[demadog]

European cities were built a thousand years ago to be dense by default because that was the technology.

The US is very young and not dense, save for a few downtown clusters.

There is definitely a lot that can be done, but it really comes down to user demand. People actually prefer cars if it’s the viable option. But depends on distance, timing, distance, and goals.

We shall see how ridership shifts in Los Angeles - probably the greatest live experiment in trying to force habit change currently in progress. Anyone here have inside baseball numbers on the habit changes in LA?

[afiori]

American cities were dense and at a point in time the US had the most advanced public transit systems in the world.

In the wake of the collective Futurama[0] craze car companies managed to buy it and tear it down. American cities were not build for the cars, they were bulldozed[1] for the cars.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurama_(New_York_World%27s_F...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/smpr1q/1...

[erentz]

US cities looked like European cities before we decided to change course (they just had grids instead of mazes). We tore down dense cities, built freeways, and mandated suburbia as basically the only development style permitted. We can turn it around quite easily if we wanted.

[1] is a great twitter account that shows the before and after destruction of our cities.

[2] is a great series of videos contrasting our NA development to European development. Plenty of videos demonstrating the course Netherlands was on were following US development styles there too (car dominated inner cities) in the 70s/80s but they consciously decided to change course which is why they look like they do now. So we can change course too. If we want to.

[1] https://twitter.com/SegByDesign [2] https://www.youtube.com/c/notjustbikes

[skinnymuch]

The US got pushed heavily into cars. Of course I prefer a car being back at my parents in the suburbs. The amount of public transit to counter act sprawling suburbia would be insane.

The US continues a lot of [indirect] subsidizing for cars as well while not funding or caring about public transit enough. HN has had many previous posts on this.

[afiori]

The existence of suburbs itself is a subsidy to cars, almost every suburb is a money sink of infrastructure maintenance.

Video essay for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

[skinnymuch]

Thank you for this. I knew this was true, but didn’t have actual backing to be able to know how exactly.

The other thing I have a lack of knowledge with is how and where people in America lived 100 years ago. I assume most people lived within distance of a handful of essential shops until some point after the WW2/Depression, when suburbia probably sky rocketed.