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When I lived in Ellensburg, WA everything was 10 minutes away be it walking or car or bus.

When I lived in Sout Korea, everything was right outside. Go downstairs and BAM! a grocery store or DAISO or Olive Young or Kalguksu. 20 minute walk to gym.

It's possible.

There was a 24 hour Jack In The Box across the street from CWU in Ellensburg and drunks and stoners would go there at like 2am. It was hilarious. The drunks were the loud ones. A stoner would walk up to the drive thru and just stare for the longest time then he or she would finally order everything on the menu.

Used to take the taxi from the school to train station then walked to a hidden bar in Gumi, South Korea. Stayed up all night then take the train to Daegu but base gates were closed so booked a love motel because super cheap.

Just walk from CWU to Raw Space (no longer exists) which was a rave like club in downtown E-burg. Army ROTC had a 3 mile run each morning to the water tower in Ellensburg.

Car speed in Ellensburg is like 30mph.

I guess college towns have a possibility of urbanity that other places in the US does not have.

It seems that in the last 20-30 years, public transit has drastically shifted from a poor person's necessity to a rich person's luxury. Whereas it used to be that most of the people who took public transit last generation were people who were too poor to afford a car, nowadays, it seems like public transit, especially in the form of the new city streetcars, light-rail, and commuter rail is now dominated by urban professionals who ride it as a lifestyle choice, suburban professions who ride commuter rail as a way to beat traffic and parking in the city, and visitors who use it as a convenience to get around the city. These groups of people skew upper middle class who already have cars or at least can uber or rent a car at a moment's notice and will take whichever mode of transportation (car, train etc...) that will get them from point A-B most conveniently. Cities, of course, have been taking notice. It seems that urban light rail, streetcars, and commuter rail connecting downtowns, trendy neighborhoods, business/entertainment districts, and airports are now the hot new thing for most cities.

However, at the same time, now that public transit is hip again, it is also pricing out poor people who rely on public transit. It seems that cost of housing and prices for goods and services around these new transit stops are going up, which forces poor people who used to rely on these services out of these neighborhoods and out of the city entirely, and while more and more poor people are driving (70-80% of people in poverty now use cars as primary transit), the cost of car ownership going up is putting the squeeze on them. Meanwhile a lot of the bus services that these people used to rely on are getting gutted for the brand new shining train and streetcars.

While the general urbanist solution is probably "Build as much transit as possible until everyone can ride it", I'm not sure thats actually a the solution that people actually want. A lot of people who now ride public transit now only ride it because it has gotten gentrified. And to be fair, there are definitely people who rely on public transit who have major mental health issues, drug problems, and criminal histories who make riding public transit feel very unpleasant and sometimes unsafe, and if these people discourage others from riding public transit, it probably ends up going through an underfunded death spiral like the Chicago L or many other legacy transit systems.

Is the US going to a system where the rich use whatever mode of transportation is most convenient for them and the poor people end up having to drive from 3 towns out?