The suburbs are inherently compatible with trains and really any public transportation. They were quite literally designed around the car and the expectation that everyone would have a car.
New suburbs get built and they can be built differently. Not to mention that the current suburbs in the US aren’t made to last the next hundred years, like stone houses in Europe are. They can, have to and will change.
The Work from home trend for example is a huge change. If you work from home and do not have to drive to work and back, you do not want to drive the same amount anyway just for grocery shopping. You want to use the free time won, by stepping outside of your home and go on a walk, sit in a café and meet people in your suburb.
Why are the anti-car people anti-self-driving car?
If a human makes a mistake while driving, we call for self-driving cars.
If a self-driving car causes an accident, we call for the road to be more catered to self-driving cars. Self-driving car is still too many cars rotting on the road, unused most of the day, heating up cities and taking up space and resources, when a bus can replace hundreds of them.
A self-driving car is still a car, and it can’t do what humans can do: People make billions of good decisions every day that help avoid accidents. We just don’t recognise them because we focus on the bad decisions that cause accidents. Self-driving cars will never be able to make those good decisions, so having lots of them will only work if the roads are designed more for them. Then we will have roads that are like train tracks with all the negative characteristics of today’s cars on top, when we could just have trains and busses all the benefits that come with them.