[jasonwatkinspdx]

A small number of people like Robert Moses wielded enormous power over how our civil infrastructure was built in the post war period. Moses was famously opposed to public transit, going so far as to deliberately build bridges with overhead clearance too low for buses on routes to one of his beach developments.

During this period the federal dept of transportation was offering to pay 90% of urban freeway projects. There are a few famous examples of people negotiating a different outcome, like the light rail vs mt hood highway in Portland, Oregon. But the bulk of local politicians simply took the free money and built massive freeway infrastructure without much consideration of the future.

So no, this was not some broadly democratic choice or invisible hand of the market. It was a small number of politically powerful people making unilateral decisions using vast government funds.

[chrisco255]

People wanted to live in the suburbs. It was definitely promoted by government and business leaders, but it was also desired organically by people. It may not seem obvious now, but prior to the suburbs, a lot of people lived in ragged tenement buildings that were in bad shape. The suburbs were a boon to the economy, to standard of living, to incomes, etc. I found a great video from a filmmaker on this subject:

How The US Government Sold Us On The Suburbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmL6xIg-EJ0

[dragonwriter]

> It may not seem obvious now, but prior to the suburbs, a lot of people lived in ragged tenement buildings that were in bad shape.

A lot of people still do. The people that could afford to move to the suburbs were also people that could afford to move out of tenements in the city, too, generally.

OTOH, it allowed them to be farther from (and outside shared facilities like schools, etc., with) the tenements and the people stuck living in them. (Which, due to economics and outright, overt discrimination in both lending and things like restrictive real estate covenant, especially meant non-Whites.)

[jasonwatkinspdx]

I'm aware, and spent a decade living in that sort of neighborhood where most of the buildings are still original to their 20's construction.

The point is that suburban sprawl was something that was ultimately lead by a small group of people, and was done without a lot of foresight, particularly about induced demand.

Of course many people chose the new suburbs. One of the problems with this style of building is that it is indeed very appealing when it's at it's initial lowest density state. The problem is that as people move into the suburbs and congestion begins to rise, suburban sprawl has no answer. Those wide open freeways that felt so fast and convenient initially become the bane of your commute or even doing simple errands.

Then people get frustrated, and believe the only answer is still that same default idea to return to that initial utopia: just expand the freeways even more! Except as we see today, that simply doesn't work, and the pattern just repeats.

The whole context could have been different, and that would have resulted in very different decision making from consumers, particularly today.

I'll use Portland as another example, as I'm both familiar with it and it's something of an outlier on these issues historically. All the cool neighborhoods that are desirable to live in now are where the old streetcar lines used to run. The entire shape of these neighborhoods is different, with high walkability, because of the remnants of that transit system.

The streetcar system here was deliberately deconstructed here, again, largely due to powerful special interests. The auto and tire industry worked quite hard on promoting buses as the new modern approach, a vision local politicians also helped promote.

Today Portland is reconstructing the street car system, as part of a larger overall transit plan. 100 years later we can see we wished we'd just kept and maintained the original track system, and designed our zoning around it.

That's really the core point I want to make: suburban sprawl is a mirage, that appeals initially. However it fundamentally cannot deal with congestion, which means sprawl only has three possible futures: Door one is continued cycles of expansion and induced demand where congestion just gets worse in the long term. Door two is a mode switch, to provide a meaningful transit option to relieve the pressure of congestion without freeway expansion. Door three is economic collapse, where the whole question is mooted because entire subdivisions become blighted places no one wants to live in.

A large portion of US suburbia is headed for door #3 atm over the next half century. Hopefully we can be smarter than we were half a century ago.