Canada

We only need the political will to, since I'm sure most people would want to live in a better version of what they have now.

You would think, but a fair amount of people I talk to in the 40+ do not want to change and actually are opposed to change.

People seem to think this is how we have always lived, and it's only really been 2 or 3 generations that have lived with so much excess.

Isn't Canada too big for bike lanes? I can't bike from Toronto to Halifax! And the train would take ages to go from Montreal, QC to Victoria BC. Why are you assaulting my freedom of movement by pushing these things on us!?!?!? /s

There's a sense in which cars by their nature produce sprawl. Cars are larger than people, so if I want a building to contain N number of people, I need an empty space nearby that contains 3N of just emptiness waiting for a car, so our buildings can't be too close together. There needs to be that buffer space between them for their cars.

Then people have to get to the parking lots, so we need roads. But if I want N people to be able to get here, I need more than that space between our parking lots for enough cars to be able to reach me. Not to mention left turning lanes and big intersections, and of course long stretches to get past the long parking lots.

So if we don't have space for that in a city, we either have to knock down a bunch of buildings to make room for these things, it we have to expand outwards into the larger empty space outside the city. Which naturally leads to sprawl.

It's amazing to actually do a satellite view of an area, take a screenshot, and then colour in the parts that are actually a building or shop or home, and then colour all the other parts that are road, driveway, parking lot, intersection. It's this foam which sprawls.

Not in the Quebec-Windsor corridor. There's enough people, and the density is high enough for rail to be useful.

The environmental benefits are great and all, but you'll get downtown to downtown faster and cheaper than car or train with high speed rail. Like, get off work in downtown Toronto, eat on the train, and watch a Sens game at 7 at LeBreton Flats, and back home for midnight sort of speed.

That is 100% part of our problems with housing, road maintaince and municipal budgeting. We don't have to sprawl just because we have massive amounts of land, we can also build denser cities, transit oriented develolments, and walkable neighbourhoods.

Cities in Europe have managed to build modern neighbourhoods without sprawl, we could too. We need to stop using the excuse "my country/province is too big for transit" when the majority of people travel within their own metropolitan area on a daily basis.