Specifically places like Texas

Simple: we cut the Commie crap, abolish heavy-handed “big government” zoning* restrictions that infringe on landowners’ God-given property rights, and let the Free Market sort it out! red-tailed hawk bald eagle screech

No, seriously – only the over-the-top 'murica tone was a joke. Left to their own devices, people naturally tend to build reasonable things.

The current prevailing modes of development only exist because government policy forces them to exist by prohibiting everything else almost everywhere. It was very much a utopian [sub]urban planning experiment, promulgated by Federal policy from the top down. Take this FHA bulletin from 1938, for instance: they were literally labeling traditional development “bad” and the beginnings of all the suburban development patterns (that we’ve realized are terrible ideas in retrospect) “good”. (Keep in mind the strength of these recommendations: developers didn’t have to follow this guide, but if they didn’t their project was gonna get redlined, which means their customers wouldn’t be able to get financing to buy their product.)

NIMBYs and car-brains love to think that car-dependent American development patterns are the “natural” result of the “free market,” but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

We’d also need to fix the public transportation infrastructure in two very important ways, neither of which are the naive suggestions of slapping on bike lanes or transit to the existing shitty dendritic street network we have in all that suburban sprawl now:

1. Buy out houses at the ends of culs-de-sac to reconnect the street grid and reduce block size (at least for pedestrians and cyclists, if not for all transportation modes)
2. Redesign stroads into either proper roads (see 8:55 in the linked video), proper streets (9:26), or proper roads flanked by proper streets (12:44).

As for those “naive suggestions:”

Don’t get me wrong: we definitely should do transit; it’s just that it doesn’t work very well until after you’ve got decent density and last-mile walkable connectivity. It should happen at least concurrently with street redesigns and zoning reform, if not subsequently to them.

As for cycling infrastructure, I’m a huge fan of that, too – in the short-to-medium-term. It’s just that, as you ascend to the higher levels of urbanist thinking, you come to a realization: bike lanes are actually car infrastructure. Seen from a car-supremacist perspective, bike lanes seem like they’re for cyclists because building them on roads dominated by cars increases cyclists’ safety and encourages more cycling. But seen from a sufficiently-urbanist perspective, you come to realize that streets are for people and cars are interlopers, so getting cyclists “out of the way” of drivers with separated infrastructure only enables speeding and makes the street worse! We are very, very far away from getting over that hump though, so for now we should be building separated bike infrastructure pretty much everywhere as fast as we can.

(* And yes, that includes Houston.)

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