[saraid216]

Europe generally resisted the authoritarianism of the car, and lashed back against it fairly strongly. In the US, many cities were literally gutted in favor of making sure cars could move fast. Then we started designing with the assumption that anyone worth caring about had a car.

[_delirium]

I wonder to what extent some of that is a fortunate combination of circumstances. Many European countries were quite positive on highways in the mid 20th century. But city centers mostly escaped having American-style freeways bulldozed through them, I think out of urban-preservation reasons more than anti-car or pro-transit sentiment. Same reason NYC ended up finally pushing back on Robert Moses's plans. So the freeways mostly stopped at the edges.

At the height of the uncontrolled car-ification of Copenhagen in the '70s the place was totally crawling with automobiles to the exclusion of other modalities, though. It's pretty weird to look at some photos from that era, with car traffic taking up almost the whole width of narrow streets in the city center, pedestrians confined to narrow ledge-like sidewalks, and bikes either absent or trying their luck in traffic. Now most of those streets have been either pedestrianized, turned into mixed-traffic, low-speed "living streets", or had the roads narrowed to one lane to make room for bike lanes and/or wider sidewalks.

[lookACamel]

Might you link to some of those photos for the curious?