[jimby]

Interesting that the major cities with sizable public transport user populations are all in the northeast hub. Boston, NYC, Philadelphia, DC. Growing up and living here, cars aren't really necessary day to day in any of these cities. I'm shocked when I travel to basically any other major-ish US city, especially "newer" big cities like Denver, Phoenix, Miami, Tampa. The best way I can describe it is older cities are built at human-scale, newer cities are built at car-scale.

[swatcoder]

Those northeast cities form a connected industrial corridor that specifically bloomed during the train age. People and goods were actively shuffling around between them and within them as the very essence of why they existed.

Meanwhile, many other US cities were developed around regional agriculture, ranching, frontier settlement, and/or sea and river ports. Some explored sophisticated public transit systems at one point or another, but by the time they got really urbanized, cars were widely available and it was easier to justify roads and highways for personally-owned vehies than far more expensive train/tram infrastructure. We now see how car-centrism introduces limits on growth, but there wasn't a consensus sense of what those limits were or whether growth would really encounter them.

[tsimionescu]

You also shouldn't forget that car companies actively bought and dismantled mass transportation in several of those cities, at a loss to them, for the express purpose of driving demand for cars.

[treflop]

It’s not about how the city is built… cities are largely built the same… completely haphazardly.

What older cities have, due to their age, is a metric ton more people in a smaller area because they ran out of space to expand and have to redevelop existing land.

Phoenix has 5% of the density of Paris and is not even 150 years old. Paris is over 2,000 years old. If Phoenix keeps growing for the next 2,000 years, will it have great public transit? Probably.

[htthbjk]

Phoenix is a desert oven. It will never grow like Paris.

[weberer]

Philadelphia is the odd one out there. Unless you live in Center City, most people have cars.

[cortesoft]

Yeah, cities that got big before cars aren’t designed around cars… seems like a logical result.