Car-Centric US Cities

Isn't there a chicken-and-egg problem especially in US cities? The typical low-density suburban sprawl in american urban areas was "fueled" by the car/oil and housing industry in a much larger scale then in other similar developed countries. This lifestyle was nothing less then the american dream - no? In the same time the economy and the urban centers are expanding and everything is built around the autombile lifestyle. So yes, today it wouldn't be possible to simply sc

Most cities in North America built in the XX century were deliberately built with the car in mind. The suburb doesn't make sense without cars, unless of course you have a very good local train network (which in the USA is almost close to impossible to find nowadays). You can see the opposite issue in Europe, too: very old cities are a nightmare to travel in a car, my city has existed for >2000 years and because of that the city centre has a lot of roads that only make sense if you expect

Most major US cities did not start out as car centric locations (even the south and west), but we made them all so within the span of 100 years. Doesn't seem unreasonable it could be undone as quickly

Not sure why this get downvotes. American cities were overbuilt from the start. In most american cities, from the late 1700s onward, wide roads on a grid were a desirable feature, a hundred years before cars were a thing.These wide roads were originally a buffer space for all the smoke and filth of the industrial city. As a weird unintended consequence, the car could become commonplace so early because american cities already had the roads to accommodate them. And now with cars, these roads b

That's because most of those cities were built up before cars existed, and even horse-drawn carriages were a luxury for the few.Many American cities on the other hand have grown up with the car, with wide streets dividing neighborhoods, and essential facilities scattered far away from one another. Reducing car usage in a typical American city (not downtown Manhattan) is not just a matter of banning cars or replacing them with public transportation. The city itself needs to be redesigned

Your sarcasm/examples are false equivalencies. US cities were at one point far less car centric than they are now. Do you think we should maintain the status quo there as well?

What a hilariously American comment. Nearly all American cities were built by train networks that existed in the 1800s. These train lines were ripped out to make way for car infrastructure in the mid-1900s, which was designed to segregate neighborhoods and give giant profits to GM. Even famously car-centric LA with their massive freeways once had the best public transit in the world.https://www.segregationb

You're mixing up suburbs with small towns. If it is within driving range of a big city downtown then even if it is its own municipality, it is part of the greater metropolitan area of the big city.Suburbs became a thing after the car industry worked very hard to make sure subways and train cars can't be used. And this was also after the great interstate highway project and explicit city planning meant to mitigate the fallout of a nuclear attack by having a huge urban sprawl. All of

Yes. European cities were, in general, well-developed before the car was invented.US cities are built around the car. This means more space dedicated to parking, which means less space for homes and businesses, which means things are farther apart, which means people need cars.It’s a negative feedback loop.

Initially U.S cities were built according to a grid plan (grids being the most efficient means of urban planning at the time). This also made public transport easier. Grids however do not work well for cars. In response to increasing car ownership, T junctions were introduced to improve flow of traffic. The car also made it possible for people to live far from their place of work, thus the popularisation of suburbs. Other countries followed suit.