Without taking sides about the actual suburbs vs. cities here (you may be right that suburbs are great), the tone of the comment is very "I have this now, thus I must be allowed to have it forever regardless of the consequences". If you had slaves, and other people didn't have slaves, it wouldn't be very 21st-century to be arguing that "so I choose to have slaves, but I don't try to make other people have slaves. You don't like slaves and not slavery. Why can't you be content to just not have slaves yourself? Why must we all be able to live on this planet happily?" You didn't put forth any substantive argument and I don't see how suburbs are incompatible with GP's proposal for more public transportation. I can't say that you (and everyone) can't have a suburb if you want it, it's just that the whole comment does nothing but appeal to "leave me alone, leave the status quo".
Fair point regarding the last line. Overlooked that somehow.
> Land doesn't have any rights, so suburbs can't infringe upon them.
Slaves didn't have rights back then either, as I understand it. Can't infringe upon those!
More seriously, I haven't done the math myself but given concepts like "earth day" it doesn't seem like we're doing too well in providing for everyone, and that's with a large majority of people not living in the usa suburb style. It only seems fair if everyone (eight billion people) were given the opportunity to achieve an equal standard of living if they are willing to work for it; the kind of thing one would ideally codify in a binding human rights statement (e.g., ECHR). Under the ideal of giving everyone equal opportunities, freely taking however much land you fancy would almost certainly infringe on others' basic rights.
But anyway that's just about land use. I don't know that the amount of land taken is the restrictive factor here, it's probably more about how you get to and from your daily needs (transportation and heating being big factors in personal energy use). The fundamental limitation usually boils down to energy in the end (could live in the Sahara if you build a lot of AC and desalination and pipes to get it there -- spaceship earth style). Currently, we don't have a lot of energy available in a way that maximizes total happiness, considering global warming. We might have to take it easy with personal consumption rates until we do have the energy.
