| Watched a couple minutes of this but the narrator's caustic takes are a bit long winded and distracting. The interstate system was and is one of the greatest civil engineering feats of all time. Prior to the US highway system it could take as long as 2 months to travel across the country by car. And prior to interstate system it would take at least two weeks. It is a shame that many planners didn't anticipate that cities with interstates running through them would grow so densely around exit points and disrupt the grid or chop up the city in various "urban islands" but to call the system anything but a success is just wrong. If anything it's a victim of too much success. I think more cities are aware of this now and you see more efforts to build insterstates at a lower level than the urban core to allow grids to more easily connect and to stop pushing so much local traffic onto the interstates themselves (as in Dallas, Boston and others). Having just come back from Switzerland, I'm aware that street cars can be highly functional, but they work well there because the cities are quite dense, even when the population is like 50k or 200k, which in U.S. a similar city would be far more spread out. |
It's worth noting that US cities, even ones in the Western US states, were not always as spread out as they currently are: urban sprawl in the US was caused by the development of highways (and then interstates). Our cities used to have dense urban cores; we intentionally bulldozed and de-densified them to build highways.
As random examples: Denver[1], Topeka[2], Sacramento[3] (page 10). I picked these entirely randomly; Google just about any small-to-medium-sized US city and you'll find that it most likely had a streetcar network until the 1930s or 40s.
[1]: https://kdvr.com/news/local/denver-once-had-one-of-the-large...
[2]: https://www.ksnt.com/news/local-news/workers-uncover-topekas...
[3]: https://www.cityofsacramento.org/~/media/Corporate/Files/Pub...