[seanmcdirmid]

My first comment mentioned urban planning. I that involves more than just planning the transit, you have to plan the work places and residential places as well. The USA is too enamored with personal and corporate liberty to let the government plan anything that would actually be effective beyond “let’s just build freeways everywhere and expect everyone to drive.”

[tptacek]

You don't get to "plan" the work places and residential places. They are what they are. Your transit plan needs to serve the commercial and residential areas that already exist, not a hypothetical ideal. It isn't easy in Ireland, Germany, or Spain to reorganize an entire metro area by fiat, either.

[kasey_junk]

It might not be easy but big swaths of US cities did exactly this in living memory. Many of them as active parts of building the highway system.

[rayiner]

Not really. Cities like New York and Chicago built some downtown freeways, but jobs are still clustered in the downtown core. They're still very different from cities like Atlanta and Dallas that rapidly expanded in the mid-20th century around the highway system. The same for suburbs that grew up around traditional cities during the highway era. Loudoun, a booming part of Northern Virginia, was mostly farmland and exurbs even when we moved to the area in 1989. You're not going to make Loudoun look like New York any more than you can make New York look like Loudoun.

[kasey_junk]

Chicago put the major north/south and east/west highways where they are to make areas more clearly delineated between residential and commercial.

They did this for a variety of reasons some noble (grand visions of urban renewal based on cars instead of public transit) and some odious (breaking up non-machine voting wards, enforcing de facto redlining post the Supreme Court decisions, etc). They were able to make sections of the city, specifically the near south and south west places you commuted through instead of to. Similar things were done with tearing out el tracks, trolleys and the removal of commuter rail from further south neighborhoods that had been alternate business districts to the loop. These were conscious urban planning decisions to reinforce the pattern of outward/in commutes.

American Pharoah is a not particularly good biography of Richard Daley that happens to include a good book on Chicago urban planning in the late 40s to late 60s era.