[ButlerianJihad]

Not so fast: I would say that the move to suburbs was initially driven by a thirst for homeownership with luxurious lawns, coupled with electric streetcars and other rail-based transport.

It was only later that the almighty combustion engine and tire companies forcibly replaced streetcars with buses and trucks, that cars began their hegemonic domination of suburbia. The National Highway System decrees didn't hurt, either, but highways were built in the USA with an ulterior motive of national defense.

[naravara]

It also happened during a period where cities were polluted, noisy, and the middle-class housing was largely cramped tenements. Basically all of this has been/is being mitigated these days. City-center housing now looks more like luxury loft living than tenements (though this gives us a big problem with ‘missing middle’ housing where there’s very little housing available that is suitable for families where everything is decrepit slums or luxury 1 and 2 bedroom condos). Pollution has been largely mitigated with catalytic converters and, now, EVs. And electrification helps deal with noise pollution as well through getting rid of engine noise (especially for motorized appliances like leaf-blowers).

Meanwhile, traffic and the stigma around drunk driving (which wasn’t nearly as strong or strictly enforced before the 90s), have quickly taken much of the bloom off the rose of car-dependent lifestyles. I predict the growth of micromobility options will continue to make cities even more attractive as well by improving coverage for areas where transit can’t go and generally improve the throughput of city streets and reduce the space needed for parking cars for people who live within “not-quite walking but feels silly to drive” distance.

The big gap in the US at least is simply a lack of cities! Everything is still concentrated in a handful of legacy urban centers that survived the waves of “urban renewal” and it’s simply too expensive to house all the people who want to live there without turning them into Hong Kong sized megalopolises, which starts to introduce new problems from overwhelming density. “Urban” development patterns need to expand out to more of the country to take demand pressure off the 5 or 6 American cities with decent mass transit.