I havent read PSS but I loved The Vital Question and Transformer. It was so much better than a book on the Krebs cycle had any business being. I probably liked VQ better though.
This is the easiest trick technique for figuring out vaguely north/south direction.
Take an analog watch. Say it is 9am, point the 12pm/midday point of the watch at the horizon directly below the sun, the half way distance between the hour hand and 12pm is the fairly close direction of the pole. So in that case, the 10:30am point would be the pole.
In the northern hemisphere it points South, in Southern hemisphere it points North.
This reminds me of this scene from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead when they're trying to figure out whether Hamlet knows a hawk from a handsaw by the direction of the wind.
Transportation allows people to live far from where they work, but that's everything from horses to bullet trains.
Free roads allow for dispersed uses but doesn't affect how dense of segregated they are. Beyond the cost and space requirements to park everyone's cars. Zoning is doing almost all the work you're describing - even with the presence of cars and subsidized highways, the built environment would look very different without zoning and with more market forces.
Jacksonville (and most of Florida) is extremely low lying with a high water table, so sub-surface construction (basements) and subways are basically impossible.
Structurally, it's a low density, car-based city so light rail (as opposed to busses) requires a lot of up front investment without the land use to justify it. At this point, like many US cities, adding effective transit is a chicken and egg problem with land use.
Transit access is what concentrates jobs and creates urban vitality. Highway access has a similar effect but creates corridors and edge city clusters which also drive up land values and cost but are impossible to effectively serve by transit, requiring every single person to drive.
reply