[matthewowen]

Is this a serious question? Let's take 1900 as an example year that's before individual motorized traffic (the car existed but clearly wasn't popularized). New York had a population of 3.5MM. London was 6.5MM. Paris 2.7MM.

If we're going to identify something key to the growth of cities, surely it is mass transit. Much of this isn't apparent in modern cities in the USA because so many of them tore apart their streetcar systems in the middle of the 20th century as policies shifted to favor the private automobile. But mass transit seems to me like the thing that drove the growth.

[choeger]

Just research how 1900 London was like for the average worker and then tell me you'd want to live like that.

[spion]

Just research how London is today. Most people don't use cars at all.

[tonyedgecombe]

Well it wasn't full of diesel and petrol fumes. The great stink was forty years earlier, they already had decent sewage systems (many of which are still in place now).