[akgerber]

You don't need an automobile to travel beyond your neighborhood! You can take a bus or a train or ride your bike, even in suburban areas.

Plenty of midsize cities worldwide work on various combination of mass transit, automobiles, walking, and bicycles. The automobile monoculture in most midsize American cities is a product of our early development of cheap automobiles combined with federal policies massively subsidizing highways and the racial paroxysms of the mid-20th century.

Even Canadian midsize cities, which in many ways are very similar to those in USA (except for far worse weather) have far higher transit usage. In Calgary, 'the Dallas of Canada', full of oil money & newly-built single-family homes, 24.3% of commuters use transit, and that's considered low! http://www.calgaryjournal.ca/index.php/news/2538-calgary-s-t...

Likewise, newly built Dutch suburbs have many features that resemble American suburbia, but have good bike lanes and acceptable bus transit: http://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/01/15/dutch-suburbs-are-like...

Manhattan is still dependent on transit because it's one of the few places in America that's so dense, even 60 years of dedicated auto-first policy couldn't change the facts on the ground.