is precisely a pod: disconnected from a neibouring region until they filter from the residential streets onto a more main road and then back into the neigbouring residential area. However, to pedestrians and bicycles, there is no real delineation. Mazelike to vehicles, multiply connected and convenient to pedestrians and bicycles.
Edit: so pedestrians and bicycles will typically avoid the choke points since more direct routes are available to them. On the main roads where vehicles become congested (and faster) clear separation of the traffic types becomes increasingly necessary compared to lazy back streets where bicycles and vehicles can intermix (these people will typically be neighbours anyways).
I was raised in a city that has one river that splits the city. Around this river is where all the biking centralises and cars are forbidden. The city is old and narrow too.
Thing is you are nearly everywhere faster by bike. And so the far majority of people has and uses one. People whine about their traffic there, not realizing how lucky they are.
Add bikeability. Anything to help getting people out of their car. There's something perverse about people using vehicles weighing 20x their own weight to move around such distances, where a vehicle weighing 1/5 their weight will do. Not to mention the ease of parking a bike.
True for places people visit frequently and for short durations (grocery stores, restaurants). But residential areas? pfft. And even if I could find a bike rack, I wouldn’t leave it overnight because of theft. Inevitably I find myself hauling my bike indoors whenever I visit friends. Whereas my friends with cars just parallel park without giving it any thought. I hardly have them beat here.
But yes, I agree with your premise. Biking is way more enjoyable than driving in a city, when possible. And in the end that’s a huge piece of winning people over. Electric bikes are helping more people discover this, though ironically, electric bikes are even worse when it comes to parking (larger theft target; harder to haul up stairs/indoors).
I would suspect that many neighborhoods could be kept at the same density and be significantly rethought in line with the Strong Towns ethos to be more comfortable places to live.
Density increases might be necessary in high COL areas because those places are in high demand, but there's plenty of bad city design in places outside uber-expensive metropolitan areas. And there might be strong demand for missing middle[1] housing if only it were legal and frictionless to build it.
[1] https://youtu.be/CCOdQsZa15o